Discordant Melody Alexander Ze

Discordant Melody
Alexander Zemlinsky. Used by permission of Alexander Zemlinsky Fonds bei der Gesell-
schaft der Musikfreunde in Wien.
Discordant Melody
Alexander Zemlinsky,
His Songs, and the Second
Viennese School
LORRAINE GORRELL
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY

OF MUSIC AND DANCE, NUMBER 64
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gorrell, Lorraine.
Discordant melody : Alexander Zemlinsky, his songs, and the second Viennese school /
Lorraine Gorrell.
p. cm.(Contributions to the study of music and dance, ISSN 0193-9041 ; no.
64)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes.
ISBN 0-313-32366-6 (alk. paper)
1. Zemlinsky, Alexander, 1871-1942. Songs. I. Title. II. Series.
ML410.Z43G67 2002
782.42168'092dc21 2002023251
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright 2002 by Lorraine Gorrell
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without
the express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002023251
ISBN: 0-313-32366-6
ISSN: 0193-9041
First published in 2002
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Acknowledgments
The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce material from the following:
Frontispiece photograph of Alexander Zemlinsky. Used by permission of Alexander Zemlinsky
Fonds bei der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien.
Musical example 13.1, Zemlinsky, "Ich gen' des Nadus" (I Go at Night), mm. 2-6. Used by
permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
Musical example 14.1, Zemlinsky, "Da waren zwei Kinder" (There Were Two Children),
mm. 1-6. Used by permission of Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen. Copyright 1900
Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen.
Musical example 14.2, Zemlinsky, "Meeraugen" (Sea Eyes), mm. 1-3. Used by permission of
Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen. Copyright 1900 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS,
Copenhagen.
Musical example 14.3, Zemlinsky, "Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan" (Knock, and It Shall
Be Opened to You), mm. 10-12, from Ehetanzlied (Marriage Dance) und Andere Gesdnge
op. 10. Reprinted by kind permission of the copyright owner. 1913 by Ludwig Doblinger
(B. Herzmansky) KG., Vienna-Munich.
Musical example 15.1, Zemlinsky, "Die drei Schwestern" (The Three Sisters), mm. 1-4. Used
by permission of Universal Edition A.G. 1914 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 5540.
Musical example 17.1, Zemlinsky, "Entfiihrung" (Abduction), mm. 12-15. Used by permis-
sion of Mobart Music Publications.
Musical example 17.2, Zemlinsky, "Jetzt ist die Zeit" (Now Is the Time), mm. 8-11. Used
by permission of Mobart Music Publications.
Extracts from the Nachlass of Louise Zemlinsky. Used by permission of the Archive of the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna.
Extracts from the Mahler-Werfel Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of
Pennsylvania. Used by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Brand, Juliane, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris, eds. 1987. The Berg-Scboenberg Cor-
respondence: Selected Letters. New York: W.W. Norton. Copyright 1987 by Juliane Brand,
Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris. Used by permission of W.W. Norton &c Company,
Inc.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1952. "My Evolution." Musical Quarterly, 38, no. 4 (October): 517-
527. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea. Ed. Leonard Stein. Trans. Leo Black. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Pali-
sades, CA 90272.
Weber, Horst, ed. 1995. Briefwecbsel der Wiener Schule. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-
gesellschaft. Used by permission of Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
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To Bud
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
1. Fin de siecle Vienna 1

2. Getting Started 17
3. The Real World 27
4. Prague 37
5. Berlin 54
6. "The Gates of Hell H a d O p e n e d " 62
7. Flight 68
8. Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Schoenberg's Circle 75
9. Zemlinsky and the Eternal Feminine, Alma Schindler 98
10. Poetry and Song: Zemlinsky and the Second Viennese
School 117
11. Introduction to the Songs 136

12. Apprenticeship: Early Unpublished Songs 144
13. A Notorious Brahmin: O p . 2, O p . 5, O p . 6 153
14. A N e w Path: O p . 7, O p . 8, O p . 10, Unpublished Songs 170

x Contents
15. Maturity: Op. 13, Unpublished Songs of 1916 190

16. Symphonic Songs 202
17. Abendlieder: Op. 22, Two Songs, Op. 27, the American
Songs 214
Notes 227
Bibliography 263
Unpublished Songs and Fragments in the Library of Congress
Collection 279
Works for Voice and Chamber Ensemble or Orchestra 281
Song Index: Titles and First Lines 283
Subject Index 289
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Donald Friedman, Friederike

Zeitlhofer (Austrian Cultural Institute, New York), Silvia Kargl (Alexander
Zemlinsky Fonds), Otto Biba of the Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musik-
freunde and his staff, Therese Muxeneder and the staff of the Arnold
Schoenberg Institute in Vienna, Universitatsbibliothek Wien, Johann Zie-
gler and the Vienna Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, the Winthrop Library
Staff, the Library of Congress, Nancy Shawcross and the Van Pelt Library
of the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard University Libraries, the
University of Cincinnati Music Library, the University of Chapel Hill Music
Library, Winthrop University for faculty development funds and sabbatical
leave, the Winthrop Research Council, Professor Donald Rogers, Dean Da-
vid Franklin, Professor Janice Bradner, Professor Martin Hughes, Ida New-
som, Naomi Barban, Dora Seitl, Helen Loper, and Professor Ronald Parks
for the musical examples.
Most of all I am grateful to my family: my mother, Clara Horstmann
Gorrell; my daughter, Rachel Newcomb, for her suggestions and encour-
agement; Karen, Emily, and Suzanne Newcomb; and my husband, Wilburn
Newcomb, who has been with me every step of the way.
Name Spellings
The name of Alexander Zemlinsky's father will be spelled "Zemlinszky."
Arnold Schoenberg's name will be spelled without an umlaut unless it is
part of a quote that uses the German "Schonberg." Louise Zemlinsky's
name is also Anglicized from "Luise." Alma Schindler/Mahler/Gropius/
Xll Acknowledgments
Werfel is referred to as Alma Schindler before her marriage to Mahler and

as Alma Mahler after her marriage to Mahler. Her writings are listed in
the bibliography under "Mahler-Werfel, Alma." Edward Steuermann's
name is Anglicized from Eduard.
Introduction
The one to whom I owe most of my knowledge of the technique and

the problems of composing: Alexander Zemlinsky . . . he was a great
composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think. . . .
Arnold Schoenberg1
Alexander Zemlinsky's "time has c o m e " at last. Scores of his music are
being reprinted or published for the first time; recordings of his works are
available on major labels and performed by distinguished artists; confer-
ences, books, articles, and doctoral dissertations now reflect the importance
of Zemlinsky and his music. But perhaps Schoenberg himself contributed
to Zemlinsky's long-delayed recognition. Schoenberg's dramatic presence
and his iconoclastic musical vision profoundly defined and divided opinions
about twentieth-century music, eclipsing the contributions of gifted, pro-
gressive composers such as Zemlinsky, whose unpretentious personality
and more accessible musical style were easily overshadowed. Yet musicians
are beginning to realize that Zemlinsky's works represent a bridge between
the nineteenth-century romantic style and Schoenberg's modernism, a cru-
cial nexus between nineteenth-century fin de siecle music and the avant-
garde of the twentieth century.
Philosopher/musicologist Theodor Adorno wrote that
today, captivated by conventional aesthetic idealism, one tends to go too far in

music, neglecting the thread that connects the authors of an epoch with one another
. . . perhaps the individual achievements owe more to this collective, binding force
XIV Introduction
than was originally thought. In this light, Zemlinsky was one of the most note-
worthy figures of his generation.2
Because his music was perceived to be a synthesis of stylistic elements of

his predecessors and contemporaries, Zemlinsky failed to capture the imag-
ination of the public w h o loved to hate or embrace the works of his more
startling musical peers. Yet Adorno points out that
If Schoenberg's work compressed the most divergent impulses of his era, maturing
into the idea of constructivist composition, then Zemlinsky defined the musical
domain in which those impulses could be compared with one another. Not just
Wagner and Brahms, but Mahler, Debussy and Schoenberg. . . . Zemlinsky's claim
to authority, which his Viennese friends always acknowledged, was based on the
balancing of these disparate energies in his work in a most productive way.3
Indeed, composer, conductor, pianist, and teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky

(1871-1942) was highly regarded by some of the most distinguished mu-
sicians of his age. Anton Webern wrote to Zemlinsky in a letter of 24
November 1922, "I am still inspired with the deeply affecting impression
of your songs. I have studied them with Fr. Mihacsek [singer Felicie Hiini-
Mihacsek] and found myself in continuous ecstasy. The wonder of their
form still sounds within m e . " 4 Igor Stravinsky commented to Robert Craft
that "of all the conductors I have heard I would nominate Alexander von
Zemlinsky as the one w h o achieved the most consistently high standards.
I remember a Marriage of Figaro conducted by him in Prague as the most
satisfying operatic experience of my life." 5 Composer Alma Mahler wrote
in her autobiography: " H e was one of the finest musicians. . . . Zemlinsky
was a born teacher, and . . . that was most important for me, and not only
for me, but for the entire musical generation of this epoch. His ability, his
mastery was simply wonderful." 6
Composers are constantly being reexamined, and many reputations go
in and out of fashion. The most famous example is, of course, the "dis-
covery" or "rediscovery" of J o h a n n Sebastian Bach's work by musicians
and the musical public after Felix Mendelssohn's historic performance of
the St. Matthew's Passion in Leipzig on 11 March 1829. For many yea rs,
composer/violinist Louis Spohr was far more famous than Franz Schubert,
whose reputation grew steadily after his death, while Spohr's declined.
M a n y examples can also be cited from the twentieth century, such as Sergei
Rachmaninoff, w h o was granted slightly more than two pages in the 1954
edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and dismissed wit h
the words: "The enormous popular success some few of Rakhmaninov's
works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded
it with much favour."7 Antonio Vivaldi's reputation has also undergone
substantial reevaluation, and he is now one of our most revered composers.
Introduction xv
The songs of Richard Strauss, often slighted in discussions of the lied, are
n o w considered worthy companions to his operas and orchestral works,
which have always been a part of the modern repertoire. There are no
absolutes in determining fame and fashion in music.
If music is to survive beyond the period in which it was created, it must
establish an affinity with each new era, one that may differ from its rela-
tionship with the age in which it originated. Theodor Adorno reflected on
this question and noted that
[T]he durability of past art does not automatically depend on its former modernity.
. . . Likewise, the same criteria of the present cannot be applied backwards to a
state of musical consciousness, of which the logic of its consequences is not now
at all conceivable, while at the same time, possibilities emerge which may be ac-
cepted later. Once art works lose the tension to the here and now for the observer
or listener, then there opens up entirely other aspects than those that were first
evident.8
The bold and the new usually demand the attention of following gen-
erations, while music that is part of a continuing tradition may be over-
looked or dismissed. In " ' N e w Music' as an Historical Category," Carl
Dahlhaus considered that
[t]he new, which asserts itself through its antithesis to the old, has a propensity to
reflection and to polemics. . . . That the concept of the new attaches to a whole era,
instead of to an unrepeatable moment, seems to presuppose that an old style, a
"prima prattica," exists side by side with the new one. . . . Yet the real antithesis
to the new is not music which is seen and felt to be old, but . . . the "moderately
modern." . . . In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aesthetics and historical
theory primarily contrast the new with the . . . reasonable middle way, and not with
the old, which is . . . understood as something that was once new, as something to
which one can relate instead of having to combat it.9
Perhaps this explains why Gustav Mahler, w h o was never perceived as

a radical modernist, experienced a period of neglect after his death.
[I]n a Mahler symphony one finds surface elements of folk song and references to
street music, to the waltz, and to the military band. These untraditional materials
are placed side by side with conventional musical subjects. They are all integrated
into a musical structure which consistently draws on traditionBeethoven, Berlioz,
and Brucknerbut remains distinct. . . . [Eclecticism becomes the impetus for for-
mal innovation. Modernity is framed by the fragmentation and transformation of
tradition. Originality is achieved without the wholesale destruction of past prece-
dents.10
There is also an inertia in the reevaluation of composers whose works

are not already part of the " c a n o n . " Because he or she did not attain fame
XVI Introduction
in their lifetime or were forgotten after they died, the reasoning continues,
they must have earned their oblivion. In the early stages of the Zemlinsky
revival, reviewers of his music repeated one another's tired cliches, criticiz-
ing his style as being eclectic (a criticism often leveled at Mahler), as lacking
in originality, and most important, for being tonal. Few critics appeared to
k n o w much about his music and had heard little more than the piece they
were reviewing. Perhaps we need to cultivate the kind of openness exhibited
by Brahms when he learned that some of the songs he thought were folk
tunes had actually been composed by Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio
for his Deutsche Volkslieder. "Not really folk-music? Well, then we have
one good composer the more." 1 1
Little of Zemlinsky's music was heard for thirty years after he died in
1942, for he was overshadowed by his more daring, innovative contem-
poraries. It may be that part of the growing interest in Zemlinsky's w o r k
can be attributed to a parallel waning in the dominance of Arnold Schoen-
berg's serial technique, which had become the p a r a m o u n t compositional
practice in the Western academy by the 1950s. But serialism, for many
composers, even for Schoenberg's close disciple Berg, was or has become
only one of many compositional tools. It now yields place to a plurality of
techniques as the musical community discovers other "paths to the new
music." 1 2
In his essay "Rethinking the Twentieth Century," Leon Botstein reflects
on the place of Schoenberg and his circle:
The historical paradigm generated by Schoenberg and his followers about the pro-
gressive course of music and the end point of twentieth-century music turns out
not to have been a convincing predictive hypothesis. . . . the proportions of impor-
tance and influence will look different. The mature Richard Strauss, for example,
may take on greater significance, and composers heretofore relegated to the periph-
ery . . . may turn out to have more influence and be of greater interest to future
observers. At the same time, the work of Schoenberg and his school will continue
to frame the debate (even in defeat), although the terms of the debate and the
rhetoric will no longer be that of the participants themselves.13
Zemlinsky's work is gradually being viewed as having a "greater signifi-

