Der 116. Psalm

Franz Schreker was an important representative of the “Wiener Moderne” and one of the most successful opera composers at the beginning of the 20th century. To conclude his studies at the Vienna Conservatory he set Psalm 116 for women’s choir and orchestra (1900) and dedicated to his “beloved teacher Robert Fuchs, in reverence.” Fuchs, the highly respected composition teacher, was a close friend of Johannes Brahms and a champion of Brahms’s romantic classicism. Thus, Schreker’s psalm setting closely follows the tonal language of Brahms. In 1901 Psalm 116 was first performed in a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, and was first published in the same year by the Viennese publisher Adolf Robitschek. The scoring of the psalm is identical with that of Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem, which would suggest and facilitate a performance of both these on the same concert program.