Schreker: Vorspiel zu einer grossen Oper, für großes Orchester

„A great, boisterous piece of music with all the stops of the orchestra pulled out." This is how Schreker described to his wife his Prelude to a Large Opera. Written in Estoril during the summer of 1933 after he had been suspended from his post at the Prussian Academy of the Arts and was facing the likelihood of emigration, it was to be his last work. The unnamed subject of this imposing overture was Schreker's unfinished opera, Menmon, about an ancient Egyptian general and demigod who is torn between earthly ambition and a longing for enlightenment: ,,Erdgeborner, wandre und weile, Gottgeweihter, strebe zum Licht!" It is a theme that resonates with earlier Schreker operas, most particularly Der ferne Klang.

Schreker's Prelude to a Large Opera bears direct comparison with the concert overture to his opera Die Gezeichneten, the Vorspiel zu einem Drama of 1913. Both works employ a large orchestra to paint dramatic vistas of visionary' sweep. But the orchestra of Die Gezeichnelen, with its shimmering strings, refined instrumental doublings, and richly detailed surface, captures the nuances of a psychological drama. The orchestra of Memnon, in keeping with its subject, takes on a more austere, even monumental cast. There is greater timbral autonomy in the sinewy contrapuntal, lines that characterize its musical texture, and a battery of delicately deployed percussion instruments accentuates the beguiling hint of near-Eastern melos (the result of Schreker's study of recordings of Egyptian music).