cance."
Early in his career, Zemlinsky achieved recognition, honors, and presti-
gious performances. In 1 8 9 1 , while he was still a student, he was awarded
first prize and twenty gold coins in a competition at the Vienna Conser-
vatory for his song "Des Madchens Klage" (The Girl's Lament); his song
"Der Morgenstern" (The Morning Star) won second prize in the same con-
test the following year. He was considered a protege of Brahms, and his
first opera, Sarema, was premiered by the Bavarian State Opera in 1897
after winning the Munich Luitpold Prize in 1896. His second opera, Es
Introduction xvu
war einmal (Once Upon a Time), was premiered in 1900 by the Vienna
Court Opera with Gustav Mahler conducting a fine cast that included Aus-
trian soprano Selma Kurz and Danish tenor Erik Schmedes. Mahler also
assisted Zemlinsky's career, advising Zemlinsky on his revisions of Es war
einmal and later hiring him as a conductor at the Vienna Court Opera.14
The Neue Musikalische Presse, a weekly "periodical for m usic, theater, art,
singing, and societies," included Zemlinsky's picture in several issues, re-
viewed performances of his works, and published his music in its supple-
ments. In 1899, Zemlinsky's Symphony no. 2 in B-flat major was premiered
by the Vienna Tonkunstverein Orchestra after winning the prestigious Bee-
thoven Prizecalled later by Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann "our Nobel Prize in
music." 1 5 In the words of another scholar, "Zemlinsky was successful in
all important musical genres of the time: opera, symphony, chamber music,
and song." 1 6
Zemlinsky was also the teacher of several famous students: He was
Schoenberg's only composition teacher; he taught his colleague and friend
Artur Bodanzky ( 1 8 7 7 - 1 9 3 9 ) , w h o later became conductor at the Metro-
politan Opera in N e w York; he was also the teacher of both child prodigy
Erich Wolfgang Korngold and "femme fatale" Alma Schindler Mahler
Werfel. Alma Mahler had much to say about Zemlinsky in her diaries,
autobiography, and remembrances: "[T]he force of his intellect was felt in
every glance of his eyes and in every one of his abrupt movements. . . .
[Ajlmost all the musicians of his day and of the next generation too were
recruited from among his pupils." 1 7
Zemlinsky's students all developed their own unique styles of composi-
tion, a tribute to his ability to nurture and respect their individual gifts. In
fact, many grateful students honored Zemlinsky by dedicating their works
to him: Arnold Schoenberg dedicated his op. 1 to his teacher; composer
Karl Weigl ( 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 4 9 ) , w h o enjoyed a distinguished career in Vienna and
the United States, dedicated his String Quartet, op. 4, to Zemlinsky; 1 8 Jo-
hanna Muller-Hermann ( 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 4 1 ) , one of Zemlinsky's few female stu-
dents w h o made a name for herself, dedicated her String Quartet in E-flat
major, op. 6, to him, 1 9 as did Erich Wolfgang Korngold his Piano Sonata
no. 2 in E major.
Perhaps Zemlinsky was too modest to promote himself and his works
with sufficient vigor. He confided in a letter to Alma Mahler that even if
he had elbows, he didn't k n o w h o w to use them to get ahead. 2 0 And despite
the great beauties of his work, the subtlety and understatement in much of
Zemlinsky's music may elude the listener on first hearing. Berg spoke of
this in a letter to Schoenberg on 23 April 1912: "[T]he overture for chorus,
organ, and orchestra by [Cyril] Scott: never-ending mush, no doubt mod-
ern, but it almost made me nauseated. Nonetheless. Colossal success. Zem-
linsky's magnificent work [23rd Psalm], on the other hand, fell flat; most
XVlll Introduction
of the audience can't appreciate such chaste beauty, such slightly under-
stated w a r m t h . " 2 1
The precipitous decline of Zemlinsky's reputation can also be linked to
a series of momentous historical events. His generation experienced uni-
maginable suffering through t w o major wars, depressions, social unrest,
anti-Semitism, and h u m a n extermination. His tenure in Prague coincided
with World W a r I, the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and
the detachment of Prague from the mainstream of German culture. Prague,
which had seemed to him a stepping-stone to a position with one of the
major orchestras in Berlin or Vienna, proved to be a dead end. Musical life
was drastically curtailed during World W a r I, and although Zemlinsky se-
riously considered leaving Prague, few significant opportunities were avail-
able. When the w a r was finally over, Prague became a Czech city that was
no longer part of the Austrian Empire, and its importance in mainstream
German society waned. Zemlinsky, nevertheless, remained in Praguenow
a gravestone to his ambitionsthe conductor of a provincial orchestra in
a foreign country, burdened by an overwhelming conducting schedule that
allowed little time for composing. He finally left Prague in 1927, but it was
simply too late. H e accepted a modest position at the Kroll Opera in Berlin
as an assistant conductor to rising star O t t o Klemperer. Zemlinsky's bad
luck continued. The Kroll Opera, beleaguered by financial problems that
were exacerbated by the 1929 depression, closed its doors in 1 9 3 1 . Al-
though Zemlinsky remained in Berlin as a teacher at the Hochschule fur
Musik, he was soon forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to
power in 1 9 3 3 . H e fled to Vienna but was again displaced when the Nazis
invaded Austria in 1 9 3 8 . H e arrived in the United States in December 1 9 3 8 ,
broken in health, unable to speak English, and u n k n o w n to most Ameri-
cans. After feeble attempts to make a new life for himself in a land he
found totally foreign, he died quietly in 1942.
Musical concepts were in transition at the turn of the century, and many
composers began to feel that the language of tonality had been exhausted.
Edward Kravitt points to H u g o Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, and M a x Reger as
composers w h o were "creating a radical crises of tonality" while they
sought to retain a connection with the traditional lied. 22 Zemlinsky's early
songs are representative of his apprenticeship in the genre of the lied as he
learned to write in the styles of his predecessors Robert Schumann, Robert
Franz, Clara Schumann, Wolf, and Johannes Brahms. His first three lieder
collections were written in a style quite similar to Brahms's, and Zemlinsky
prided himself on being a "Brahmsian." But with the songs of his op. 7,
he discovered his own voice, a voice that continued to change throughout
the rest of his musical career. In fact, song was often his vehicle for solving
musical problems on a small scale and was, therefore, a barometer for
change in his other works. Zemlinsky also allowed song to insinuate itself
in much of his music. H e not only wrote original songs for his operas, but
Introduction xix
he also recalled phrases, melodies, and entire songs in his operas, instru-
mental and choral works.
His songs even illuminate our understanding of the elusive man, Zemlin-
sky, especially on those occasions when he set poetry reflective of his life
experiences. His affinity for particular poems deepens our perspective on
his spirit, sympathies, and state of mind, just as his preference for works
by his contemporaries enriches our sense of the age in which he lived.
Forgotten Austrian artistspainters, poets, playwrightswhose works
were rejected during the Nazi era are now being reexamined with growing
enthusiasm. The name of Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), for example,
"had all but disappeared into an oblivion that has lasted until very recently.
. . . It was not decadence . . . but virulent and lingering anti-Semitism that
was the root cause of Schnitzler's relegation to near oblivion after his
death." 23 Painters Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) and Egon Schiele (1890-
1918) have attracted renewed interest as well with centenary celebrations
of their birth years. In fact, "the period between 1890 and 1930 is now
being recognized as one of the greatest epochs in German cultural his-
tory." 24
Christopher Hailey, in his biography of Franz Schreker (1878-1934),
another forgotten musician of the turbulent Nazi era, points out that com-
posers such as Paul Hindemith and Schoenberg, who lived beyond the war
years, were "the first to be rehabilitated" 25 because they were able to con-
tinue to draw attention to their music and define their musical philosophies
for the next generation. Not only did their living presence prevent their fall
into oblivion, but their avant-garde compositional styles also found an ar-
ticulate group of supporters. The composers who failed to fit into "neat
post-war stylistic categories or prove accessible to tidy analytic method-
ology" 26 have only recently begun to be examined, as scholars realize the
complex diversity of the first fifty years of the twentieth century.
Hailey also cites the unexamined opinions of Nazi historians that, amaz-
ingly enough, continued to shape musical discussions in the postwar
years.27 This is an important point when considering the often-repeated
criticism of eclecticism in the works of both Mahler and Zemlinsky since
Nazi critics maintained that Jewish musicians could never display original-
ity. Although Zemlinsky was actually only one-quarter Jewish, he began
life as a Jew, was considered to be Jewish by many critics and acquain-
tances, and was often judged as such.
Zemlinsky found himself caught between many worlds. As a composer,
he was wedged between the radical avant-garde and the traditionalists. As
a man, he was an "amalgam" of various ethnic/religious groupsJewish,
"Aryan," Islamic; even when he converted from Judaism to Christianity at
the age of eighteen, he did not join the Catholic Church, the largest branch
of Christianity in Vienna, but instead became a member of a Christian
minoritythe Lutheran church, which represented only 3 % of the Austrian
XX Introduction
religious community. 28 His career, his life, and his spirit were shattered by
the chaos of world events. Although he was able to flee the evils of the old
world, he could not accept the alien new world that only nominally re-
ceived him.
Discordant Melody
Chapter 1
Fin de siecle Vienna
[Mjodernism, after 1848, was very much an urban phenomenon. . . .

[I]t existed in a restless but intricate relationship with the experience
of explosive urban growth (several cities surging above the million
mark by the end of the century), strong rural-to-urban migration, in-
dustrialization, mechanization, massive re-orderings of built environ-
ments, and politically based urban movements. . . . The pressing need
to confront the psychological, sociological, technical, organizational,
and political problems of massive urbanization was one of the seed-
beds in which modernist movements flourished. . . . The fierce class and
traditional resistances to capitalist modernization in Europe . . . made
the intellectual and aesthetic movements of modernism much more im-
portant as a cutting edge of social change . . . some of the less pro-
gressive or class-divided urban centres . . . (such as Vienna) generating
some of the greatest ferments.
David Harvey1
Vienna and its music are inseparable.
Jacques Offenbach, 18802
T h r o u g h o u t the nineteenth century, the H a p s b u r g Empire was weakened

by numerous defeats and humiliationsfirst at the hands of Napoleon,
w h o occupied Vienna twice and brought an end to the Holy R o m a n
Empire, then in the Revolution of 1848, and finally in the Seven Weeks'
W a r of 1866 when it was trounced by Prussia. Cleverly led by O t t o von
Bismarck, Prussia outmaneuvered and undermined the Austrian govern-
ment by unifying all German-speaking lands outside of Austria (and Swit-
2 Discordant Melody
zerland) under Prussian rule. Bismarck swallowed up Schleswig/Holstein,

Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and the free city of Frankfurt and was
joined in a North German Confederation by twenty-one other German
states.3 Then, in 1870, Bismarck tricked Prussia's neighbor France into de-
claring war on Prussia and defeated her soundly. With a helpless France
out of his way, Bismarck absorbed the remaining southern German states
into his new German nation, which was now the strongest power within
the European continent. 4 Bismarck's exclusion of those Germans who lived
within the Hapsburg Empire, a minority population in a sprawling, mul-
ticultural nation, planted seeds of discontent among those who longed to
belong to a great, unified German state. One of those would be Adolf
Hitler.
As late as 1910, a population census indicated that in the western portion
of the Hapsburg Empire only 35.58% considered themselves German. The
remainder of the population consisted of Poles (17.77%), Ruthenians
(12.58%), Czechs and Slovaks (23.02%), Slovenes (4.48%), Serbs and
Croats (2.8%), and Italians (2.75%). 5 Vienna itself mirrored the tremen-
dous diversity of the empire at the turn of the century with its 1,386,115
Germans, 133,144 Hungarians, 102,974 Czechs and Slovaks, 4,346 Poles,
895 Ruthenians, 1,329 Slovenes, 271 Serbo-Croatians, and 1,368 Italians.
Bismarck called Vienna "the German capital of a Slav empire." 6 During
the last half of the nineteenth century, Vienna's population grew rapidly,
resulting in an array of social problems, housing shortages, and national-
istic discontent, and despite Vienna's extensive woods, parks, and open
spaces, its working-class poor were packed into overcrowded portions of
the city.7
After experiencing a humiliating defeat in the Seven Weeks' War with
Prussia, Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph and the Germans of Austria/Bo-
hemia, in a homeland now isolated and severely weakened, attempted to
deal with the nationalistic movements within the empire by forming an
alliance with one of the powerful minorities, the Magyars of Hungary.
Entering into an agreement to share governmental power with the Magyars,
Franz Joseph formed a dual monarchy between Austria and Hungary in
the Compromise of 1867, allowing Hungary to create its own parliament
and officially use its language (Magyar), while binding Hungary to a com-
mon foreign policy with the Germans of Austria. Unfortunately this agree-
ment failed to address the festering grievances of the large Slav minority
that was actively agitating for equality within the now-segmented domain. 8
The Compromise of 1867 not only created the Dual Monarchy but also
allowed Jews to own property and to enter many professions of their own
choosing. The earlier emancipation of the Jews during the French Revo-
lution and a gradual liberalization of the social climate within Vienna itself
after the Revolution of 1848 9 made Vienna a magnet for oppressed Jews
from the East. Since Vienna offered more opportunities for Jews than most
Fin de siecle Vienna 3
other European cities, it attracted waves of Jewish immigrants. Soon, over

