Alexander Zemlinsky

A somewhat under-rated composer who seems, of late, to coming back into high regard. There is potential confusion about his name: some CD covers seem to want to call him Alexander von Zemlinsky and [https://www.last.fm/search?q=Zemlinsky“ target=“_blank” rel=“noopener 9,000 or so users of Last.fm] seem to want to agree with them. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Zemlinsky Wikipedia], too, seems besotted with the aristocratic pretensions that little, three letter addendum to his name conjours forth! The Wikipedia article does mention, at least, that the 'von' was made up by his father, with zero justification since not one of the family was enobled. In any event, the standard book of truth in these parts on the subject, the New Grove, is quite clear: the “von” gets bracketed, indicating its optionality. It is accordingly more appropriate to drop it than to include it.

Despite the name (which has Hungarian origins from his grandfather), Zemlinsky was born in Vienna, Austria in 1871. He studied piano from a young age and played the organ in his synagogue on holidays. He was then admitted to the Vienna Conservatory in 1884, where he studied piano with Door and composition with Johann Fuchs and, eventually, Anton Bruckner. He gained influential support from Brahms for some of his earliest compositions: his clarinet trio of 1896 was recommended to a publisher by him. In 1895, he met Schöenberg: the two became firm friends for the rest of their lives. None other than Gustav Mahler helped Zemlinsky revise his second opera before then presenting it for performance; he also agreed to conduct Zemlinsky's third opera and arranged for its performance (though he resigned his directorship of the opera before the performance actually occurred). Curiously, Zemlisnky was in a relationship with one Alma Schindler about this time: she eventually broke off the relationship and married… Mahler! The overall point being, of course, that around the turn of the century, Vienna was a hot-house of music making and innovation by many -and Zemlinsky was right in the thick of it at all times.

Zemlinsky was no slouch as a conductor himself, becoming opera conductor in Prague in 1911 (and there performing the world premier of Schönberg's Erwartung). From Prague, he moved to Berlin, where he was Klemperer's deputy at the Kroll Opera. With the rise to power of Hitler in 1933, Zemlinsky fled back to Vienna. When the Anschluss happened in 1938, it was time to flee once more, this time to America, where he was to die in New York in 1942, having been generally ignored and forgotten by his adopted country.

Zemlinsky's best-known work is the Lyric Symphony of 1923, a seven-movement piece for soprano, baritone and orchestra, set to poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (in German translation), which Zemlinsky compared in a letter to his publisher to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The work in turn influenced Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which quotes from it and is dedicated to Zemlinsky.

Zemlinsky was highly regarded as a composer by all in the Second Viennese School, though he was fundamentally at odds with how that school of composition was striving to revolutionise music. His initial foundation of Viennese classicism was soon tempered by the growing influence of more Wagnerian romanticism, which he then maintained for the rest of his career. despite his friendship with Schönberg, he was reluctant to adopt Schöenbergian 12-note serialism as a compositional practice. He certainly wished to write music in a style appropriate for his time, including its more revolutionary nature; but he remained a fundamentally tonal composer. Accordingly, whilst he is sometimes listed as a member of the Second Viennese School, it's fundamentally inappropriate to include him in the same company as Schönberg, Webern and Berg. New Groves says of him, somewhat hyperbolically I suspect, “his craftsmanship was always perfect and several of his works … are outstanding”. The outstanding works then mentioned are his Maeterlinck songs (Op. 13) and the String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3.

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