Felix Draeseke

Felix August Bernhard Draeseke (October 7 1835 – February 26 1913) was a composer of the "New German School" admiring Liszt and Wagner. He wrote compositions in most forms including eight operas and stage works, four symphonies, and much vocal and chamber music.

Music and Styles

During his career Draeseke divided his efforts almost equally among compositional realms and composed in most genres, including symphonies, concertos, opera, chamber music, and works for solo piano. With his early Piano Sonata in c-sharp Sonata quasi Fantasia of 1862–1867 he aroused major interest, winning Liszt's unreserved admiration of it as one of the most important piano sonatas after Beethoven. His operas Herrat (1879, originally Dietrich von Bern) and Gudrun (1884, after the medieval epic of the same name) met with some success, but their subsequent neglect has kept posterity from understanding Draeseke as one of the few true successors to Wagner and one of the very few who could conceive dramatically convincing and musically compelling examples of "Gesamtkunstwerk".

Related Topics:
Symphonies - Concerto - Opera - Chamber music - Piano - Beethoven - Gesamtkunstwerk

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Draeseke keenly followed new developments in all facets of music. His chamber music compositions make use of newly developed instruments, among them the violotta, an instrument developed by Alfred Stelzner as an intermediary between viola and cello, which Draeseke used in his A major String Quintet, and also the viola alta, an instrument developed during the 1870s by Hermann Ritter and the prototype of viola expressly endorsed by Richard Wagner for his Bayreuth Orchestra.

Related Topics:
Violotta - Alfred Stelzner - Bayreuth

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A master contrapuntist, Draeseke reveled in writing choral music, achieving major success with his B minor Requiem of 1877–1880, but nowhere proving more convincingly his powers in this direction than in the staggering Mysterium Christus which is comprised of a prolog and three separate oratorios and requires three days for a complete performance, a work which occupied him between the years 1894–1899 but whose conception reaches back to the 1860s. Of all the symphonies from the second half of the 19th century which are unjustly neglected, Draeseke's Symphonia Tragica (Symphony No. 3 in C major, op. 40) is one of the very few which deserves repertory status alongside the symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner, a masterful fusion of intellect and emotion, of form and content. Orchestral works like the Serenade in F major(1888) or its companion of the same year, the symphonic prelude after Kleist's Penthesilea have in them all that is declared necessary for audience success: rich melodic invention, rhythmic vivacity, and extraordinary harmonic conception. Draeseke's chamber music is equally rich.

Related Topics:
Contrapuntist - Oratorio - Brahms - Bruckner - Kleist's - Penthesilea

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