1860–1945 · Austria
Emil von Reznicek (1860–1945) was an Austrian composer of Czech descent, born in Vienna, who lived mostly in Berlin. He wrote the opera Donna Diana, whose overture remains his most performed work, as well as symphonies, chamber music and piano music. Pianists will find his sheet music at the "Intermediate+" level on the site.
Baron Emil Nikolaus Joseph von Reznicek was born in Vienna on 4 May 1860. His father, General Josef von Reznicek, was raised to the rank of baron, and Emil's half-brother was the artist Ferdinand von Řezníček. His mother, Clarisse Ghika Budești, came from the Romanian high nobility and died in 1864.
The boy grew up in comfortable circumstances but remembered his youth as a difficult one: after his mother's early death he did not get on with his stepmother, and at times he was sent away to boarding schools. It was then that music became a necessity of life for him. From the age of eleven he had piano lessons, based on the Viennese classics.
In 1873 his uncle Eugen Ghika introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner. Johannes Brahms took notice of him and invited him to join the Singverein once his voice had broken, but nothing came of it: in 1874 the family moved to Graz.
In Graz Reznicek had his first lessons in composition from Wilhelm Treiber, and his first compositions date from this time. He took his school-leaving exams in 1878 in Marburg an der Drau. He was judged unfit for military service, and his father proposed a diplomatic career, so from 1878 Emil studied law at the University of Graz.
Alongside the law he took up music with Wilhelm Mayer, who was also known as W. A. Rémy. Among Mayer's pupils were Wilhelm Kienzl, Felix Weingartner and Ferruccio Busoni. Reznicek first combined law with music and later kept only music.
Reznicek did not pass his first law examination, perhaps deliberately, and his father then stopped objecting to a composer's career. Mayer advised him to finish his education at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1881–1882 Reznicek studied there with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn.
Reznicek learned the conductor's craft in theatres: he spent a season at the Graz theatre under Alfred Skraup, and then worked as a theatre Kapellmeister in Zürich, Stettin, Jena, Bochum and Berlin. His engagement at the summer theatre in Stettin cost him a large part of the inheritance from his mother, and from then on he had to live on his own earnings.
He then settled in Prague. At first he wrote music for the German Theatre under Angelo Neumann, then became military Kapellmeister of the 88th Infantry Regiment, but was dismissed after a duel. While he waited for new civilian clothes, he wrote the opera Donna Diana.
The premiere of Donna Diana took place in Prague in 1894 and brought the composer his decisive breakthrough. The overture to this opera is still Reznicek's most performed work. This opera was the decisive step from imitating Wagner to engaging with his legacy in a way that went beyond him.
From 1896 to 1899 Reznicek was court Kapellmeister at the theatre in Mannheim. He turned down an offer to become chief conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and the symphony orchestra in New York. After a scandal over his private life, the family left Mannheim. In 1899 he married Bertha, and the couple settled in Wiesbaden, where they lived until 1902.
In Wiesbaden he wrote the folk opera Till Eulenspiegel, whose premiere in Karlsruhe in 1902 was conducted by Felix Mottl. The family then moved to Charlottenburg, near Berlin. Reznicek spent most of his life in Berlin, but at first it was hard for him to establish himself there as a composer.
In his first years in Berlin he taught composition at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and gave chamber concerts in which pre-classical music was played alongside modern music for string orchestra. In 1906–1908 he worked in Warsaw, at the philharmonic and the opera. From 1909 to 1911 he was first Kapellmeister at Hans Gregor's Komische Oper in Berlin; it closed when Gregor became head of the Court Opera in Vienna in 1911.
In 1911 the composer's second wife fell seriously ill and her life was in danger. Reznicek turned the experience into the tone poem Schlemihl, written in 1912, and with it a new period of his work began. It was followed by Der Sieger (1913) and Frieden - Eine Vision (1914). When the war broke out he was not swept up in the general patriotic fervour and wrote In memoriam, a kind of interdenominational requiem for the fallen.
Reznicek's principal work is considered to be the opera Ritter Blaubart (Bluebeard), written in 1915–1917 after the play by Herbert Eulenberg. Wartime censorship forbade the premiere, which took place only in 1920 in Darmstadt. After that the public saw him no longer as the composer of Donna Diana but as the composer of Blaubart, and he was counted, with Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner, among the leading German composers born in the 1860s.
Official recognition followed. In 1920 Reznicek became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, later its senator, and from 1920 he taught at the Berlin Higher School of Music. He turned down an offer to become director of the higher school in Berlin, which opened the way for Franz Schreker. A great success with the public returned in 1930 with the one-act opera Spiel oder Ernst, which was staged at practically all German theatres. In 1935 the composer was awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science.
The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was a heavy blow for the family: his wife's Jewish ancestry, which Reznicek had never denied, became a danger. In 1934, at Strauss's invitation, he became the German delegate to the Permanent Council for International Co-operation of Composers and organised concerts of modern music in Germany. When the Nazis tightened their control of the council in 1942, he tried to put up resistance and finally withdrew from it. The censors had already banned the autobiography he was preparing for print in 1940.
His wife Bertha was driven to despair; she withdrew from public life and in 1939 died of a heart attack. Performances of his music in Germany became ever rarer. In 1943 he was moved out of Berlin to Baden in Lower Austria, where a stroke struck him on Christmas Day that year, and he did not fully recover.
In February 1945 he was allowed to return to Berlin. Emil von Reznicek died there on 2 August 1945 of typhoid fever and starvation during the epidemic that ravaged most of the city. He is buried at the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof in Stahnsdorf.
Reznicek's legacy is quite extensive: seven operas, five symphonies, other orchestral works, string quartets, and piano and organ music. Most of the symphonies have titles: the First is "Tragic", the Second "Ironic", the Third "Im alten Stil" (In the Old Style), and the Fifth the "Tanz-Symphonie" (Dance Symphony). The orchestral works include the Raskolnikoff overture and the tone poems Schlemihl and Der Sieger.
A distinctive feature of his music is its frequently ironic character. It can be heard in the opera Ritter Blaubart, in the Dance around the Golden Calf from Der Sieger and in the tarantella that ends the Dance Symphony. By his own account, the strongest influence on him was Gustav Mahler. His music stayed tonal, though it often used bi-tonal constructions. Any kind of music could serve him as raw material, from works predating Bach to modern dance music and jazz, which he brought into his operas through a jazz band.
After the Second World War his music was almost forgotten, and the false accusation that he had sympathised with the Nazis made things worse. Since the mid-1990s there has been a new wave of interest in his music in Germany and Austria: in 1996 the Schubert Quartet gave the first performance of one of his quartets, and in the 2000s recordings began to appear. In 2012 a great-grandson of the composer set up the Reznicek Archive in Wedemark as a centre for research on his legacy.
Donna Diana was the decisive step from imitating Wagner to engaging with his legacy in a way that went beyond him, and in Till Eulenspiegel he went further with the idea of a folk opera that drew on older musical styles. After his experience at the Komische Oper and his wife's illness, a new and very personal style took shape, which can be described as a kind of musical expressionism. The dramaturgy of his operas shows the influence of silent-film aesthetics. He was sceptical of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method but not opposed to atonality as such, and he held Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu in the highest regard. The critics of his day did not grasp this mixture of styles and often accused him of Eulenspiegelei.
For pianists the site has two works at the "Intermediate+" level, both for solo piano. The overture to Donna Diana is the composer's best-known music. Zwei Phantasiestücke (Two Fantasy Pieces) belongs to his early works: they were written in Marburg an der Drau during his years at school.