Die Seejungfrau, Fantasy in Three Movements for Large Orchestra after a Fairy Tale by Andersen

Program notes

About the Work

Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid) is a forty-five-minute orchestral fantasy on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, and one of the most personal scores of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In April 1901 Zemlinsky began a love affair with his composition pupil Alma Schindler, the most magnetic young woman in musical Vienna. That November she met Gustav Mahler; she broke with Zemlinsky and married Mahler four months later. Zemlinsky began Die Seejungfrau in February 1902 and completed the orchestration in March 1903, and the work is widely heard as, in part, an expression of that heartbreak: Andersen’s tale of a creature who sacrifices everything (her voice, her world, her nature) for a love that is never returned could hardly have cut closer to home.

The premiere, on 25 January 1905, took place in this very building: at the Musikverein, with Zemlinsky conducting, in a legendary concert that also included the first performance of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande: teacher and pupil, side by side, each with a huge orchestral tone poem. Zemlinsky’s score was warmly received and had further performances in Berlin and Prague, yet the composer then withdrew it, and the work vanished for three quarters of a century. The manuscript itself was split: Zemlinsky gave the first movement away as a gift, and carried the other two with him when he fled Austria in 1938. Only in the early 1980s was it established that a manuscript in Vienna and another in Washington were parts of the same work. The modern revival came in 1984, and a 2013 critical edition by Antony Beaumont restored a passage Zemlinsky cut before the premiere: the mermaid’s visit to the sea-witch. Since its rediscovery, Die Seejungfrau has become one of Zemlinsky’s most frequently performed orchestral works.

What to Listen For

The fantasy is in three movements, and it helps to keep Andersen’s story in mind without expecting a bar-by-bar narration. At the premiere Zemlinsky offered no programme note, preferring the tale to be felt rather than read.

The first movement opens in the depths: low strings and winds conjure the dark, slow-breathing world of the sea floor. Against it, listen for a solo violin: the voice of the mermaid herself, lyrical, yearning, unmistakably human in a non-human world. The movement’s centrepiece is a magnificent orchestral storm and shipwreck, from which the mermaid rescues her drowning prince; the aftermath, as the waters calm, contains some of the most tender music Zemlinsky ever wrote.

The second movement (marked ‘very lively, rushing’) is the fantasy’s scherzo: glittering, dance-like, by turns seductive and sinister. This is the world of transformation: the sea-witch’s bargain, the mermaid’s voice traded for human legs, festivity at the prince’s court that she can watch but never fully join. The orchestration here is Zemlinsky at his most virtuosic, a Viennese contemporary’s answer to Strauss and early Schoenberg.

The finale (marked ‘very broad, with painful expression’) is the long farewell. The prince marries another; the mermaid, refusing to save herself by killing him, dissolves into foam at sunrise. Zemlinsky shapes this as a slow, grief-saturated transfiguration: themes from the earlier movements return purified, and the solo violin’s song is absorbed into a radiant, resigned final ascent. If the work is indeed his answer to losing Alma, this ending is its message: not rage, but renunciation. Listen, at the very close, for how the music does not so much end as evaporate, the mermaid becoming spray, spirit, air.