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Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Encyclopedia - Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky or Alexander Zemlinsky, (October 14, 1871 - March 15, 1942) was an Austrian composer of classical music, a conductor and a teacher. Alexander von Zemlinsky - Early Life. Zemlinsky was born in Vienna and studied the piano from a young age. He played the organ in his synagogue on holidays, and was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory in 1884. There he studied the piano with Anton Door, winning the school's piano prize in 1890. He also took composition lessons, and began to write pieces. ...

Including:

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Early Life

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Alma Mahler and in his later career

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Work

Alexander von Zemlinsky - List of selected Works

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Orchestral Works

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Operas

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Other Works for the stage

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Choral Works

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Voices and orchestra

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Songs for voice and piano

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Chamber Music

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Works for piano

Alexander von Zemlinsky - External link

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Encyclopedia - Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky or Alexander Zemlinsky, (October 14, 1871 - March 15, 1942) was an Austrian composer of classical music, a conductor and a teacher.

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Early Life

Zemlinsky was born in Vienna and studied the piano from a young age. He played the organ in his synagogue on holidays, and was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory in 1884. There he studied the piano with Anton Door, winning the school's piano prize in 1890. He also took composition lessons, and began to write pieces.

Zemlinsky met Johannes Brahms on several occasions, who, among other acts of encouragement, recommended Zemlinsky's Clarinet Trio (1896) to the Simrock company for publication. He also met Arnold Schoenberg when Schoenberg joined the Polyhymnia, an orchestra Zemlinsky had formed in 1895, as a cellist. The two became close friends, and later mutual admirers. Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg counterpoint lessons, thus becoming the only formal music teacher Schoenberg ever had. Zemlinsky was also to teach Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

In 1897, Zemlinsky's Symphony No. 2 (actually the third he had written, and sometimes numbered as such) was premiered in Vienna and was a success. His reputation as a composer was further helped when Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of his opera Es war einmal at the Hofoper in 1900. In 1899, Zemlinsky secured the post of Kapellmeister at the Carltheater in Vienna.

List of Austrians in music, List of Austrians

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Alma Mahler and in his later career

In 1900, Zemlinsky met Alma Schindler (later Alma Mahler) and fell in love with her. He helped her to work on some of the songs she was writing. His love was reciprocated, though Alma felt a great deal of pressure from close friends and family to end the relationship. They were primarily concerned with Zemlinsky's lack of a significant international reputation and what some believed to be an objectionable physical appearance. Eventually she caved to the pressure, and broke off the relationship with Zemlinsky. She met Gustav Mahler in 1901, and convincing herself that she loved him, married him in March of the following year. Zemlinsky later married Ida Guttmann in 1907, though the marriage was an unhappy one, and Zemlinsky had many affairs. Following Ida's death in 1929, Zemlinsky married Luise Sachsel on January 4, 1930, a woman twenty-nine years his junior to whom he had given singing lessons to since 1914. This was a much happier relationship, lasting until Zemlinsky's death.

In 1906, Zemlinsky was appointed first Kapellmeister of the new Vienna Volksoper before leaving to work at the Deutsches Landestheater in Prague from 1911 to 1927, where he premiered Schoenberg's Erwartung in 1924. Zemlinsky then moved to Berlin, where he taught and worked under Otto Klemperer as a conductor at the Kroll Opera. With the rise of the Nazi Party, he fled to Vienna in 1933, where he held no official post, instead concentrating on composing and making the occasional appearance as guest conductor. In 1938 he moved to the United States and settled in New York City. He never learnt English, became ill, suffering a series of strokes, and stopped composing. He died in Larchmont, New York of pneumonia.

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Work

Zemlinsky's best known work is probably the Lyric Symphony (1923), a seven movement work for orchestra, soprano and baritone soloists on 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 was an influence on Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which quotes it and is dedicated to Zemlinsky.

Other orchestral works include the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), premiered in the same concert as Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande (in Vienna, 1905) and a late three-movement Sinfonietta (1934, admired by Schoenberg and written in a style comparable to Kurt Weill's and Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonic works from the same time). Further parts of his output include chamber music, notably four string quartets and a series of operas, including Eine Florentinische Tragödie (1915-16) after Oscar Wilde, and the ballet Der Triumph der Zeit (1901).

The influence of Brahms can been seen in Zemlinsky's early works (the ones that prompted encouragement from Brahms himself), while later works adopted the kinds of extended harmonies that Richard Wagner had employed, drawing influence also from Mahler. In contrast to his friend Schoenberg, he never wrote atonal music, and never used the twelve-tone technique.

As a conductor, Zemlinsky was admired by composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Kurt Weill for his performances of Mozart but also of new music.

Alexander von Zemlinsky - List of selected Works

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Orchestral Works

Symphony (No. 1) for orchestra (1891, fragment)
Symphony No.1 (No. 2) for orchestra (1892/1892)
Suite for Orchestra (c.1895)
Symphonie No.2 (No. 3) for orchestra (1897)
Drei Ballettstücke. Suite from Der Triumph der Zeit for orchestra (1902)
Die Seejungfrau (The Little Mermaid) for orchestra (1902/03, premiered in Vienna in 1905)
Lyric Symphony for soprano, baritone and orchestra op.18 (after poems by Rabindranath Tagore) (1922/23)
Sinfonietta for orchestra op. 23 (1934, first performance, Prague 1935)

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Operas

Sarema, Opera (libretto by the composer, Adolf von Zemlinszky and Arnold Schönberg, 1893–95, Premiered in Munich 1897)
Es war einmal ... (Once upon a time ...), Opera (libretto by Maximilian Singer nach Holger Drachmann, 1897–99, Premiered in Vienna 1900)
Der Traumgörge, Opera (libretto by Leo Feld, 1904–06)
Kleider machen Leute (The Clothes Make the Man), Opera (libretto by Leo Feld, after Gottfried Keller) (Three versions, 1908-1909/1910/1922)
Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy), opera in one act op. 16 (libretto by Oscar Wilde/ Max Meyerfeld, 1915/16)
Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), opera in one act op.17 (libretto by Georg C. Klaren based on Oscar Wilde's Der Geburtstag der Infantin, 1919–21, premiered in Cologne in 1922)
Der Kreidekreis, opera in three acts op. 21 (libretto by the composer after Klabund, 1930–32, premiered in Zurich in 1933)
Der König Kandaules, opera in three acts op. 22 (libretto by the composers after André Gide in the German translation by Franz Blei, 1935/36, complete orchestration by Antony Beaumont 1992–96)

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Other Works for the stage

Ein Lichtstrahl, Mimodram for piano (text by Oskar Geller, 1901, rev. 1902)
Ein Tanzpoem. A Dance Poem in one act for orchestra (Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1901–04, final version of the ballet Der Triumph der Zeit (1901))
Incidental music for Shakespeare's Cymbeline for tenor, reciter and orchestra (1913–15)

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Choral Works

Frühlingsbegräbnis (Paul Heyse) for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra (1896/97, rev. c. 1903)
Psalm 83 for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1900)
Psalm 23 for chorus and orchestra op. 14 (1910, first performance, Vienna 1910)
Psalm 13 for chorus and orchestra op. 24 (1935)

Alexander von Zemlinsky - Voices and orchestra

Maiblumen blühten überall (Richard Dehmel) for soprano and string sextet (c. 1902/03)
Sechs Gesänge after poems by Maurice Maeterlinck op. 13 (1913, orchestrated 1913/21))
Symphonische Gesänge for baritone or alto and orchestra op. 20. (texts from Afrika singt. Eine Auslese neuer afro-amerikanischer Lyrik, 1929)