half of the doctors and lawyers of Vienna were Jews, 1 0 and by 1900, the
two largest religious groups in Vienna consisted of 1,461,891 R o m a n Cath-
olics and 146,926 Jews. 1 1 In Prague, large numbers of Jews also chose
medicine or law since "a Jewish graduate, unless he accepted baptism in
order to enter government service, had in fact no other choice but law or
medicine, the two professions that offered self-employment." 1 2
But beneath the facade of daily life in Austria lurked a virulent anti-
Semitism that surfaced in times of crisis. When the economy crashed in
Vienna on 9 M a y 1873, two years after Zemlinsky's birth, this financial
disaster was immediately blamed on the Jews because of their high profile
in banking and business. Although an investigation of the crash revealed
irresponsible speculation throughout the entire economic community, the
Jews proved to be the most convenient scapegoat. In fact, the economic
crisis weakened democratic forces within Austrian society, a situation that
would be repeated with more drastic results after the stock market crash
of 1929. As the depression of 1873 dragged on, the discontent of the lower
middle class, the uneducated, the unemployed, and those susceptible to
demagoguery spread throughout the entire economic community. The de-
pression was felt worldwide as the panic, which began in Vienna, spread
throughout Europe and the United States. 13 The inability of Liberal officials
to remedy one of the worst financial catastrophes in Austrian financial
history served to strengthen support for a number of radical political phi-
losophies, 1 4 destroying "popular faith in liberal ideas and in the business
and intellectual elite that espoused them." 1 5 M a n y scholars believe that the
foundation for the world disasters of the twentieth century were fueled by
this economic calamity.
The gradual waning of an already pallid liberalism in the 1880s was
coupled with the rise of several radical populist political movements, two
of which were fiercely anti-Semitic. Politician Georg Ritter von Schonerer
(1824-1921) demanded closer ties with Germany, touting the "superiority"
of everything German and espousing the need for German domination of
the multicultural H a p s b u r g Empire. Schonerer also created a climate in
which open hatred of the Jews could be more aggressively expressed. 1 6 " H e
was the strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria
produced." 1 7 His ideas were much admired by the young Adolf Hitler, w h o
would rely, as Schonerer did, on brute force and intimidation to get his
way.
Karl Lueger ( 1 8 4 4 - 1 9 1 0 ) , Vienna's popular mayor from 1897 to 1910,
exploited the strong undercurrent of anti-Semitic feelings within Vienna to
promote his political agenda. Cofounder of the Christian Social Party, a
party that represented shopkeepers, tradesmen, and lower-middle-class
workers, Lueger used the word "Jew" as a pejorative, 1 8 although he had
Jewish friends and at least one Jewish ancestor of his own. When Lueger
4 Discordant Melody
was first elected mayor of Vienna in 1895, Emperor Franz Joseph refused
to approve the election, stating that "so long as he [Franz Joseph] ruled,
Lueger would never be confirmed as mayor." 1 9 M a n y Jews, including Sig-
mund Freud, were staunch supporters of the emperor because they felt he
defended their interests. But after five elections in which Lueger was chosen
mayor, the emperor finally bowed to the will of the electorate and allowed
Lueger to take office.20 Hitler revered Lueger, honoring him in Mein Kampf
as one of his most important models. "I look upon this man as the greatest
German mayor of all times." 2 1
In his bid to become mayor of Vienna, Lueger received the support of
Pope Leo XIII, w h o supposedly kept a picture of Lueger on his desk, 22 and
confided to Lueger, "The leader of the Christian Socials should k n o w that
he possesses a w a r m friend in the pope w h o blesses him; he values the
Christian Social efforts and has complete understanding for certain diffi-
culties, 'but they will be overcome.' " 2 3 The Catholic Church, the dominant
religious group in Austria, contributed to the isolation of those Jews w h o
chose not to give up their religious identity and assimilate. 24
Racial hatred toward minorities such as Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies was
further sanctioned by popular interpretations of Darwin's explanations of
natural selection: that is, nature's elimination of the inefficient or weak
within a species and the survival of the strongest organisms. As these ideas
filtered into the current parlance, pseudoscientists found a ready audience
for theories of racial purity. French writer Comte de Joseph Arthur Gobi-
neau in his Essai sur Vinegalite des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality
of the Human Races, 1853-1855)25 propounded the idea of Aryan supe-
riority and the need for maintaining racial purity. Building on Gobineau's
assumptions, Englishman H o u s t o n Chamberlain ( 1 8 5 5 - 1 9 2 7 ) , the son-in-
law of Richard Wagner, in 1899 published Die Grundlagen des neunzehn-
ten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), extolling
" G e r m a n i s m " as the foundation of all that was good and progressive in
Europe. He maintained that Jews debased the Aryan population and should
not be allowed to assimilate. 26 Most of the Wagner family supported these
views, and when Adolf Hitler visited Bayreuth in 1 9 2 3 , they became his
staunch supporters.
Early in his reign, the young Emperor Franz Joseph decided to modernize
Vienna by removing the defensive walls that surrounded the inner city and
separated it from its burgeoning suburbs. He replaced the fortifications with
wide boulevards and monumental Renaissance-styled buildings that in-
cluded a magnificent opera house, theater, museums, university quadrangle,
and parliament building, transforming Vienna into one of the most beau-
tiful cities in Europe. The sumptuous Musikverein, designed by Danish
architect Theophil von Hansen (1813-1891) and built between 1867 and
1870, was the home of the Vienna Conservatory of Music in Zemlinsky's
youth, the venue for premieres of his early works and the beginning of his
conducting career. After the 1890s, under the inspiration of architect Otto
Wagner (1841-1918), designs for new buildings were simplified to empha-
size their utility and building materials. Ornament was supplanted by aus-
terity of line, symmetry, and attention to the function of buildings in the
modern world.
Despite political and social unrest at the end of the nineteenth century
or perhaps because of itVienna was experiencing an astounding cultural
renaissance. In music, this renaissance was made possible by its many stellar
inhabitants, such as Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss II, Hugo Wolf, Gus-
tav Mahler, and a younger generation of musicians, Alban Berg, Anton
Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alexander Zemlinsky. The capital of the
disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire was also the home of other in-
novative figuressuch as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, architect Adolf
Loos, revolutionary psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, journalist/satirist Karl
Kraus, and writers Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan
Zweiglending credence to Friedrich Nietzsche's theory that "culture owes
its peaks to politically weak ages." 27
Carl Schorske points out that since entrance into the Hapsburg aristoc-
racy was closed to the middle classeven to those who received patents
of nobilitythe bourgeoisie mimicked the aristocracy's love and glorifica-
tion of culture by becoming patrons of the arts. 28 "By the end of the 1890s
the heroes of the upper middle class were . . . actors, artists, and critics." 29
"Art was closely bound up with social status. . . . If entry into the aristoc-
racy of the genealogical table was barred to most, the aristocracy of the
spirit was open to the eager. . . . The democratization of culture, viewed
sociologically, meant the aristocratization of the middle classes. That art
should perform so central a social function had the most far-reaching con-
sequences for its own development." 30
Wealthy industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, father of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, for example, was a great patron of the arts as well as an
amateur violinist who played chamber music with his family. He enter-
tained musicians such as Gustav Mahler, Joseph Joachim, Bruno Walter,
and Johannes Brahms; he also financed the Secession building in Vienna,
owned a distinguished art collection that included works of Viennese
painter Gustav Klimt, and produced another son, Paul, who became an
illustrious concert pianist. Playwright Arthur Schnitzler was the son of re-
nowned laryngologist Johann Schnitzler, who attended the theater, opera,
and concert halls of Vienna and was the physician for some of the most
famous actors and singers of his day. (He did not, however, encourage his
son to become a writer.)
Intellectuals and artists gathered in the salons and cafes of Vienna where
they "shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a
business and professional elite proud of its general education and artistic
culture." 31 The young genius Hugo von Hofmannsthal was introduced into
6 Discordant Melody
the coffeehouse culture by his father, a businessman who nurtured the gifts
of his only offspring.32 In the Cafe Griensteidl, Hofmannsthal met other
literary figures such as Peter Altenberg, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hermann
Bahr as well as political leaders such as socialist Victor Adler and Theodor
Herzl, who came to drink coffee, read newspapers, and talk. Zemlinsky
and Schoenberg also spent some of their leisure hours at the Cafe Grien-
steidl, where they became acquainted with writers Karl Kraus and Alten-
berg.33 Conductor Bruno Walter, a Berliner, was completely mystified by
the coffeehouse culture of Vienna: "How in the world could all those peo-
ple from every conceivable walk of life afford to spend several hours a day
in one of the innumerable coffeehouses?"34 He noted that the Austrian
tendency to "negligence and indolence as well as a good deal of intrigue
and evil gossip" might be credited to the coffeehouse.35
Surprisingly, many of the cultural icons of Vienna knew one another.
Arthur Schnitzler, who considered Mahler the "greatest living composer,"
first met him at the home of Mahler's sister Justine.36 Justine Mahler mar-
ried Arnold Rose, founder of the Rose String Quartet and concertmaster
of the Vienna Philharmonic, and Gustav Mahler's other sister, Emma Mah-
ler, married Arnold Rose's brother, Eduard. Conductor Bruno Walter gave
voice lessons to Olga Schnitzler, Schnitzler's young wife. The human rela-
tionships of many of these well-known figures seem suitable subjects for a
soap opera series (or new versions of Schnitzler's Reigen): Zemlinsky was
in love with Alma Schindler, who discarded him for a better prospect,
Gustav Mahler. The now Alma Mahler became disillusioned with her mar-
riage and had an affair with Walter Gropius. Alban Berg was happily mar-
ried to Helene Nahowski Berg but dallied with a number of other women,
most notably Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, who was Franz Werfel's sister and
the sister of Louise Zemlinsky's best friend, Marianne. 37 Helene Nahowski
Berg's mother, Anna Nahowski, was the mistress of Emperor Franz Joseph
from 1878 to 1889, and her daughter Helene and son Franz were rumored
to be the emperor's illegitimate children. Painter Oskar Kokoschka, a friend
of poet Georg Trakl, spoke in his autobiography of Trakl's love for his
twin sister, "to whom he was bound by more than a brother's love." 38
Schoenberg's wife Mathilde Zemlinsky Schoenberg ran off with Schoen-
berg's painting teacher and friend Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when
Mathilde Schoenberg returned to her husband. Alexander Zemlinsky's first
fiancee, Melanie Guttmann, immigrated to the United States where she
married artist William Clarke Rice, who painted a portrait of Richard
Gerstl in 1907. Alexander Zemlinsky's portrait was painted by a pretty
singer/art student, Louise Sachsel, in 1919, who then became his voice stu-
dent. In 1921, he dedicated a copy of his song "Es war ein alter Konig"
"to my Luise" (in purple ink, which Zemlinsky often used in his manu-
scripts) and then married her less than a year after the death of his wife
Ida Zemlinsky in 1929 (or to quote Heinrich Heine, "A boy loves a girl
who chooses someone else"). Alma Schindler managed to fall in love with
Gustav Klimt, Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Oskar
Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel, and others.
Such interactions sometimes required the skills of the budding psycho-
analytical community. Gustav Mahler, for example, in despair when his
marriage to Alma Schindler began to crumble, sought Sigmund Freud's
advice. In 1910, Mahler traveled to Leyden, Holland, for a brief consul-
tation with the vacationing psychiatrist and astounded Freud with his quick
understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. Freud elicited from Mahler rec-
ollections of his brutal father and beloved mother 39 and, according to Alma
Mahler, "apparently calmed him down." 40 Bruno Walter also consulted
Freud after his right arm became paralyzed, and he could no longer con-
duct. Freud examined Walter's arm and prescribed a vacation to Sicily.
When Walter returned from his trip with his "affliction" unchanged, he
was counseled by Freud to conduct anyway. Apparently this was good
advice since it worked. 41 Anton Webern, who suffered from a debilitating
nervous disorder, moved from one job to another and canceled many of
his conducting engagements. He was psychoanalyzed by Dr. Alfred Adler,
a dissident former disciple of Freud, who had established his own respected
branch of psychoanalytic theory. Although Webern considered the treat-
ment successful, he would always exhibit delicate psychological sensitivi-
ties. Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler were classmates at the Vienna
Conservatory, and when Wolf's sanity began to slip in 1897, Wolf an-
nounced to his friends that he, not Mahler, had been appointed as the
director of the Court Opera. Wolf was committed to a mental institution.
Perhaps we should mention some of the artistic gains that resulted from
the interaction of these cultural celebrities. Gustav Klimt painted several
works with music as the subject: Schubert at the Piano (1899), Music I
(1895), Music II (1898), and Beethoven Frieze (1902). Rodin sculpted a
bust of Gustav Mahler. A Jugendstil cover was designed for Zemlinsky's
op. 13 songs. Richard Gerstl, who at one time aspired to be a music critic,
painted portraits of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. Gerstl encouraged Schoen-
berg to paint, which resulted in self-portraits as well as paintings of Berg
and Zemlinsky. Kokoschka painted Alma Schindler, Anton Webern,
Schoenberg, Georg Trakl, and Egon Wellesz and produced paintings about
music: The Power of Music and Bach Cantata. For a Secession exhibition
in 1902 that highlighted Max Klinger's Beethoven sculpture, Gustav Mah-
ler conducted an excerpt from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Mahler's
arrangement for winds and brass.42 Mahler became more sensitive to the
art world after his marriage to Alma Schindler, the daughter of a painter,
and hired the respected artist Alfred Roller as stage designer for the Court
Opera in 1903. The Ansorge Society, an interdisciplinary organization that
presented programs focusing on the works of individual musicians and
writers, counted both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg among its members. Zem-
8 Discordant Melody
linsky was acquainted with many Austrian painters and attended Secession
exhibitions. In his letters to Alma Schindler, he mentioned his art gallery
visits during his vacation in Munich 43 and praised the genius of Arnold
Bocklin, a nineteenth-century Swiss painter whose works were exhibited by
the Secessionists.
The economic crisis of 1873 spawned a rejection of tradition by many
Viennese, called by Schorske the "Oedipal revolt." Often labeled "Jung"
to denote the youthful character of this rebellion"Die Jungen," "Jung-
Wien," "Jugendstil"it spread from politics to literature and then to the
other arts. 44 In 1897, young artists in the Viennese art world decided to
sever their connections with the highly conservative academy. Gustav Klimt
joined with Carl Moll (Alma Schindler's stepfather) and other progressive
Viennese artists in breaking away from the stultifying traditional art world,
represented by the Kiinstlerhaus (The Artists' House). Calling themselves
Secessionists, a term they first used in their magazine Ver Sacrum, they
vowed to "promote purely artistic interests, especially the raising of the
level of artistic sensitivity in Austria." They aimed to unite "Austrian artists
. . . by seeking fruitful contacts with leading foreign artists, initiating a non-
commercial exhibition system in Austria, [and] promoting Austrian art at
exhibitions abroad." 45 They also hoped to "abolish the dividing line be-
tween art and life."46 The language for this manifesto would later be mir-
rored in Alban Berg's prospectus for Schoenberg's Society for Private
Musical Performance in 1918.
An even greater artistic rebellion occurred in music, precipitating a break
with the past that would overshadow the work of progressive composers
such as Zemlinsky. In 1921, Arnold Schoenberg mentioned his new twelve-
tone system to musicologist Josef Rufer, a student of both Schoenberg and
Zemlinsky: "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of
German music for the next hundred years." 47 The twelve-tone system did,
in fact, become an international style, adopted by composers in many coun-
tries, and the repercussions of this "discovery" are still being felt through-
out Western music. But other innovative composers such as Debussy,
Stravinsky, Bartok, and Hindemith also found new solutions to the limi-
tations they perceived in nineteenth-century tonality.
Artistic vitality permeated all of fin de siecle Europe and brought about
a lively international exchange of ideas. Literary symbolism, for example,
which began in Paris, was quickly embraced by writers in Belgium, Ger-
many, Austria, Italy, Spain, and England. A cosmopolitan spirit also illu-
minated the art world: The Viennese Secessionists, like the Munich
Secessionists (1892) and the Belgian Les XX (The Twenty, 1883), 48 re-
flected the rebellion of the earlier French Salon des Refuses (1863) 49 by
putting on exhibitions that included avant-garde foreigners such as Belgian
painter/sculptor Fernand Khnopff, a founding member of Les XX; Franz
von Stuck, a founding member of the Munich Secession; Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes, admired by the "official" art world in France and by symbolist

