Schreker was the oldest son of the Bohemian Jewish court photographer Ignaz Schrecker and his wife Eleonore von Clossmann, who was a member of the Catholic aristocracy of Styria.

He grew up during travels across half of Europe and after his father's death the family moved from Linz to Vienna (1888) where in 1892, with the help of a scholarship, Schreker entered the Conservatory. Starting with violin studies, with Sigismund Bachrich and Arnold Rosé, he moved into the composition class given by Robert Fuchs and finally graduated as a composer in 1900.

His first success was with the Intermezzo op.8 for strings which won an important prize sponsored by the Neue musikalische Press in 1901. Schreker had begun conducting in 1895, when he had founded the Verein der Musikfreunde Döbling. After graduating from the conservatory he spent several years taking various bread-and-butter jobs.

In 1907 he formed the Philharmonic Chorus, which he conducted until 1920, and among its many premières were Zemlinsky's Psalm XXIII and Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden and Gurre-Lieder.

His "pantomime", Der Geburtstag der Infantin, commissioned by the dancer Grete Wiesenthal and her sister Elsa for the opening of the 1908 Kunstschau, first called attention to his development as a composer.

Such was the success of the venture that Schreker composed several more dance-related works for the two sisters including Der Wind, Valse lente and Ein Tanzspiel (Rokoko). In 1912, the first performance in Frankfurt of the opera Der ferne Klang, on which he had been working since 1903, consolidated his fame and in the same year, Schreker was appointed as a professor at the Music Academy in Vienna.

This breakthrough heralds a decade of great success for the composer. His next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, which was given simultaneous premières in Frankfurt and Vienna (March 15, 1913) was less well received (the work was subsequently revised as a one-act 'Mysterium' entitled simply Das Spielwerk in 1915), but the scandal which this opera caused in Vienna only served to make Schreker's name more widely known.

The outbreak of World War I interrupted the composer's success but with the première of his opera Die Gezeichneten (Frankfurt, April 25, 1918) Schreker moved to the front ranks of contemporary opera composers.

The first performance of Der Schatzgräber (Frankfurt, January 21, 1920) was the highpoint of his career. The Chamber Symphony, composed between the two operas for the faculty of the Vienna Academy in 1916, quickly entered the repertoire and remains Schreker's most frequently performed work today.

In March 1920 he was appointed director of the Hochschüle für Musik in Berlin and between 1920 and 1932 he gave extensive musical tuition in a variety of subjects with Berthold Goldschmidt, Alois Hába, Jascha Horenstein, Ernst Krenek, Artur Rodziński, Stefan Wolpe, and Grete von Zieritz numbering among his students.

Schreker's fame and influence were at their peak during the early years of the Weimar Republic when he was the most performed living opera composer after Richard Strauss.

The decline of his artistic fortunes began with the mixed reception given to Irrelohe (Cologne, 1923 under Otto Klemperer) and the failure of Der singende Teufel (Berlin, 1928 under Erich Kleiber).

Political developments and the spread of anti-Semitism were also contributory factors, both of which heralded the end of Schreker's career. Right-wing demonstrations marred the première of Der Schmied von Gent (Berlin, 1932) and National Socialist pressure forced the cancellation of the scheduled Freiburg première of Christophorus (the work was finally performed in 1978).

Finally, in June 1932, Schreker lost his position as Director of the Musikhochschule in Berlin and, the following year, also his post as professor of composition at the Akademie der Künste.

In his lifetime he went from being hailed as the future of German opera to being considered irrelevant as a composer and marginalized as an educator. After suffering from a stroke in December 1933, he died on March 21, two days before his 56th birthday.

Although Schreker was influenced by a number of composers such as Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, his mature style shows a very individual harmonic language, characterized by a combination of tonal with chromatic and polytonal passages.