Poor Alexander Zemlinsky. Unlucky in love with Alma Schindler, later the wife of Gustav Mahler (among others), and overshadowed professionally by his pupil (and one-time brother-in-law) Arnold Schoenberg. On the 150th anniversary of his birth, he remains fin de siècle Vienna’s great musical outlier.
Zemlinsky is yet another very interesting composer whose profile has risen somewhat thanks to recordings. In particular, he received a boost during the compact disc era, a time when the market became oversaturated with endless duplications of the standard repertoire, and producers scrambled to exhume accessible music lurking at the fringes.
In himself, Zemlinsky was a remarkable talent. He studied theory with Robert Fuchs and composition with Anton Bruckner. Early on, he received support from Johannes Brahms. Later, he met Schoenberg, to whom he gave lessons in counterpoint. He was the only formal teacher Schoenberg ever had. Interestingly, he was also mentor to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who went from toast-of-Vienna musical wunderkind to seminal Hollywood film composer.
Like just about everyone else, Zemlinsky became embroiled in a torrid love affair with Alma Schindler. He even proposed marriage. Alma seemed keen on the idea at first but was soon dissuaded by family and peers. Gustav Mahler became a champion of Zemlinsky’s music, despite the fact that both men happened to love the same woman.
By his own assessment, Zemlinsky was not an attractive man, and perhaps there was something autobiographical in his decision to set Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Birthday of the Infanta” as an opera, which he titled “The Dwarf.” (SPOILER ALERT: The Dwarf is spurned and dies of a broken heart.)
Zemlinsky is probably best known for his “Lyric Symphony,” for vocal soloists and orchestra, on texts of Rabindranath Tagore, and the large-scale symphonic poem “The Mermaid,” after Hans Christian Andersen.
However, I have always been partial to this early Symphony in B-flat, written in the shadow of Brahms and Dvořák:
The Clarinet Trio, Op. 3, frequently performed as a piano trio (with a viola taking the clarinet part)
“The Mermaid”
A recent performance of the “Lyric Symphony”:
Happy sesquicentenary, Alexander Zemlinsky!
PHOTO: Zemlinsky smokes the sourest cigar in the world