artists and writers, including Mallarme, w h o dedicated a sonnet to him; 5 0
Italian symbolist Giovanni Segantini, w h o was influenced by Jugendstil and
whose work was admired by both the Munich and Viennese Secessionists; 51
the great French sculptor Rodin; Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin; Dutch
painter Jan T o o r o p ; and German painter/sculptor M a x Klingerto name
a few. Members of the Wiener Werkstatte (Viennese Workshop), formed
in 1903, shared the ideals of artists such as William Morris (1834-1896)
in England, Theo Van Rysselberghe ( 1 8 6 2 - 1 9 2 6 ) , and Henry van de Velde
(1863-1957) in Belgium. They wanted to introduce art into everyday life
in the form of wallpaper, decorations, tapestries, book illustrations, and
even women's clothing.
The multifarious achievements of creative genius within fin de siecle Vi-
enna have given rise to a mythology emphasizing a prominence of place:
Arnold Schoenberg's Vienna, Wittgenstein's Vienna, and Schnitzler's Vi-
enna. The enchantment of Vienna and the Austrian Empire was nostalgi-
cally recreated by journalist/writer Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl in My Life and
History. She recounted a visit of Rodin to the 1902 Secession exhibition in
Vienna and a meeting at her home.
My husband and I had asked Rodin to a real Viennese "Jause" (afternoon coffee).
It was a wonderful June afternoon in the Prater, and all the Sezessionists had as-
sembled there. Klimt was in a brilliant mood and sat next to Rodin, who talked
enthusiastically to him about the beauties of Vienna.
I had the coffee served on the terrace. Klimt and Rodin had seated themselves
beside two remarkably beautiful young women. . . . Alfred Gruenfeld sat down at
the piano in the big drawing-room. . . . Klimt went up to him and asked, "Please
play us some Schubert." And Gruenfeld, his cigar in his mouth, played dreamy
tunes that floated and hung in the air. . . .
Rodin leaned over to Klimt and said: "I have never before experienced such an
atmosphereyour tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco; your unforgettable,
temple-like exhibition; and now this garden, these women, this music . . . and round
it all this gay, child-like happiness. . . . What is the reason for it all?" And Klimt
slowly nodded his beautiful head and answered only one word"Austria."' 2
A similar view of Vienna was expressed in the famous 1911 edition of

the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "As a general rule, the Viennese are gay,
pleasure-loving and genial. The Viennese women are justly celebrated for
their beauty and elegance; and dressing as a fine art is cultivated here. . . .
As a rule, the Viennese are passionately fond of dancing. . . . Opera, espe-
cially in its lighter form, flourishes and the actors of Vienna maintain with
success a traditional reputation of no mean order." 5 3
Yet Sigmund Freud claimed, "I never felt really comfortable in the city."
Freud's biographer Peter Gay reflected that "Vienna never wholly ceased
to be for him the theater of hardship, repeated failure, prolonged and hate-
10 Discordant Melody
ful solitude, unpleasant incidents of Jew-hatred." 5 4 Nevertheless, after

Freud reluctantly escaped Nazi-infested Vienna in 1938 and finally reached
London, he would lament that "one had still very much loved the prison
from which one has been released." 5 5 Similar conflicting feelings were
shared by Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. The Viennese continually failed to
honor Schoenberg's greatest achievements, and he withdrew from Vienna
during several important periods in his life. "I don't want to have anything
to do with Vienna. I d o n ' t w a n t to contract any new depressions there." 5 6
In 1913, after a disastrous concert that featured music of Schoenberg, Berg,
Webern, Mahler, and Zemlinsky, Berg wrote to Schoenberg, "Your revul-
sion against Vienna has always been justified and I seeunfortunately too
latehow wrong I was to have tried to reconcile you to Vienna. . . . O n e
can't hate this 'city of song' enough!!" 5 7
Gustav Mahler also experienced many difficulties during his career in
Vienna. Persecuted by a virulent press and conservative public, he was fi-
nally forced from his position at the Vienna Court Opera in 1907. Just
four years later, the same press rushed to his side when he was dying,
issuing hourly reports on the status of his health. Zemlinsky too, having
lived in Vienna for the first forty years of his life, after a series of disap-
pointments looked for opportunities elsewhere. Except for special con-
ducting engagements and short visits there, he did not return to Vienna for
almost twenty-three years. Yet he longed for success and acceptance in the
city he loved. He wrote to Alma Mahler in December 1918: "I will, as you
probably already know, direct Das Lied von der Erde on 18 February in
Vienna. I am very much looking forward to that and yet I come with mixed
feelings for Vienna. Probably the honored music critics will again use the
opportunity to beat me u p . " 5 8 In an unpublished letter to Alma Mahler in
1915, Zemlinsky had spoken of being "condemned here in Prague." 5 9 But
the Vienna he longed to return to no longer existed; perhaps the Vienna
he longed for had never existed.
Alban Berg, w h o lived in Vienna his entire life, frequently expressed frus-
tration with his beloved city. After Schoenberg decided to move to Berlin
and offered Berg his composition students, Berg replied, "There is some-
thing so wonderful in being the chosen one, the champion and comrade-
in-arms for your ideas . . . even if it is only in this God-forsaken city." 6 0 As
late as 1 9 3 1 , after Berg had achieved international recognition as a com-
poser, Schoenberg would comment, "It really is almost inconceivable that
again neither you nor Webern has been approached about a professorship
at the Vienna Academy. But believe me: you needn't regret it; one day
they'll be the ones to regret it!" 61 Berg wryly referred to Vienna as a "Cafe
M u s e u m . " 6 2 The artist Kokoschka also expressed his ambivalent relation-
ship with Vienna when he called it that "oppressive little w o r l d " and re-
fused to return from Prague for a retrospective exhibition of his works in
1937. 6 3
Fin de siecle Vienna's amazing artistic, scientific, and intellectual renais-

sance was led by a long list of brilliantly accomplished Jews. Many of them
no longer practiced their religion but considered themselves cultural Jews.
Playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), who described the
world-weary, erotic emptiness of the era in plays such as Reigen (1897),
and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis, remained sec-
ular Jews. But many other German Jews converted to Christianity, often
as a means of being assimilated into the larger society. Arnold Schoenberg
converted to Christianity in 1898, and Zemlinsky probably converted to
Christianity the following year. He teasingly referred to Schoenberg's new
baptismal name "Franz" in one of his early letters.64 In fact, during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assimilation through intermar-
riage, religious conversion, and secularism among Jews became so wide-
spread that when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they felt obliged to
devise elaborate categories to define who was a Jew and who was not.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal's mother, for example, was a Christian married
to a Jew. Franz Schreker's father, a Czech/Hungarian Jew, converted to
Protestantism when he married Schreker's Catholic mother. Gustav Mahler
became a Catholic, perhaps from conviction but also in order to qualify as
conductor of the Vienna Opera, a government position; he also married a
gentile. Writer Peter Altenberg, whose real name was Richard Englander,
converted to Christianity and, like many Jews such as Felix Salten, Egon
Friedell, and Max Reinhardt, changed his name to remove any association
with his Jewish heritage.65 Society did not always welcome these converts,
as Gustav Mahler discovered when his appointment as director of the Vi-
enna Court Opera was opposed by Cosima Wagner "because he was a
Jew." 66 Alma Mahler mentions many slights Mahler received and stated
that "he knew that people would not forget he was a Jew. . . . Nor did he
wish it forgotten. . . . He never denied his Jewish origin. . . . He was a be-
liever in Christianity, a Christian Jew, and he paid the penalty." 67
The idea of Jew as "other," as not a "true" German, was an unexamined
bias for many Germans, even for the young Anton Webern when he first
entered the University of Vienna. "He describes his class at the Institute as
including 'seven Jews, a Jewess, four Poles and four Germans.' " 68 Webern
soon learned to revere some of the most brilliant Jews of his era: Gustav
Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Guido Adler, Karl Kraus, and Georg Trakl.
Leon Botstein notes that the number of Jews who converted to Christi-
anity represented only a tiny portion of the Jewish community. 69 Many
Jews felt assimilation was either impossible or undesirable. Led by Theodor
Herzl (1860-1904), they formed the Zionism movement with the goal of
establishing a separate Jewish state. Herzl, a correspondent for the Neue
Freie Presse in Paris during the Dreyfus affair, was overwhelmed by the
vitriolic anti-Semitism that surfaced when Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer,
was unjustly accused of treason. Herzl came to believe that anti-Semitism
was impossible to overcome and in his Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State,
1896) proposed a homeland for the Jews, a cause he championed for the
rest of his short life.
Many Westernized Jews had difficulty in identifying with the large influx
of Eastern Jewish immigrants whose foreign dress, unfamiliar mannerisms,
and customs seemed alien to them. Some wanted to deny their Jewishness
altogether. Karl Kraus, for example, who converted to Catholicism in 1911,
took on his own brand of anti-Semitism as he disassociated himself from
Jewish writers and thinkers who would not shed their Jewish identity.
From 1899 to 1936, Kraus produced his highly influential periodical Die
Fackel (The Torch). Distinguished literary figures such as Heinrich Mann,
Georg Trakl, and Peter Altenberg contributed to early editions of Die
Fackel, but after 1911, Kraus wrote the issues entirely by himself. He prided
himself on the preciseness of his style and is said to have spent an inordinate
amount of time deciding where to place every comma. His essays, lectures,
poetry, and aphorisms were admired (or despised) by the Viennese com-
munity, who breathlessly awaited every issue of Die Fackel. "Kraus diag-
noses the psychopathology of everyday life, as it is reflected in the language
of the Viennese and the jargon of their newspapers. Even when his theme
is the breakdown of western civilization it is still in the Kartnerstrasse that
he finds the motifs for his satire." 70 Kraus's poetry was set to music by a
number of admiring composers including Anton Webern.
Kraus "held court" in some of Vienna's most prominent coffeehouses
and first commanded the attention of the Viennese in 1897 with a satirical
essay, "Die demolierte Literatur" (Demolition Literature), using the de-
struction of one of Vienna's most popular coffeehouses, the Cafe Grien-
steidl, as the basis for his parody of some of Vienna's most famous authors:
"Our literature is bracing itself for a period of homelessness; the threads
of artistic creativity are being cruelly severed. . . . Professional life . . . took
place in that coffeehouse . . . the true center of literary activity. . . . Who
does not remember the almost crushing profusion of newspapers and jour-
nals that made the visit to our coffeehouse a virtual necessity for those
writers who had no craving for coffee?"71 Kraus sold nearly 30,000 copies
of this essay.72
Touting the "virtues" of sexual freedoma necessary condition for his
own philanderingKraus was one of the most influential men in Vienna
at the beginning of the twentieth century. He maintained a set of misogynist
views that were disseminated in his writings, while at the same time, he
championed the rights of prostitutes, whom he considered to be oppressed
by a hypocritical society.
Prostitutes in Vienna at the beginning of the century (like prostitutes
today) were vulnerable to incurable venereal diseases, were outcasts from
society, and had no laws to protect them from those who preyed upon
them. Writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) noted in his autobiography that
"female wares were offered for sale at every hour and at every price, and
it cost a man as little time and trouble to purchase a w o m a n for a quarter
of an hour, an hour, or a night, as it did to buy a package of cigarettes or
a newspaper. . . . [D]oor after door . . . one next to the other on display at
the windows of their dwellings at street levelcheap goods." 7 3 Prostitutes
patronized by members of the upper and middle classes often dressed as
fashionable ladies and were imprisoned in more luxurious settingsbroth-
els that looked like fashionable dwellings. 7 4 But prostitution was an ac-
cepted condition of life, and Alma Schindler, after a tempestuous session
of kissing and petting with Zemlinsky, lamented in her diary that he could
go to a prostitute to relieve his sexual tension, but she had no outlet. 7 5
Zweig, discussing the social causes for r a m p a n t prostitution in Vienna,
placed much of the blame on society's repressive attitudesits double stan-
dard for men and women, on its prudish, hypocritical conventions of de-
cency, and even on the restrictive, uncomfortable clothing middle-class
women wore that made natural movement impossible while rendering them
almost physically helpless. Ironically, while every inch of the female body
was covered, a w o m a n ' s corset accentuated her breasts, and a bustle drew
attention to her derriere: "The man vigorous, chivalrous, and aggressive,
the w o m a n shy, timid and on the defensive, the hunter and his prey." 7 6
Middle-class w o m e n could not leave home without a chaperone and were
totally ignorant of reproduction processes or male physiology. "The society
of those days wished young girls to be silly and u n t a u g h t . . . to be led and
formed by a man in marriage without any will of their o w n . " 7 7 This same
society then condemned women for their ignorance. Bruce T h o m p s o n in
Schnitzler's Vienna noted, "Single women who blatantly stepped out of line
forfeited their right to a respectable marriage, and adulteresses, if discov-
ered, could become social outcasts." 7 8
When Alban Berg asked his fiancee Helene "to prove that you too were
unafraid of the greatest sacrifices to show your love for m e , " they began
to argue over the meaning of "prostitute." Berg wrote her,
I found a prostitute's position no more or less offensive than associating with people
wrhom you and many others consider quite unobjectionable . . . the prostitutes of
the spirit . . . they sully themselves for money, for salaries, offices, honours, ad-
vancement; hypocrites who pretend to be very upright . . . respectable wives who
marry for money, selling their bodies and souls for life. Well, that takes in about
90 per cent of the world's population, who accordingly, in my view, are not much
better or more respectable than prostitutes. 79
Arthur Schnitzler chronicled the sexual deception and distress of those

w h o defied the social codes of fin de siecle Vienna. "The young Schnitzler
in particular was sensitive to the hypocrisy of a society which 'sold' its
daughters in marriage for money or titles, yet which also condemned adul-
teresses out of hand."80 In Der einsame Weg (The Lonely Way), Schnitzler's
character Felix discovers he is the son of Julian, w h o had an affair with
Felix's mother and then deserted her. When she discovered she was preg-
nant, she had rushed into marriage with Professor Wegrat, the man Felix
believed was his father.
Julian: I am simply telling you the truth. . . . It was your mother, and it was I who
left her. . . .
Felix: And if she had killed herself?
Julian: I believe I would have thought myself worth itat that time.
Felix: . . . And she might have done it, of that I am certain. She would want to end
the lies and pain like a hundred thousand girls before her have done. 81
In his play Reigen (Round Dance, 1 8 9 8 - 1 8 9 9 ) , Schnitzler presented ten

characters from various strata of societyas he moved up the social ladder
from a prostitute to a count; he revealed the great subterfuge and dissem-
bling among the "respectable classes" as they pursued their illicit sexual
liaisons. One scene in Reigen takes place in a restaurant that not only
provided dinner but a private room for sexual dalliances, a typical accom-
modation for men w h o did not wish to be seen with the "lower class" shop
girls with w h o m they were carrying on clandestine affairs. "Rarely can
institutionalized promiscuity have so blatantly coexisted with the proprie-
ties of bourgeois moralism and religious conformity."82 Ironically, Schnitz-
ler himself engaged in numerous love relationships and knew well the
women he portrayed. He also knew that plays, novels, and operettas such
as Die Fledermaus might present promiscuity with lighthearted abando n,
but "real" society maintained a puritanical grip on its female members.
Kraus advocated the liberalization of laws relating to contraception,
abortion, and homosexuality and also supported the same sexual freedom
for women that society allowed men. 8 3 But he was not championing the
emancipation of women since his notion of w o m a n ' s role in society was
limited to the purely sensual. Even in 1 9 1 3 , after he fell in love with Sidonie
Nadherny, an intelligent, clever w o m a n , he failed to reflect his altered views
in his public writings. 8 4
For many years, comments about Kraus and Die Fackel peppered Alban
Berg's letters to his wife and to Schoenberg. In 1909, Berg wrote to Helene
Nahowski: "So here is Die Fackel, another marvel of deep wisdom and
brilliant h u m o u r . . . a masterpiece." 8 5 Zemlinsky knew Kraus socially, of-
ten meeting him at the homes of mutual friends and at Vienna's most pop-
ular coffeehouses. Schoenberg, w h o held Kraus in high esteem, introduced
Webern to Kraus, but according to Schoenberg's brother-in-law, violinist
Rudolf Kolisch, Schoenberg's relationship with Kraus was somewhat one-
sided: Schoenberg held Kraus in high esteem, while Kraus, "whose favorite
composer was Offenbach," was uninterested in Schoenberg's music. 8 6 In

