Schreker's career was stifled by the Great War. After the brilliant successes of his ballet Der Geburtstag der Infantin in 1908 and his opera Der ferne Klang in 1912—leading to his appointment as professor of composition at Vienna's Imperial Music Academy—the conservatism of the war years delayed the production of his latest opera. Meanwhile, he remained quietly busy. After completing the score of Die Gezeichneten in June 1915, he wrote librettos—Die tönenden Sphären, around a vision of an early armistice and a festival of peace, and the mythic Der Schatzgräber. By the fall of 1916, he had set the former aside to compose Der Schatzgräber when a commission from the Academy prompted the composition of the Chamber Symphony, which incorporated music written for Die tönenden Sphären. The Chamber Symphony was first heard in a performance by the Academy's faculty on March 12, 1917. One of the faculty members, the composer Joseph Marx, left an amusing portrait of Schreker during rehearsals, leaving "the conductor's podium to savor the effect from the last row of the parquet. 'How does that sound? What do you say to that combination?' he asked repeatedly, beaming with pleasure all the while."

The Chamber Symphony invites that sort of response. Accustomed to employing a Wagnerian orchestra for his operas, Schreker demonstrates with a mere 23 instruments—11 strings, seven winds, harp, piano, celesta, harmonium, and percussion—that sonic witchery is not a matter of brute force but of infinite cunning. A non-developing nod toward sonata form—the Chamber Symphony's unbroken span includes an Allegro, an Adagio, a Scherzo and a cyclic recall of the Allegro's material—provides the merest thread along which Schreker strings a shimmering aural phantasmagoria. Arresting feints, piquant harmonic shifts garbed in radiant auras of iridescent sonority, and glowing fragments of beguiling melody pass in bewildering profusion. The upshot is expansive and diffuse, suffused with an air of constant distraction as strange, hallucinatory moments yield to passionate intoxication, preternatural joy, or sudden terror. Composed between the erotically obsessed, orchestrally overloaded Die Gezeichneten and the straightforwardly transparent Der Schatzgräber, the Chamber Symphony represents a splendid and kaleidoscopic epitome of Schreker at the top of his bent. To the film devotee, many of these tropes—which fascinated a generation—will seem overly familiar from their recycling in the film music of Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and Wolfgang Erich Korngold, among others.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide