Franz Schreker

Sonata In F Major

Schreker's compositional beginnings were still unknown when his stage works met with great success in the 1910s and 1920s. With this first publication of his violin sonata, written in 1898 in his student days at the Vienna conservatory, his early creative phase is made accessible in a representative work for the first time. Schreker composed the technically demanding three-movement sonata with the intention of performing it himself when he was studying violin with Arnold Rosé. The piece was written in the late Romantic tradition of Brahms and Dvorák, an era Schreker's composition teacher Robert Fuchs was committed to. Although Schreker respects the prevailing formal conventions of chamber music compositions, the elegance of melodic invention and a distinctive harmonic refinement is outlined by the future master of magical sounds in every bar.