Zemlinsky, Alexander von (1871-1942)

[Lat-Literal]

A composer who should perhaps be better known for bridging the gap between late Romanticism and twentieth–century modernist styles:

Lyric Symphony - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEKBsUFtSs

(although I would have chosen a version with Fischer-Dieskau if I could have found a full link)

[pastoralguy]

I've only just returned a cd to the library of his string quartets played by the Zemlinsky Quartet. Very interesting music, imho.

[Richard Barrett]

who should perhaps be better known for bridging the gap between late Romanticism and twentieth–century modernist styles

If you don't mind me saying, I think it would do Zemlinsky a favour not to think of his work as "bridging a gap" - it shouldn't be forgotten that at the time he was writing there was no "gap", just a gradually widening range of pathways a composer could take. Although it would have to be said that he was a follower of musical trends rather than an instigator of them, there's something more individual about his music that goes beyond its stylistic evolution from the influence of Brahms to that of Mahler and finally Stravinsky's neoclassicism: a certain kind of contrapuntal density that isn't quite like anyone else's; and of course the Lyrische Symphonie is comparable with anything else written around that time. (For preference I would listen to the recording by Christine Schäfer and Matthias Goerne, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.)

[Lat-Literal]

If you don't mind me saying, I think it would do Zemlinsky a favour not to think of his work as "bridging a gap" - it shouldn't be forgotten that at the time he was writing there was no "gap", just a gradually widening range of pathways a composer could take. Although it would have to be said that he was a follower of musical trends rather than an instigator of them, there's something more individual about his music that goes beyond its stylistic evolution from the influence of Brahms to that of Mahler and finally Stravinsky's neoclassicism: a certain kind of contrapuntal density that isn't quite like anyone else's; and of course the Lyrische Symphonie is comparable with anything else written around that time. (For preference I would listen to the recording by Christine Schäfer and Matthias Goerne, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.)

That's a fair and rational point - and an informative post which could lead to an interesting discussion.

Thank you.

[Serial_Apologist]

Today's performance of the String Quartet in D minor on the Lunchtime Concert is of the first, composed between 1894 and 1896, and not the arguably better-known second string quartet.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I enjoyed the recent Die Seejungfrau release on Qobuz by Petrenko and the RLPO and as a consequence spent some time listening to the Lasalle Quartet disc of his chamber work.

[french frank]

Lyrische Symphonie op 18 on Radio Klassik Stephansdom at 2pm today:

https://radioklassik.at/programm/sendungsdetails/#nowplaying

[Serial_Apologist]

What a fascinating composer Alexander von Zemlinsky was! Obviously that goes for all the composers of his generation bordering on the birth of modern music; but in some ways AvZ illustrates the choice open to a young composer around the turn of the last century, and the attitude of those within the Austro-German lineage to newer and in some ways more innovative lying outside it. No one showed this more demonstrably that Richard Strauss - one of AvZ's early influences. Whereas a French composer, say Bizet or Saint-Saens, would seek new directions - while avoiding as much as possible the omnipresent post-Beethovian lineage - by turning to "the exotic" in mannerisms of orchestration, melodic turns of phrase, or using old or non-western modes for harmonic brickwork. Strauss, in particular, would in effect purloin such foreign idiomatic traits, or tropes, and absorb them into the inherited language with its forms, encrypting its underlying philosophy of using anything suitable to build on its own past - viz the Korsakovian "orientalisms" in Salome, the mock Mozart in Till Eulenspiegel and the pastiche Lully in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. The ways in which Zemlinsky applied this principle in the last decade of the c19 offered an object lesson for future generations of Austrian and German composers looking to break with surface associations or impersonating them ironically while adhering to the strengths of earlier architectonics. What true emotional, aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction is to be had from his early Piano Trio Op 3 with its convident handling of, and frankly obtrusive allusions to then-recent Brahms works - with the latter's approval, we learn! But in the Second Symphony of 1896, we already find the growing composer out co-opting from composers outwith his tight circle, including Dvorak and Balakirev. The latter influence is a giveaway in a linking descending passage in the octatonic mode, with chords compliant, that Liszt might well have handed onto the Russian three decades before - Balakirev then handing it on to Borodin, Rimsky and the rest of them. Rather than mere space filling he then configures this melodic-harmonic modality into what remains of the development.

Zemlinsky carried off these appropriations with an ease his English contemporaries, particularly Parry in some of his symphonic passages, seemed somehow less at home in, pre-empting any connotations of aesthetic change the way Victorian architects would add stylistically incompatible ornament onto a building's exterior without turning or raising a hair. Elgar's powerful musical personality overcomes our awareness of their presence so that they somehow go towards enhancing our myth of what seems to "British" about his music, and we have to go looking for them through different lenses

Viewed retrospectively through our now very long lense this Russian influence can be seen as opening the way to the French influences that would modify and then break away from the Wagnerian influence in the person of Debussy, thus opening a new chapter subject in how the Second Viennese School composers, with whom Zemlinsky maintained associations, albeit at some distance; while looking both ways at the same time - makes him such a suitable induction point for those who continue to find difficulty with much of the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern after 1907.