1932, Webern affirmed his respect for Kraus when he began a series of
sixteen private lectures in Vienna by applying to music the same principles
Kraus applied to language. In his second lecture, Webern lamented Kraus's
mediocre views on music but followed, "I needn't say w h a t Karl Kraus
means to me, h o w much I revere him." 8 7 Webern set to music the Kraus
poem "Wiese im Park" in his op. 13 for voice and small orchestra and
worked with three additional poems for the orchestral songs "Vallorbe,"
"Vision des Erblindeten," and "Flieder." 8 8
The painter Kokoschka said of Kraus: " H e was absolutely intolerant
with everybody. He gave permission to see him in the cafe at a certain time
in the evening when he ate his dinner. . . . He was a cruel m a n so he was
frightening for the Viennese." 8 9 Zemlinsky and Schoenberg referred to
Kraus with deference in their correspondence, but Alma Mahler later
claimed that Zemlinsky disliked Kraus for printing a negative story about
circumstances at the Vienna Conservatory.90 Actually, Alma Mahler herself
seems to have been the source for some of Kraus's gossip. (La Grange
points out the trouble Alma Mahler caused by reporting other people's
conversations to Kraus, which would then appear in Die Fackel.)9^ In Mein
Leben, Alma Mahler expressed her distaste for Kraus because of his attacks
on her friends and stepfather Carl Moll. She cited with satisfaction a libel
case won by H e r m a n n Bahr, w h o took Kraus to court for implying that
Bahr had accepted bribes as a theater critic. 92 But in her youthful diaries,
she revealed her physical attraction to Kraus.
Kraus's pacifist stand during World War I caused immense distress
among members of the Schoenberg circle, w h o were sympathetic to the
Austrian cause. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were part of the Austrian
military and spoke patriotically about the war. In 1918, Kraus wrote an
antiwar play, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Man-
kind), filled with a scathing criticism of war, the Austrian people, the press,
and the monarchy. (In England, Bertrand Russell was jailed in 1918 after
espousing pacifism in a letter to The Tribunal in January 1918.)
After World W a r I, Vienna became "the provincial capital of a small
alpine republic . . . no longer the cultural powerhouse it had once been, and
the honour of being one of her outsiders was losing its savour." 9 3 Having
lost its position as the capital of a great empire, Vienna was far too weak
and demoralized to support the arts as its population struggled for the bare
necessities of life. Cultural reactionaries gained new ground in this unstable
environment and were often successful in equating progressive develop-
ments in the arts as "decadent" or "non-German." 9 4 The disproportion-
ately high number of Jews w h o had achieved success in the world of the
arts became a prime target for cultural conservatives. The defeat of Ger-
many and Austria in World W a r I, the dismantling of the Austro-Hungar-
ian Empire, the severe economic hardships following the war coupled
with heavy war reparations demanded by the Allies, and the modest re-
covery in the 1920s wiped out by the Great Depression in 1929 created a
fertile climate for fanaticism and extreme racial hatred. In 1926, Sigmund
Freud would state, "My language is German. My culture, my attainments
are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the
growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since
that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew." 95 Schoenberg arrived at the same
conclusion. On 20 April 1923, he wrote to Wassily Kandinsky, "For I have
at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and
I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European,
indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer
the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew." 96
A brilliant cultural era had drawn to a close. Perhaps the same forces of
turmoil and ferment that had inspired the surprising coexistence of such
various geniuses were partly to blame for the unparalleled human catastro-
phe that followed. Inconceivable barbarism was unleashed as war, geno-
cide, and economic devastation, and like a black hole, it sucked in almost
every region of the earth.
Chapter 2
Getting Started
[T]o be Austrian did not mean German; Austrian culture was the crys-
tallization of the best of many cultures.
Berta Szeps1
Alexander Zemlinsky was born on 14 October 1871 in the Jewish working-

class section of Vienna, the second districtLeopoldstadt. 2 Located on the
north side of the Danube Canal, Leopoldstadt was the home of the Carl-
theater, the Synagogue of the Turkish Jews (a Sephardic Jewish commu-
nity), and the Prater, the largest public park and amusement area in Vienna,
described in the 1905 edition of the Baedeker Handbook for Travellers as
"the favourite haunt of the humbler classes, especially on Sunday and hol-
iday afternoons." 3
The year 1871 was also the year in which France agreed to secede Alsace-
Lorraine to Germany and pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs after losing
the Franco/Prussian War; the aging, belligerent Wilhelm I, king of Prussia,
became emperor of the new German Empire; Verdi wrote Ai'da in honor
of the opening of the Suez Canal; writer and explorer Henry Stanley trav-
eled to Africa to find David Livingston, locating him in Ujiji; Charles Dar-
win expanded his ideas on natural selection in The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex; and Emperor Francis (Franz) Joseph was in
the twenty-third year of his sixty-eight-year reign over the decaying Haps-
burg Empire.
With a population less than half German, the H a p s b u r g Empire at the
end of the nineteenth century was politically anemic and racked by dissent
from an array of vocal minorities that included Hungarians, Czechs, Slo-
venes, Poles, Italians, and Ruthenians. Zemlinsky's mother, Clara Semo von
Zemlinszky (1848-1912), reflected this multicultural world as the daughter
of a Turkish-Jewish father and a Turkish-Islamic mother (Bianca Ferrai).
She was born in Sarajevo, which was under Turkish rule until 1878 when
it was occupied by Austria-Hungary in a partial European partitioning of
the Ottoman Empire. Her rich, complex heritage would influence her son
who began his life as a Jewto explore non-Germanic literature and ideas.
His song setting of a Turkish poem, "Der Liebe Leid (The Pain of Love),
published in his op. 2, the unpublished "Orientalisches Sonett," the opera
Sarema, and the Lyric Symphony were tender remembrances of this Eastern
legacy.
The marriage certificates of Zemlinsky's grandparents on his father's side
of the family indicate they were Roman Catholic and that the bridegroom,
Anton Semlinsky, had been born in Hungary. 4 Zemlinsky's musical talent
seems to have come through his father, Adolf von Zemlinszky, whose ma-
ternal grandfather, Wenzel Pulletz, is listed as a musician on his marriage
certificate.5 Although Zemlinsky's father called himself "von" Zemlinszky,
a designation of nobility, the family name was spelled "Semlinsky" on birth
and marriage records. Scholars have been unable to discover any docu-
ments granting nobility to the family, nor have they determined when the
spelling of "Semlinsky" changed to "Zemlinszky." Schoenberg's cousin
Hans Nachod recalled that Zemlinsky's father was a Polish aristocrat, 6 but
Alexander Zemlinsky's second wife, Louise, stated that Zemlinsky's father
had changed his name, 7 which was most likely the case since "Adolf Sem-
linsky" was the name recorded on his birth certificate (born 23 April 1845,
died 29 June 1900). Adolf Semlinsky was baptized as a Roman Catholic
four days after his birth8 but converted to Judaism, most likely in order to
marry Clara Semo, an unusual gesture in Catholic Austria at a time when
so many German Jews were being assimilated into the Christian commu-
nity. In the words of Zemlinsky scholar Horst Weber, "The mother was
obviously a very dominant personality." 9 In 1872, Adolf von Zemlinszky
was appointed secretary to the Turkish-Israeli community and in 1888 pub-
lished a history of their society in Vienna, Geschichte tiirkisch-israelitischen
Gemeinde zu Wien von ihrer Griindung bis heute (The History of the
Turkish-Israeli Society in Vienna from the Founding to the Present).10 He
was also editor of Wiener Punsch11 and may have even been the librettist
for Zemlinsky's opera Sarema, a text adapted from Rudolf von Gottschall's
Die Rose vom Kaukasus. Adolf von Zemlinszky seems to have represented
himself as being Jewish to Clara Semo's father, and the family remained
Jewish until her father died.12 Louise Zemlinsky stated, "My husband was
at birth registered in the Jewish faith, and he told me that he was Jewish
until the second class in grammar school, until he was seven or eight years
old. His Jewish grandfather had died a few years before." 13 This is probably
not accurate since Zemlinsky's father wrote the history of the Turkish-
Getting Started 19
Israeli community in Vienna when Zemlinsky was nearly seventeen years

old, and one would assume that Zemlinszky was given the assignment be-
cause he was still a respected member of the Jewish community. In a hand-
written account of her memories of her husband, Louise Zemlinsky wrote:
"Zemlinsky said to me once soon after I had painted his portrait that he
was born in the Jewish community, and at that time it didn't occur to me
to ask anything more . . . [I]t was the occasion when he asked me my re-
ligion because I did not look Jewish; he said this on the way home when
he accompanied me from my lesson."14
Zemlinsky's identity was clearly shaped by his early years as a member
of the Jewish community, and he remained a cultural Jew throughout his
life, despite his "mischlinge" background. His best friend, Arnold Schoen-
berg, was born a Jew; many of his other friends and students were Jewish,
as were both of Zemlinsky's wives. His choral settings of Psalms 23 (1910)
and 13 (1935), his choral marriage song for the wedding of Helene Bauer
and Rabbi Isidor Kahan, "Baruch aba, mi adir" (1896),15 and his Psalm
83, completed 10 September 1900, which implores God to act against those
who have "struck against your people," reflect his early background. He
was also the target of non-Jews such as Alma Schindler Mahler and Max
Burckhard, who made disparaging anti-Semitic remarks about him. Not
until the Nazis came to power did Zemlinsky show interest in his Aryan
background.
After World War I when the Austro/Hungarian Empire was dissolved
and titles were abolished, Zemlinsky dropped "von" from his name, 16 al-
though some of his friends such as Alma Mahler and Anton (von) Webern
continued to refer to him as "von Zemlinsky." Much earlier, he had sim-
plified the spelling of his last name from "Zemlinszky" to "Zemlinsky."
The old spelling was still used on the title page to his op. 1, Ldndliche
Tdnze, published circa 1891 (by Breitkopf & Hartel) while he was a student
at the Vienna Conservatory. It occurs also on the title page of his op. 5
but not on his op. 2 (both published by W. Hansen); even as late as 28
December 1901, he used the old spelling in a letter to Schoenberg. Oddly
enough, "Zemlinszky" is the family name that appears on the birth certif-
icate of Zemlinsky's daughter Johanna Maria in 1908.
Although ethnically one-quarter Jewish, Zemlinsky would later be listed
as " H " = half Jewish in the 1941 edition of Lexikon der ]uden in der
Musik,17 a directory compiled by the Nazis to identify Jews in the world
of music. The Nazis devised a complex set of rules to determine who was
not a "pure" German or so-called Aryan. Since Zemlinsky was married to
a Jew, he would have been "upgraded" from a designation of "quarter-
Jew" to "half-Jew." The genealogical data included in the Nachlass of Lou-
ise Zemlinsky was most likely collected because the Nazis demanded proof
of each citizen's lineage.
Two very similar stories have been told about Zemlinsky's early training
as a pianist. Louise Zemlinsky stated that when Zemlinsky was three years
old, his father took a friend's son into their home for a school term and
had a piano brought there for the visitor. Zemlinsky eagerly listened to the
other child's lessons and continually begged to study the piano until his
father finally found a teacher for his little son.18 Zemlinsky told Alma
Schindler that the son of a friend was living with the Zemlinskys, and his
father allowed Zemlinsky to study along with his child, but soon Zemlinsky
outstripped the progress of the other student and was given his own
teacher. Unfortunately, Zemlinsky's joy in playing the piano was soon
dampened by his family, who insisted he play simple, popular pieces for
their friends rather than the Mozart sonatas he loved. They would carry
him to the piano, and he would cry.19
Zemlinsky entered the Vienna Conservatory of the Society of the Friends
of Music (Wiener Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde) in
September 1884 when he was almost thirteen years old and remained there
until 1892. (The Gesellschaft der Musikfreundeor Musikvereinwas
founded in 1812 as a concert society, a music school, and a library.) On
Zemlinsky's application for scholarship aid to the Conservatory, his father,
Adolf Zemlinszky, listed his profession as a "civil servant," a position never
verified elsewhere.20 By 1888, Zemlinsky had already tried his hand at com-
posing in a variety of musical genres: The Library of Congress Alexander
von Zemlinsky Collection contains manuscripts of songs, piano pieces, one
movement of a piano trio in A minor, works for violin and piano, and
even a draft for a piano concerto.21 He studied harmony and counterpoint
with Robert Fuchs, whose ideas of motivic development became a funda-
mental feature of Zemlinsky's style and later the foundation of Schoen-
berg's concept of developing variation. 22 (Fuchs also taught Mahler, Wolf,
and Schreker.) In 1890, Zemlinsky began to study composition with
Fuchs's brother, Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, a composer, conductor of the
Vienna Court Opera, and editor of portions of Schubert's collected works
(Gesamtausgabe) as well as operas of Handel, Gluck, and Mozart. 23 Both
of the Fuchs brothers and Anton Door, Zemlinsky's piano teacher, were
acquainted with Johannes Brahms, a composer who would have a tremen-
dous impact on Zemlinsky. Zemlinsky dedicated five unpublished piano
Ballades and his Trio in D minor for clarinet, cello, and piano op. 3 to
Johann Nepomuk Fuchs,24 and Fuchs honored his promising young student
by conducting Zemlinsky's Symphony in D minor in the large hall of the
Musikverein on 10 February 1893.
Zemlinsky's pianistic training can be traced back to Beethoven, since his
teacher Anton Door was a student of the great pianist/pedagogue Carl
Czerny (Franz Liszt was also Czerny's student), who had been a Beethoven
student. Zemlinsky's playing won the admiration of many great musicians
including Mahler, who would later relate that Zemlinsky played "with in-
credible technique."2^ The Conservatory report for the school year 1889-
Getting Started 21
1890 indicated that the eighteen-year-old Zemlinsky had "completed his

