Anno Schreier

About Anno Schreier

Anno Schreier has the theatrical instinct of Richard Strauss: the music of the composer in his mid-thirties possesses an enormous power of imagination, seductive sensuality and fantastic diversity (Stefan Ender commented on the premiere of the opera Hamlet in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna in September 2016) 

Born in Aachen in 1979, Anno Schreier has chiefly gained his reputation as an opera composer. By the premiere of the opera Kein Ort. Nirgends based on a novel by Christa Wolf in Mainz in 2006, he had already developed an individual music theatre style in which he blended and juxtaposed heterogenic set pieces and quasi quotations with a multitude of stylistics, frequently alienated with an ironic or grotesque touch. Schreier continued to develop this approach in tragic and comic works and music theatre works for young people, for example in the chamber opera Mörder Kaspar Brand (2011, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf), the musical comedy with an Arctic theme Prinzessin im Eis (2013, Theater Aachen) and Schade, dass sie eine Hure war (2019, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf). He has produced an increasingly complex and yet always sensually experienceable and dramatically effective conglomerate of highly diverse musical forms with a constant juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy and earnestness and entertainment. In contrast, he has also created works such as Die Stadt der Blinden (2011, Opernhaus Zürich) and Hamlet (2016, Theater an der Wien) which possess a more homogenous musical language with only occasional ‘sprinklings’ of allusions. In 2019, Schreier set the famous fantasy story The Wizard of Oz, based on the novel by Lyman Frank Baum, to music as a family opera of the same name for the Aachen Theatre. His most recent opera Turing (2022, Nuremberg Opera), on the other hand, is based on historical events and dedicated to the life of the famous scientist Alan Turing.

Frequently, Schreier’s purely instrumental works also display literary influences and other non-musical concepts. The cello concerto On A Long Strand first performed in 2015 by Julian Steckel with the Badische Staatskapelle was inspired by a poem by the Irish lyrical poet Seamus Heaney. The dialogue between the soloist and orchestra evokes a walking tour along North European coastal landscapes, also integrating elements from traditional Irish music. 

In his lieder, Schreier has made settings of texts by Eichendorff, Heine und Morgenstern as well as lyrical poetry from earlier periods and the contemporary era. In his ten-movement cycle Fuoco e lagrime for soprano and piano (also in a version for soprano and ensemble) he combines poems and fragments by Michelangelo with new texts by Marcel Beyer, thereby creating a dialogue between the Italian and the German language and between the Renaissance and the present day. In 2019, Schreier composed two large-scale vocal works: for the Kölner Philharmonie he wrote Nils Holgerssons wunderbare Reise for 2 actors, children’s choir and orchestra, an adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s famous novel. While based on texts from the Hindu scripture Rigveda, Der Anfang for choir and orchestra also establishes a connection to Schiller’s Ode to Joy through the question about a creator and is composed as a prologue for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The premiere with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra under Christopher Ward took place on the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Sinfonischer Chor Aachen.

Since around 2017, Anno Schreier has combined a musical texture reduced to only a few elements with influences from minimal music and pop music, for example in the compositions Atlantis (2018) for ensemble, Kältefuchs (2019) based on a poem by Marcel Beyer and Zwei Studien zu einer Landschaft (2019) for violoncello and piano. 

Schreier received tuition in piano, violin, organ and music theory at an early age. He studied composition with Manfred Trojahn at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf before continuing his studies at the Royal College of Music in London. From 2005 to 2007, he studied with Hans-Jürgen von Bose as a master student at the Hochschule für Musik and Theater in Munich. Since 2008, he has taught music theory at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. 

Schreier has worked with renowned orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestre National de Belgique, the Brussels Philharmonic, the Sinfonieorchester Aachen, the RSO Vienna, the Ensemble Modern and the Armida Quartet. He was “Composer for Heidelberg” during the season 2009/10. 

Schreier has been the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships awarded by institutions including the German National Academic Foundation, the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the regional capital Munich, the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Wilfried Steinbrenner Foundation and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2010, Schreier received a scholarship from the German Academy in Rome in the Villa Massimo and in 2012 the Young Artist Award from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2016, he was received into the “Young Academy” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and was awarded the German Music Author Prize in the category “music theatre” in March 2017. 

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