[richardfinegold]

I haven’t listened to the Lyric Symphony for a bit, but the one bit of Zemlinsky that has always stuck with me is the opening of The Mermaid. My overall take on A.Z. was that like many of his contemporaries (Schreker, for one) was that his music was a bit of a stew, caught primarily between Impressionism and German Expressionism, and in A.Z. case a lot of Brahmsian and late Mahler type harmonies. His voice was distinctive, he was no mere imitator despite what I said above. However there isn’t a lot that just speaks to me.
I’m taking a course on the Weimar Republic currently so it might be a good time to reevaluate Zemlimsky

[smittims]

Interesting post , S-A. Fond as I am of Strauss' music, I have to agree with Norman del Mar that he was limited in his outlook and too firmly rooted in early romanticism (Mendelssohn/Schumann , etc) to be able to look to the future as Zemlinsky did. I think the early influence of Brahms on Z's music was also useful in that he, like Schoenberg, saw the 'progressive' potential of Brahms. I think Zemlinsky's string quartets are key works in this context.

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting post , S-A. Fond as I am of Strauss' music, I have to agree with Norman del Mar that he was limited in his outlook and too firmly rooted in early romanticism (Mendelssohn/Schumann , etc) to be able to look to the future as Zemlinsky did. I think the early influence of Brahms on Z's music was also useful in that he, like Schoenberg, saw the 'progressive' potential of Brahms. I think Zemlinsky's string quartets are key works in this context.

Yes indeed, re the common Brahms influence on both composers, possibly lasting longer in Schoenberg's case if we listen not only to the late tonal works but to his near-contemporary Piano Concerto. In Zemlinksy's case it probably just became an automatic feedback of his thinking through form as he advanced into greater chromaticism, (and atonality in the Third and parts of the Fourth Quartets). Listening to the Piano Quintet soon after Reger's Second Cello Sonata composed in 1899 the other day I was struck by what the two had in common at the time, and I am struck now by your comment on Strauss - he and Reger were on good mutually respecting terms, and I can now hear the chromatic influence in subsequent Reger, that modulatory restlessness, as coming from Strauss. There is Strauss there in Zemlinsky, sure, particularly as regards voluptuousness in orchestration - where Mahler tended towards textural spareness - not to forget the quite Straussian musical characterisations in the two mature operas The Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf. This is throwing conjecture to the winds, I know, but one can be tempted to think the Mahler influence on AvZ twinned with Wagner's as yet another attempt on his part to reconcile losing Alma through musical outpouring. Coming to terms with emotional loss or sense of betrayal, or failure to, features big in German Romanticism, and carried over into Expressionism, of course - this may be the only spiritual recourse in an uncaring perpetually unstable world, but that "we" will never reach Nirvana, just go on round and round in karmic circles, had been the underlying plot of all Mahler's output; and it could be argued Alma had fallen less for Zemlinsky than for his love of Tristan, for which, we have been told, she soon reproached him for seeking to emulate in Es War Einmal!!!

[Serial_Apologist]

I haven’t listened to the Lyric Symphony for a bit, but the one bit of Zemlinsky that has always stuck with me is the opening of The Mermaid. My overall take on A.Z. was that like many of his contemporaries (Schreker, for one) was that his music was a bit of a stew, caught primarily between Impressionism and German Expressionism, and in A.Z. case a lot of Brahmsian and late Mahler type harmonies. His voice was distinctive, he was no mere imitator despite what I said above. However there isn’t a lot that just speaks to me.
I’m taking a course on the Weimar Republic currently so it might be a good time to reevaluate Zemlimsky

Indeed. Sadly we no longer have Richard B here to chide us for dreaming up imaginary aesthetic gaps for unsung creatives haplessly to fill, because if there is a case for promoting Zemlinsky into some putative first composers' division it would, for me, be in occupying within these transitions between categories as much at the taxonomist's bidding as the artists who may benefit thereby. To take just Copland as an example: he was as much a Neo Romantic as he was influenced by the anti-Romantic Stravinsky; an internationalist as much as a nationalist or at any rate a patriot at a time before either or both of these political categories had acquired mainstream contentiousness - yet few would I think dare describe him as falling between critical stools. Similarly Frank Bridge who, through his time, managed to reconcile Fauré, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Delius, Ravel, Berg and the English pastoral Postromantics into what could have been a lasting stew, were it not for history and changing fashions. The modernist aesthetic middle-of-the-road divide bridgers - think also Bartok, Martinu, Roussel, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, even Gerhard - might one day be regarded as having furnished the 20th century with some of its most enduring music. Zemlinsky as re-evaluated through the prism of 1920s Weimar might add him credibility, given his renewing attraction to American jazz by way of Weill and (indirectly I guess) Brecht.

[richardfinegold]

I agree completely with your last post. I would only add that it is interesting how some composers of the era, perhaps most famously Rachmaninov and Sibelius, felt comfortable staying within a general style over long compositional life spans, while many of the composers discussed here explored different artistic currents. The latter group appear to us, from our vantage point of several generations on, to have been somewhat peripatetic because we cannot pigeonhole them