piano studies as the best piano player of the Conservatory,"26 and after
playing the Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Zem-
linsky was awarded a Bosendorfer grand piano as his prize.27 His facility
as a pianist would be of much assistance to him throughout his career: For
example, he succeeded in convincing Mahler to premiere the opera Es war
einmal by playing his work on the piano for Mahler. M a n y years later,
Schoenberg would relay a suggestion from Zemlinsky to Alban Berg that
Berg play Wozzeck for influential people in order to find backers. But Berg
protested that his piano skills were not adequate to convince listeners of
the virtues of his work. "Of course, Zemlinsky with his virtuosity over-
comes such impediments with ease." 2 8 (Berg and pianist Ernst Bachrich
eventually did play Wozzeck for conductor Erich Kleiber, w h o premiered
the opera on 15 December 1925.) 2 9 Zemlinsky once remarked to Alma
Schindler that he was working on his piano technique with scales and
etudes. " G o o d piano playing is a concern. You also should not neglect it." 3 0
His intimate knowledge of the piano is everywhere evident in the artful
accompaniments of his songs, which appear deceptively simple but often
require considerable skill from the performer. Although he acted as a col-
laborative artist throughout his life, Zemlinsky never pursued a career as
a concert pianist.
Zemlinsky's various references as to the precise time of his first meeting
with Brahms are somewhat confusing, and in a letter to Erwin Stein in
1927, Zemlinsky admitted that his early memories were not always relia-
ble. 31 O t t o Biba believes Zemlinsky was introduced to Brahms on 11 July
1892 at a school concert in which the first movement of Zemlinsky's Sym-
phony in D minor was performed by the conservatory orchestra under the
twenty-year-old composer's direction. 3 2 In 1922, Zemlinsky recounted
memories of Brahms in an article for the journal Musikblatter des Anbruch:
I had the good fortune to get to know Brahms . . . during the last two years of
his life. . . . (H|ow fascinatingly . . . his music affected me and my composing col-
leagues of that time, among whom was also Schonberg. I was still a student at the
Vienna Conservatory when I got to know thoroughly the greater part of Brahms's
works and was possessed by this music. To . . . gain control over this wonderful,
original technique ranked as my goal at that time.
It was on the occasion of a performance of a symphony of mine when I was still
a student composerBrahms was invited to it by my teacher Fuchsthat I was
introduced to him. Soon after that, when the Quartet Hellmesberger performed a
string quintet of mine [5 March 1896, the premiere of Zemlinsky's String Quintet
in D minor] 33 which Brahms also heard, he requested the score of it and asked me
to visit him, with a short and somewhat ironic, flippant remark: "Naturally, if it
interests you to talk with me about it." This caused a serious struggle within me:
the idea that Brahms would speak with me about my attempts at composing turned
my already gigantic respect for him into fear. . . .
He went over my quintet with me at the piano. Correcting sparingly in the be-
ginning, carefully looking over one or another place, never actually praising or even
encouraging, finally becoming more irritable. And when I timidly tried to defend a
place in the development section which appeared to me to be carried out success-
fully in a Brahmsian sense, he opened up the Mozart String Quintet; he explained
to me the perfection of this "still unsurpassed formal structure," and it sounded
entirely unbiased and obvious when he said: "so that's the way one does it from
Bach to me!" From this extremely despairing frame of mind into which Brahms's
ruthless criticism had thrown me, he soon set things right with me again; he in-
quired about my material circumstances and offered me a monthly stipend so that
I could give fewer lessons [to support myself] and I could dedicate myself more to
composing. Finally, he recommended me to his publisher Simrock, who also ac-
cepted my first compositions for publication.
. . . [M]y work stood, for a long time more than ever, totally under the influence
of Brahms . . . [and) also with my colleagues. . . . We also soon became notorious
in Vienna as dangerous "Brahmins."
Then naturally there was a reaction. With the effort to find one's self, there was
an energetic turning away from Brahms . . . until this period of depreciation gave
way to a calm critical evaluation and to a permanent love for Brahms's work. And
today when I conduct a symphony or play one of his noble chamber works, I stand
again entirely under the spell of the memory of that time.34
So many facets of Brahms's character are charmingly revealed in this an-

ecdote: his brusqueness, his irony, his absolute devotion to music, his will-
ingness to discuss the work of a gifted young composer, his kind offer of
financial assistance, and the introduction to his publisher Simrock. Zemlin-
sky never mentioned the actual receipt of financial assistance from Brahms,
but in a 1924 profile of Zemlinsky in Die Musik, Ernst Rychnovsky stated,
"Although the material support did not occur, the moral encouragement
was of infinite value." 3 5 Zemlinsky is also revealed in the telling of this
anecdote: his modesty coupled with the pride and honor he felt at being
singled out by Brahms. This recognition would remain for him an impor-
tant support throughout his life and became a source of validation in the
opinion of others, such as critics Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann, w h o reported
Brahms's approval in an article in Der Merker in 1910, and Paul Stefan,
w h o i n 1 9 3 2 m e n t i o n e d Z e m l i n s k y a n d B r a h m s i n an article in Anbruch,36
Simrock not only published Zemlinsky's Trio in D minor for clarinet, cello,
and piano but also his String Quartet no. 1 in A major, op. 4, and the
Walzer-Gesdnge for voice and piano, op. 6. (After 1914, Universal Edition
fUE] became Zemlinsky's publisher.) 3 7 Brahms also assisted Zemlinsky in
1895, when he applied to the Kiinstlerhilfe des k.k. Ministeriums fur Kultur
und Unterricht for a grant to complete the score of his opera Sarema. The
report of Brahms and critic Eduard Hanslick listed some of Zemlinsky's
accomplishments, noting that they reflected his "beautiful talent" and im-
pressive musical skills, and ranked him first among the four contenders. 3 8
Getting Started 23
Brahms appears to have heard several of Zemlinsky's early works. O n

18 M a r c h 1895, Zemlinsky's Orchester Suite: Legende, Reigen und Hu-
moreske was premiered on a concert that included Brahms's Academic
Overture under Brahms's direction. Brahms was also present at a chamber
music concert in January 1896 in which his own String Quartet in B-flat
major, op. 67, was performed by the Fitzner Quartet, and Zemlinsky pre-
miered his Suite in A major for violin and piano with violinist Rudolf
Fitzner. 39 After Brahms's death in 1897, Zemlinsky dedicated his cantata
Fruhlingsbegrdbnis for soprano, baritone solos, chorus, and orchestra to
the memory of his idol. Scholar Alfred Clayton emphasizes the link between
Brahms and the second Viennese School through Zemlinsky, and it also
seems quite natural that Brahms, a friend of Zemlinsky's teachers and a
musical giant in Vienna, would exert such an important influence on Zem-
linsky in his early years.
In 1893, Zemlinsky had joined the Wiener Tonkiinstlerverein (The Vi-
ennese Musician's Society), founded in 1884 by his piano teacher Anton
Door and pianist Julius Epstein, with Brahms as its honorary president.
Zemlinsky was active as a pianist, accompanist, and conductor for the
Society, which premiered a number of his works including his Quartet for
piano, violin, viola, and cello, his suite for violin and piano, and his prize-
winning Symphony in B-flat major.40 In 1896, Zemlinsky won t hird prize
in a Society competition sponsored by Brahms, and it was at this time
Brahms recommended that Simrock publish Zemlinsky's Trio in D minor
for clarinet, cello, and piano. Alfred Clayton notes that this w o r k shows
the imprint of Brahms, who wrote his own Trio in A minor and his Q uintet
in B minor for clarinet and string quartet in 1891 for the famous clarinetist
Richard Miihlfeld. 41 Zemlinsky became a committee member of the Society
in 1897 and was successful in promoting Schoenberg's String Quartet in D
major for a private performance in March 1898. Three of Zemlinsky's
songs were also included on this program: "Empfangnis," "Altdeutsches
Minnelied," and "Der T r a u m " from his op. 2. 4 2 Although Zemlinsky be-
came vice-president of the society in 1899, he was unable to convince its
members to perform Schoenberg's Verkldrte Nacht. After Zemlinsky joined
the Ansorge Society in November 1903, his name disappeared from the
Tonkiinstlerverein's membership list. 43
M a n y of Zemlinsky's earliest works were written for piano or piano and
voice, and his first publications reflect these interests: op. 1, "Landliche
T a n z e " for piano (Breitkopf und Hartel, ca. 1891), "Skizze" for piano,
published in a supplement of Neue Musikalische Presse on 4 October 1896
(no. 40), and op. 2, Lieder fur eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte (W. Hansen,
1897). During the decade of the 1890s, Zemlinsky wrote more than sixty
songs; although he would continue to write songs throughout his compo-
sitional life, Zemlinsky, in spite of his talent as an excellent pianist, only
published one other solo piano work, Fantasien uber Gedichte von Dehmel,
op. 9. By 1898, he had also published the Trio, op. 3, as well as a String
Quartet no. 1, op. 4 in A major, and the songs of his op. 5 and op. 6. He
did not, however, neglect other areas of compositional interest in these
early yearsbesides several choral works, he also composed Symphony in
E minor (1891, incomplete, only movements III and IV exist), Symphony
in D minor (1892-1893), and Symphony in B-flat major (1897).
In 1895, Zemlinsky became director of the newly formed Polyhymnia,
an amateur orchestra made up mainly of students and amateur musicians.44
Polyhymnia rehearsed most of the time in hotels and restaurants and was
the vehicle that introduced Zemlinsky to Arnold Schoenberg, who played
cello in the orchestra. For Polyhymnia's first concert of 2 March 1896,
Zemlinsky conducted his own ballade, "Waldesgesprach" for soprano,
string orchestra, two horns, and harp, with soprano Melanie Guttmann, as
well as Schoenberg's "Notturno" for string orchestra and solo violin. Zem-
linsky and Schoenberg formed an intense friendship that permeated every
facet of their lives. The two young men often haunted the local coffeehouses
together, especially the popular Cafe Griensteidl and the Cafe Landtmann,
where they met other artists and intellectuals. Schoenberg's cousin Hans
Nachod recounted in 1952: "They are nearly all dead now. . . . Zemlinsky,
Bodanzky, Edmund Eisler, Pieau, Carl Weigh . . . They were rebels . . . un-
conventional in the conventional surroundings of the old traditional Vi-
enna. They met in the old Cafe Griensteidl or in the Winterbierhaus. Every
night they discussed their problems night after night until dawn going home
intoxicated."4^
Zemlinsky's first opera Sarema was premiered by the Munich Opera on
10 October 1897, four days before his twenty-sixth birthday. The Neue
Musikalische Presse, in a report of 17 October 1897, quoted a review from
the Miinchener Neueste Nachrichten in which the young composer was
commended for his "natural, theatrical sensibility" and his "fresh, well
developed sense for melody." Zemlinsky was praised for his "modern, col-
orful harmonizations and orchestration that almost always take into con-
sideration the predominance of the human voice." The reviewer, Oskar
Merz, noted that Zemlinsky showed a "surprising confidence in the han-
dling of vocal and instrumental groups. All in all, Zemlinsky's Sarema is a
most promising, youthful work." 46 The success of this opera brought Zem-
linsky to the attention of Gustav Mahler.
On 22 January 1900, Zemlinsky's next opera, Es war einmal, was pre-
miered at the Court Opera with Gustav Mahler conducting. Mahler his-
torian Henry-Louis de La Grange states that when Mahler looked at
Zemlinsky's opera, he found Es war einmal "terribly simplified and flat,"
but at the same time he was reminded of his own early opera Riibezahl
and decided to work with the young composer.47 Alma Mahler related later
that Mahler "produced the work with loving care, personally revising the
libretto and the music. Zemlinsky was big enough to admit the debt." 48 Es
Getting Started 25
war einmal, adapted by Maximilian Singer from a Danish play by Holger

Drachmann, was a genuine success, receiving twelve performances at the
Court Opera that season, and "Mahler was delighted to have discovered a
new creative talent." 49
Both Brahms and Mahler advised Zemlinsky at formative stages in his
career and clearly left their mark on his style. In 1912, Zemlinsky would
write to Alma Mahler that "you could mention particular advantages that
I have: for example, that I am half a student of Brahms and a total student
of Mahler." 50 Mahler influenced many other young musicians who came
under his spell, such as Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and Bruno Walter. His
splendid Mozart productions, his willingness to coordinate his conducting
with innovative staging and sets, and his promotion of Bedfich Smetana's
works would all find echoes in Zemlinsky's later career.
Not all of Zemlinsky's undertakings were supported by Mahler. In 1901,
Zemlinsky collaborated with Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) on a
three-act ballet, Der Triumph der Zeit (The Triumph of Time), which Hof-
mannsthal had first offered to Richard Strauss. Hofmannsthal and Zemlin-
sky hoped to interest Mahler in producing the work, and so the libretto
was sent to Mahler for his opinion. Hofmannsthal reported to Zemlinsky
that not only did Mahler not like the libretto but appeared to lack an
appreciation for ballet as an art form. Mahler, however, promised not to
make a final decision until he saw Zemlinsky's music.51 But after Zemlinsky
submitted Das gldserne Herz (The Glass Heart), music for the first act of
Der Triumph der Zeit, Mahler rejected it. Not until 18 February 1903 was
any music from Der Triumph der Zeit performed, when Zemlinsky himself
conducted an orchestral suite from the ballet (Drei Ballettstucke) for the
Vienna Concert Society. In a letter to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky mentioned
that Mahler and his wife (rather an interesting way for Zemlinsky to refer
to his former sweetheart) were at the concert. Zemlinsky noted that Mahler
had applauded vigorously.52 Ein Tanzpoem, that is, revised material from
the second act of Der Triumph der Zeit, was completed in 1904 but not
performed until 1992. In 1912, Zemlinsky wrote to Hofmannsthal several
times, hoping to work with him again. But by now, Hofmannsthal and
Strauss had achieved great renown with Elektra (1906-1908) and Der Ro-
senkavalier (1909-1910) and were then working on Ariadne auf Naxos.
Hofmannsthal had found his ideal collaborator and was not interested in
a partnership with anyone else.53
Although Zemlinsky was living in the shadow of Viennese mayor Karl
Lueger's anti-Semitic rhetoric and an anti-Semitic press that busied itself
with hateful attacks on public figures such as Mahler, Zemlinsky's primary
energies were focused on music. He, like so many artists, was not politically
engaged and did not anticipate the cataclysms that lay in the future. Bruno
Walter, in his autobiography Theme and Variations, admitted that at the
end of the nineteenth century he too was not a political person. In the
words of Max Brod, "No one with any self-esteem ever got involved in
politics. Arguments about Wagner's music, about the foundations of Ju-
daism and Christianity, about Impressionist painting and the like seemed
infinitely more important." 54
Chapter 3
The Real World
In 1900, the twenty-nine-year-old Zemlinsky accepted a position as Ka-

pellmeister at the Carltheater, a theater located in the second district of Vi-
enna specializing in operetta productions. Like many other aspiring young
conductors such as Mahler, Bodanzky, and Webern, Zemlinsky polished
his conducting skills in light repertory. At the same time, he was expected
to orchestrate some of the operettas performed at the Carlthe ater,1 which
included the popular Opernball (Opera Ball) by Richard Heuberger
(1850-1914) 2 and Eduard Gartner's Die verwunschene Prinzessin (The
Enchanted Princess).3 The Carltheater was the second most important op-
eretta theater in Vienna after the Theater an der Wien and, in addition to
its regular productions, hosted a variety of visiting ensembles. Zemlinsky
was especially impressed with the Deutsche Theater, which presented a se-
ries of modern dramas during its two-week summer residency in 1901 that
included The Power of Darkness by Tolstoy (1828-1910), Michael Kra-
mer, and Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat) by Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-
1946). 4 The Carltheater also hosted a Berlin cabaret ensemble in 1901,
The Buntes Theater or Uberbrettl, under the direction of Ernst von Wol-
zogen. Master of ceremonies Wolzogen presented a sophisticated variety
show that included satire in the form of pantomime plays, music, and po-
etry.5
The German/Austrian cabaret movement had received its initial stimulus
from Otto Julius Bierbaum's Stilpe (1897), a novel in which the main char-
acter is a cabaret star. Three years later, Bierbaum (1865-1910) published
Deutsche Chansons (German Songs), a collection of artistic, "singable po-
ems" designed to appeal to the average spectator,6 which included his po-
etry along with contributions from Dehmel, Liliencron, Karl von Levetzow,
Arno Holz, Frank Wedekind, Gustav Falke, Christian Morgenstern, and

Ernst von Wolzogen.7
Shortly after the appearance of Deutsche Chansons, Wolzogen opened
his famous Berlin cabaret, the Uberbrettl, 8 with a seating capacity of 650
people. The Uberbrettl was actually too large to create the intimate at-
mosphere of a true cabaret where the master of ceremonies and audience
could chat and exchange barbs, and the conservative political climate of
Wilhelm II's Berlin also restricted the kind of erotic, acerbic satire that
usually characterized French cabarets. 9 On opening night, Wolzogen pre-
sented Bierbaum's operetta/play Der lustige Ehemann (The Happy Bride-
groom) with music by Oscar Straus (1870-1954) and included a wedding
piece, "Ehetanzlied," that was danced by the bride and groom. Zemlinsky
soon set the text of "Ehetanzlied" to music, publishing it in his op. 10.
Bierbaum's poetry was also set by Schoenberg, Reger, Richard Strauss,
Alma Mahler, and Szymanowski. In a letter to Alma Schindler, Zemlinsky
praised Bierbaum's works and cited Stilpe and Lobetanz as being "very
brilliant." 10
Cabarets sprang up all over Vienna, which proved to be a congenial
home with its tradition of comic theater and operetta and its cafe society.11
The cabaret Nachtlicht (The Night Light) opened to great acclaim in 1906,
but when Karl Kraus, a familiar figure in its audience, criticized its pro-
grams, one of the founders, Marc Henry, angrily confronted Kraus and
knocked him unconscious.12 The cabaret became a staple in German-
speaking culture, appearing as a familiar milieu in films such as The Blue
Angel and in theater productions such as The Threepenny Opera of Bert
Brecht and Kurt Weill. Schoenberg not only wrote a number of charming
cabaret songs, but his Pierrot lunaire was influenced by his cabaret expe-
riences.
In 1901, Zemlinsky confided to Alma Schindler, "I am composing the
music to a short pantomime for the Uberbrettl on request from Wolzogen;
I already have three scenes." 13 This was his mime drama, Ein Lichtstrahl
(A Ray of Light) with text by Oskar Geller for piano and narrator. He also
wrote several other cabaret songs, two of which, "In der Sonnengasse" (In
the Sun Street) and "Herr Bombardil" (Mr. Bombardil), are published in
the collection of Posthumous Songs.14 Zemlinsky mentioned to Schindler
that he needed to finish something he had promised to the Vienna Uber-
brettl. 15 Other examples of his cabaret music, including his setting of Bier-
baum's "Julihexen" (July Witches)evidently performed at the Buntes
Theaterhave been lost.16
When Zemlinsky assumed his post at the Carltheater, he was considered
a rising young composer and a promising conductor. Personal accounts
from this period also reveal that he was witty, magnetic, and brilliantly
provocative. Austrian composer/musicologist Egon Wellesz (1885-1974)
said of Zemlinsky that he was "a musician of uncommon importance and
The Real World 29
technical perfection. . . . His conversation was highly stimulating and cyn-

ical." 1 7 Wellesz's wife Emmy Wellesz commented that despite his unattrac-
tive exterior Zemlinsky's conversation was "full of wit and charm so that
one never tired of hearing h i m a n d E. [Egon] W. [Wellesz] was always
fascinated by him." 1 8
Zemlinsky was also an estimable man. Alma Schindler once asked him
in a letter of 1901 if he considered himself "master" of his household, since
she knew he lived with his mother and sister after the death of his father
in 1900. He replied that although he could be master if he chose, he simply
preferred to be a good son. His basic decency may reflect a lack of ego and
selfish regard that has propelled many other men to great success. Zemlin-
sky related to her that outwardly his family appeared to be without
warmth, yet they would sacrifice everything for one another.
My father knew nothing else but his family. My mother now only [knows) her
children. I also love her, as I only can, so that the smallest disagreement with her
becomes a great grief to me. . . . My mother, a very shy, reserved woman, who has
more of an inner lifeI have much from hermy temper and my humor, but also
|I have) virtues from my father. My sister also is of a quiet nature, a level-headed
intelligent girl. . . . My mother is a brunette, my father was blond. My sister is
entirely blond. None of us was or is very dumb. 19
Zemlinsky's humor, frankness, lack of posturing, and skepticism enlivened

his correspondence with close friends and family. His life at this time
seemed fairly relaxed, without the hectic schedule and extreme pressure he
would soon experience. He described to Schindler a typical day in the sum-
mer of 1 9 0 1 :
Breakfast 8:30
Work, write letters until 11:30
Go for a walk in the Prater until 1:00
Then rest and read until 2:30 or 3:00
Then work until 6:00
Go to the theater or supper in the Prater20
Because of his blossoming reputation at the Carltheater, Zemlinsky was

invited to become one of the conductors for "Venice in Vienna" (Venedig
in Wien) in a series of summer concerts given in the Prater. Farces, mari-
onette theaters, and concerts with large orchestras of 120 to 150 musicians
directed by well-known conductors performed in an area of the Prater ar-
ranged to look like Venice. 21 Zemlinsky wrote to Alma Schindler that
"Venice in Vienna" was "quite congenialbut also awfully harmless." 2 2
Zemlinsky quickly became dissatisfied with the Carltheater's long sea-
sons, popular offerings, and constant repetition of productions. Das susse
Mddel of Heinrich Reinhardt (1865-1922) and Franz Lehar's (1870-1948)
Der Rastelbinder, for example, both received m ore than 100 successive
performances. In a letter to his mother, Zemlinsky complained that Das
siisse Mddel was "sadly" a great success.23 In 1902, Zemlinsky made plans
to move from the Carltheater to the Theater an der Wien. As he told his
friend Schoenberg in a letter of 24 June 1902, at the Theater an der Wien,
the pay was better, the repertoire was better (they performed more chal-
lenging works such as the Tales of Hoffmann), the singers were better, and
he had more opportunity to choose the novelties performed.24 Unfortu-
nately, the Carltheater, unwilling to release Zemlinsky from his contract,
sued him. He lost the lawsuit and was forced to remain there another
year.25 During this same period, he made plans to write a new opera26 and
began work on a symphonic poem based on a fairy tale by H a n s Christian
Andersen.
The Theater an der Wien was finally able to engage Zemlinsky for their
1 9 0 3 - 1 9 0 4 season, which represented a modest step up for the young con-
ductor. 2 7 Located in the sixth district of Vienna in Mariahilf on Magdalen-
strasse (now Linke Wienzeile), it was built between 1798 and 1801 by
Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart's friend and librettist for his Die Zauberflote
(The Magic Flute), and was the venue for Beethoven's premiere of Fidelio
in 1805 as well as Johann Str auss II's premieres of Die Fledermaus and
Der Zigeunerbaron.
In November 1 9 0 3 , Zemlinsky became a charter member of the Ansorge
Verein, a society formed to promote literature and music, named in honor
of the pianist/composer/former Liszt student Conrad Ansorge ( 1 8 6 2 - 1 9 3 0 ) .
Reflecting on the Ansorge Society ten years later, Paul Stefan ( 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 4 3 ) ,
a founding member, commented that the name of the organization meant
very little "because Ansorge was so little known; but, at the same time, the
name was important as a symbol for all the strugglers, the scorned, the
suppressed. . . . fits purpose was] to cultivate all great art, old or new." 2 8
The Ansorge Society usually focused its programs on one poet or composer,
and on 6 March 1904, it devoted an entire evening to the works of Richard
Dehmel in Vienna's Bosendorfer Hall. His poems, set to music by Zemlin-
sky, Pfitzner, Vrieslander, Ansorge, Strauss, and others, were sung by so-
p r a n o Marie Gutheil-Schoder with Zemlinsky at the piano, and Stefan
recounted the awe with which he witnessed Dehmel conquer an audience
that included such luminaries as Mahler, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler. 29
O n 11 February 1904, songs from Schoenberg's op. 2 ("Schenk mir deinen
goldenen K a m m " and " E r w a r t u n g " on poetry by Dehmel) and op. 3
("Hochzeitslied," on a poem by Jacobsen) had been premiered, again with
Zemlinsky at the piano accompanying tenor Walter Pieau. T w o evenings
of the Society were devoted to the beloved poet Detlev von Liliencron and
included Zemlinsky's setting of "Tiefe Sehnsucht" (Deep Longing) and
"Schmetterlinge" (Butterflies), both sung by mezzo soprano Marie Gutheil-
Schoder. This was surely one of the Ansorge Society's most popular pro-
The Real World 31
grams, since people fought to get in the door of the Bosendorfer Hall and
hundreds were turned away.30
During this same period, both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were engaged
by Universal Edition as arrangers,31 and in 1904, Zemlinsky and Schoen-
berg were also employed to teach at the Schwarzwald School, a progressive
school for young women in Vienna, founded by the feminist Dr. Eugenie
Schwarzwald.32 Schwarzwald offered an excellent education that prepared
young women for entry into the university (a few young men such as Ru-
dolph Serkin and Rudolph Kolish were also allowed to study at her school)
and also introduced her students to the most creative members of Viennese
society. "Her house was a centre of intellectual and artistic life, a meeting
place for cultural and political figures from Austria and elsewhere."33
(Schoenberg again taught at the Schwarzwald School between 1918 and
1920.)
While working on a new opera, Der Traumgorge (Gorge, the Dreamer),
Zemlinsky was engaged by Rainer Simons to conduct at the new Vienna
Volksoper, where he made his debut on 15 September 1904 with Der Freis-
chutz (The Free-Shooter). Built in 1898 to honor Franz Joseph's fifty years
as ruler of the empire, the Vienna Volksoper began its first years of exis-
tence as a theater (Stadttheater) for the performance of drama and comedy.
But in 1903 it became a people's opera house, offering inexpensive tickets
and a lively bill of fare.34 In many ways, the Volksoper could be more
imaginative and progressive than the Court Opera, which was restricted by
censors, critics, and conservative audiences. Although the Volksoper pre-
sented operettas such as Undine, Zar und Zimmermann, and Margarethe,35
it also performed operas such as Gounod's Faust, Rossini's Barber of Se-
ville, and Verdi's Otello.36 In 1906, Zemlinsky conducted several Moz art
operasThe Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni37
and began his lifelong relationship with this great Viennese predecessor.
Zemlinsky would become one of his era's most distinguished conductors
of Mozart. He also began to establish his reputation as a champion of
contemporary music but was primarily responsible for conducting standard
repertoire, including Tannhduser and Carmen?* Zemlinsky quickly discov-
ered that his new position allowed him little time to compose; he confided
to Alma Mahler that he was "more slave than artist." 39
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were soon discontented with the Ansorge So-
ciety, which was unable to present large-scale musical works and did not
emphasize music as much as they wished.40 So they and seventeen other
musicians on 23 April 1904 founded the "Vereinigung schaffender Ton-
kiinstler in Wien" (Society of Creative Musicians in Vienna) in order to
nurture the works of contemporary musicians.41 The Neue Musikalische
Presse called this new organization the "Secessionist" society for music,42
and like the Secessionists, the society published a manifesto that proclaimed
its intention of promoting new musical works while also cultivating sym-
pathetic audiences.43 Zemlinsky was named president, Schoenberg was

