About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Alexander von Zemlinsky

Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALE : Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky
Enlarge
Alexander von Zemlinsky

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

Contents

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.

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 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 - on January 4, 1930 - Luise Sachsel, a woman twenty-nine years his junior, to whom he had given singing lessons 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; there 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.

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 Paul Hindemith's, 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 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 Weill and Stravinsky, for his performances of Mozart but also of new music.

List of selected Works

Orchestral Works

Operas

Other Works for the stage

Choral Works

Voice(s) and orchestra

Songs for voice and piano

Chamber Music

Works for piano

References

See also

External link

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: