Alexander Zemlinsky

Alexander Zemlinsky, born in Vienna in 1871, stood at the very centre of Viennese music around 1900, and was then almost completely forgotten for half a century. As a young composer he was encouraged by Brahms himself, who recommended his music to his own publisher, Simrock. He became the only formal composition teacher Arnold Schoenberg ever had, and the bond became family when Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde in 1901. He was also a conductor of the first rank: at the Vienna Volksoper, then for more than fifteen years at the German Theatre in Prague (where he conducted acclaimed Mozart and gave important premieres), and later at Berlin’s Kroll Opera under Klemperer. As a composer he refused to follow his friend Schoenberg into atonality, instead pushing late-Romantic harmony and orchestration to their expressive limits in works like the Lyric Symphony and the operas Eine florentinische Tragödie and Der Zwerg. Forced to flee Austria after the Anschluss in 1938, he reached New York in poor health and died in Larchmont, New York, in 1942, his music unplayed and his name eclipsed. The revival began only in the 1970s and 1980s; today he is recognized as one of the essential voices of fin-de-siècle Vienna.