Franz Schmidt was an Austro-Hungarian composer, cellist, and pianist of the late Romantic and early modern periods, born in Pressburg (now Bratislava) and based in Vienna from 1888, where he worked as an orchestral cellist under Gustav Mahler and later taught at the Vienna Conservatory. His output centers on four symphonies, the opera Notre Dame, and the oratorio The Book with Seven Seals, along with organ works, chamber music, and concertos in a large-scale, tonally grounded idiom rooted in the Austro-German tradition. He died in Perchtoldsdorf, near Vienna, in February 1939 after prolonged ill health.

Schmidt is regarded as a significant, if often overlooked, late-Romantic symphonist whose Fourth Symphony and The Book with Seven Seals represent high points of Austrian orchestral and oratorio writing between the world wars. His reputation was complicated after his death by the Nazi-era premiere circumstances of some of his works, though scholars have generally concluded he was politically naive rather than sympathetic to Nazism; his symphonies have since gained a modest but steady place in the orchestral repertoire.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schmidt_(composer)