vice-president, and Gustav Mahler was asked to be the new society's
honorary president. Mahler not only accepted, expressing his "complete
sympathy for your goals," 44 but willingly agreed to conduct some of the
Society's programs, one of which would be an all-Mahler program.
In the Society's first concert on 23 November 1904, Mahler conducted
the Viennese premiere of Strauss's Symphonia domestica, while Zemlinsky
conducted three orchestral songs by Hermann Bischoff. In anticipation of
the all-Mahler lieder concert, Mahler completed the Kindertotenlieder,
which he had begun in 1901 but then left unfinished.45 The 29 January
1905 concert included not only the Kindertotenlieder but also four other
Riickert lieder and four songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, performed
by soloists from the Court Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic. The pro-
gram was an outstanding success46 but precipitated the demise of the So-
ciety because of Mahler's multiple, costly rehearsals, which ticket sales
could not cover. Four song recitals were presented during the Society's only
season, the final occurring on 11 March 1905. 47 Just two days before the
Mahler concert, on 25 January 1905, the Society had programmed Schoen-
berg's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande and Zemlinsky's Die Seejung-
frau. Critic Max Vancsa, reporting on this concert for the Neue Musikalische
Presse, declared that "the hopes of Jung Wiens rest on Alexander von Zem-
linsky and Arnold Schonberg." In fact, Zemlinsky was seen by many as "the
most talented successor of the Brahms generation." 48 But Alma Mahler, after
attending a rehearsal of Pelleas und Melisande and Die Seejungfrau, com-
mented in her autobiography that while she admired Schoenberg's music, she
was annoyed with Zemlinsky's constant use of sequences, enharmonic
changes . . . chromaticism . . . [and declared that his music made] no impres-
sion." She found his music as "chinless" as the man. 49
The efforts of the Society of Creative Musicians to promote contempo-
rary music with high-quality performances and varied compositional styles
provided an important model for Schoenberg's later Verein fur musikali-
sche Privatauffiihrungen (Society for Private Musical Performances).50 In
this first foray into public education, Schoenberg learned that he could not
control the critics who attended these events and that the public itself was
not always willing to give new music a fair hearing. Both of these issues
would be addressed in 1918.
In 1907, Zemlinsky married Ida Guttmann, the sister of his former fi-
ancee, Melanie Guttmann, who had emigrated to the United States in Au-
gust 1901. Although the Zemlinskys remained married until Ida
Zemlinsky's death in 1929, little is known about her. Zemlinsky often in-
cluded her greetings in letters to Schoenberg and his family but otherwise
said little about his wife. The Zemlinskys had one child, Johanna, nick-
named "Hansi" (1908-1972), for whom Schoenberg, "Hansi's" uncle,
The Real World 33
wrote a duet, "Schlaf, mein Piippchen" (Sleep, My Little Doll). This sweet
little song, sung by "Father" and "Mother," is now housed in the Library
of Congress's Zemlinsky Archive with the dedication to "My beloved little
niece Hansi" in the handwriting of Arnold Schoenberg.51 Zemlinsky also
wrote a song for his little daughter with voice and tambourine, "Der chi-
nesische Hund, oder der englische Apfelstrudel" (The Chinese Dog, or the
English Apple Strudel), inscribed with the words "Der Papa componiert." 52
In 1907, Mahler recommended that the powerful Viennese critic Julius
Korngold (1860-1945) have his brilliant child Erich Wolfgang Korngold
(1897-1957) study with Zemlinsky. These studies began in the following
year and were later recalled by Erich Korngold in a 1921 tribute to Zem-
linsky in the Prague journal Der Auftakt:
I was eleven years old at the time and had been the counterpoint student of Pro-
fessor Robert Fuchs for more than two years. . . . Zemlinsky's instruction came
freely and informally on this or that question of composition, phrasing, or form
and above all playing the piano, which I had until then neglected. . . .
My young fantasy soon stood under the fascinating spell of this teacherwith
his fabulous musicality, with the originality of his views and convictions, the casual
irony in his communication and advice, the unconditional authority that radiated
from himand made me belong to him with my whole heart. When I started to
study with Zemlinsky, I had already composed, among other works, Schneemann
for piano. . . .
Decisive for my total development . . . was Zemlinsky's strict logic in harmony,
with total freedom and boldness in the formation of chords, seeking out distant
relationships and connections between sounds, in which Zemlinsky developed his
own technique of "delayed resolution." Zemlinsky's basic principle [was that] one
voice part moved naturally and consistently, which permitted freedom in the other
voices; he was particularly strict in insisting on the logical leading of the bass. . . .
I later realized, he was going through a kind of artistic crisis of self-assertion against
the new and seductive, radical theories of his brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg,
whom he glorified; it was basically impossible for Zemlinsky to suppress his true
tonal feeling. A particular chord "drew him" as he used to say with relishdrew
him from one note to another. . . .
After about a year and a half, Zemlinsky began to instruct me in orchestration.
He dwelled only a short time on a general introduction about the character and
limitations of instruments; he immediately let me "jump into the water," whereby
he assigned me to orchestrate Schubert songs and Beethoven piano movements. . . .
In April 1910, my Schneemann was performed in a charity soiree at the home of
the Minister-president with me at the piano . . . [and] on the basis of a remark from
the old Kaiser . . . it was to be performed on 4 October 1910 . . . at the Vienna
Court Opera. On the request of Universal Edition, Zemlinsky assumed the task of
the instrumentation, part of which was undertaken by him during our lessons, so
that I now had the best opportunity to see him with a practical task. . . . Zemlinsky
left Vienna to take up a position in Prague, which was to become so important to
the musical life there. Thus, scarcely 13 years old, I lost all too soon the . . . beloved
teacher. . . . During my summer vacation in 1911, I ventured to orchestrate my
Schauspiel Ouverture, op. 4.
. . . When Zemlinsky invited me to come to Prague for a performance of this
overture under his direction . . . he asked, "Now tell me truly Erich, have you really
orchestrated that yourself?"which was certainly flattery for the orchestra student
after scarcely a half year of orchestrationbut perhaps a greater triumph for Zem-
linsky as a teacher!
. . . [II complain even today that Zemlinsky was taken from me because of his
call to Prague after such a short period of instruction! I had lost the ideal teacher,
the most enthralling musical inspiration. . . . But also Vienna had lost one of its
strongest musicians.53
Korngold highlights a number of Zemlinsky's splendid qualities: his won-

derful musicality, his wit and irony, his gift as a teacher, his willingness to
promote his student's work, the depth of his musical knowledge, and his
effort to maintain his own voice at a time when his closest colleagues were
rejecting tonality. Zemlinsky continually promoted Korngold's music, per-
forming his Sinfonietta in 1915, his operas Violanta and Ring des Poly-
krates in 1917, and Die tote Stadt in 1922. 5 4
Mahler continued to show his high opinion of Zemlinsky by engaging
him as Kapellmeister at the Vienna Court Opera for the 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 0 8 season
and also made plans to premiere Zemlinsky's new opera Der Traumgorge
there. Unfortunately for both men, Mahler, w h o had been under constant
attack for years, was forced to resign. He accepted a position as conductor
at the Metropolitan Opera in N e w York, and Zemlinsky was left in a
politically impossible situation. He made his debut at the Vienna Court
Opera conducting Verdi's Otello, later remembered by critic Rudolf Stefan
Hoffmann as a beautiful performance,55 but Mahler's successor, Felix von
Weingartner, refused to perform Zemlinsky's opera Der Traumgorge, al-
though it was already in rehearsal. Der Traumgorge, now considered one
of Zemlinsky's finest operas, was never performed during his lifetime. Zem-
linsky felt compelled (or was asked) to resign, and on 8 February 1908, he
requested a leave of absence from the Court Opera, offering the face-saving
excuse that he was needed as a conductor at the Volksoper. Weingartner
quickly granted his petition.56 Zemlinsky wrote to Mahler, telling him of
these disasters, and Mahler replied: "Sadly, the information about your
adventure with the new regime was not unexpected. In spite of this, I would
not have thought that W[eingartner] would simply ignore his promise, be-
fore all others, to bring out your opera. This is fatal for you, as I can easily
imagine." 5 7
Despite his great humiliation at the hands of Weingartner, Zemlinsky
submitted his next opera, Kleider machen Leute, to Weingartner with the
request that it be performed by the Court Opera. Weingartner returned the
score with a polite refusal.58 (In September 1916, Zemlinsky would perform
The Real World 35
Weingartner's Kain und Abel at the N e w German Theater with Weingart-

ner in the audienceyet another manifestation of Zemlinsky's inscrutable
personality.)
Zemlinsky returned to the Volksoper and remained there until 1 9 1 1 ,
presenting the first German-language performance of Paul Dukas's Ariane
et Barbe-bleue (1908Ariane und Blaubart [Ariane and Bluebeard]) and
his own Kleider machen Leute (Clothes M a k e the M a n ) , produced in 1910.
(Zemlinsky revised Kleider machen Leute between 1921 and 1922.) 5 9 Un-
constrained by the puritanical rules that prevented the performances of
sexually exotic operas at the Vienna Court Opera, Zemlinsky also per-
formed Strauss's Salome at the Volksoper in 1910; not until after World
War I in 1918 was Salome produced at the Court Opera , now called the
State Opera.
During this period, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg became friends with a
young medical student and writer, Marie Pappenheim, whose name begins
to appear on a regular basis in their correspondence. Her literary artistry
was valued by both men, but she was also a loyal friend w h o was present
for many of their most important musical occasions, including the Prague
premiere of Zemlinsky's opera Florentine Tragedy60 and the Vienna pre-
miere of Der Zwerg. She wrote the libretto for Schoenberg's Erwartung as
well as an opera libretto for Zemlinsky that was never set to music. 6 1
O n 10 December 1910, Franz Schreker, with his recently formed Phil-
harmonic Choir, 6 2 premiered Zemlinsky's newly composed Psalm 23, op.
14 for chorus and orchestra. Zemlinsky also completed four of his six great
Maeterlinck songs, op. 13, and premiered them in December as well. In
the midst of his many activities of 1910, Zemlinsky was asked to join the
program committee of the prestigious Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein
(ADMV), a society devoted to the promotion of contemporary German
music. 6 3 Franz Liszt had been one of the A D M V ' s founders in 1860, and
it attracted many famous members in the early twentieth century including
Richard Strauss and later Alban Berg. Zemlinsky spent many hours ex-
amining and choosing challenging contemporary works for performance,
only to be obstructed by the rest of the selection committee, which wanted
to settle on pleasant, "safe" music instead of more avant-garde works by
composers such as Schoenberg. 6 4 Berg, w h o joined the committee eighteen
years later, was able to convince the A D M V to perform Schoenberg's Die
gliickliche Hand on 3 July 1929, but he too was often frustrated by the
selection process. In 1933, the Nazis forced Berg to resign from the A D M V ,
charging that his music was unacceptable to their regime. 6 5 They began to
eliminate Jews and progressives from control of the organization and from
the programs of its annual music festivals and, at the same time, promoted
the works of Nazi loyalists, most of w h o m were indifferent musicians. 6 6
In the summers of 1 9 1 1 , 1912, and 1 9 1 3 , Zemlinsky directed operettas
at the Kunstlertheater in Munich, where he worked with the innovative
stage director Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt's move away from naturalism to

more abstract settings and symbolic presentations of figures was, in the
view of scholar Suzanne Rode-Breymann, later reflected in Zemlinsky's A
Florentine Tragedy.67 Zemlinsky conducted works such as Die Schone He-
lena (The Beautiful Helena) by Jacques Offenbach, The Mikado by Arthur
Sullivan, and Orpheus in der Unterwelt (Orpheus in the Underworld) by
Offenbach.68 His experiences working with Reinhardt contributed to his
extraordinary knowledge about all aspects of opera production, and he
would later bring some of the progressive artists who worked on these
productions to Prague.69
Mahler's death in May 1911 was a great blow to both Zemlinsky and
Schoenberg. Zemlinsky, already a devoted follower of Mahler, would be-
come an expert and tireless champion of his music, while Schoenberg not
only dedicated his Harmonielehre to Mahler but, in March 1912, delivered
a loving lecture on Mahler in Prague that he later presented in Berlin,
Stettin, Vienna, and other cities. Mahler's music gradually became a staple
of the concert world until 1933, when the Nazis came to power and his
works were forbidden.70
Chapter 4
Prague
Prague was on a different planet from Vienna or Berlin.

Ernst Pawel1
Walking along the interesting old streets, past the baroque facades,
through the Powder Tower, up to the Hradschin, and across the Mol-
dau bridges, I became deeply attached to the strangely imposing,
gloomily romantic . . . town.
Bruno Walter2
In 1 9 1 1 , Zemlinsky was appointed conductor of the German Theater in

Prague. He had been preceded there by many illustrious conductors such
as Gustav Mahler, Artur Bodanzky, Carl Muck, and O t t o Klemperer, all
of w h o m moved quickly to more prestigious positions. 3
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Prague was
made up of nearly 500,000 Czechs, 10,000 Germans, and 25,000 Jews,
14,000 of w h o m spoke Czech and 11,000 w h o spoke German as their
native language. 4 Both Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Franz Werfel ( 1 8 9 0 -
1945) were born into this German Jewish community, which would be
annihilated by Hitler in World W a r II. There was little incentive among
Jews of Prague to assimilate by converting to Christianity since the nation-
alistic Czech population saw even the Czech-speaking Jews as German, and
the German population saw all Jews as alien. 5
When Zemlinsky arrived in Prague, he found a "coffeehouse culture"
similar to the one he had left in Vienna. "For the modest price of a cup of
coffee," a customer could browse through a variety of newspapers, conduct
business, discuss politics, and meet friends. 6 One of the famous literary
cafes, the Cafe Arco, became the gathering place for well-known artistic
and literary figures such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Franz Kafka as
well as neutral territory in which their Czech counterparts could also con-
gregate.7 Prague, like Vienna, had its share of prostitution and an extremely
high number of children born to unmarried mothers: "44 percent of the
total births in 1912" were illegitimate.8 Although Prague was a vital part
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Zemlinsky arrived, it abruptly de-
clined in importance to the German-speaking world after World War I,
when it became the capital of an independent Czechoslovakian nation.
The German-speaking population of Prague had a long tradition of
strong cultural life, and more than 100 years earlier, Mozart had premiered
his opera Don Giovanni there in 1787. Zemlinsky would eventually estab-
lish Prague as a center for the performance of some of the great contem-
porary works of his era. During his tenure there, he conducted works by
Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Webern, Ravel, Richard Strauss,
Hindemith, Krenek, Schreker, Dukas, Busoni, Korngold, and Puccini.
Prague had two German theaters: the beautiful Konigliches Deutsches Lan-
destheater, built by Count Nostitz in 1783the theater where Mozart di-
rected his Marriage of Figaro in 1786 and his Prague Symphony in D major
in 1787 and premiered Don Giovanni on 29 October 1787 and La Clem-
menza di Tito on 6 September 1791and the Neues Deutsches Theater
(New German Theater), inaugurated on 5 January 1888 with a perform-
ance of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
Czech theater life centered around the Czech National Theater, which
opened in 1883 after fire destroyed a newly constructed Czech National
Theater in 1881. A sharp division between Czechs and Germans was ap-
parent, not just in their autonomous opera houses but throughout all of
Prague's major institutions. The university, for example, had separated into
Czech and German faculties in 1882, and although both groups held classes
in the same buildings,9 they were bitterly divided in spirit.
Considerable artistic rivalry existed between the Czech and German mu-
sical populations, as exemplified by performances of Tristan und Isolde on
the same night in 1913 and the premiere of Wagner's Parsifal in both
theaters, sung in Czech and German on 1 January 1914. The 1 January
date marked the end of a thirty-year prohibition on the performance of
Parsifal outside of Bayreuth, and Zemlinsky joked that he had actually
performed Parsifal before the Czech National Theater since his production
began at 4 P.M. and theirs started at 5 P.M.10 Zemlinsky, who loved Wag-
ner's music, called this event the greatest "of the season, the year, the cen-
tury." 11 Tancsik notes that of the 138 operas performed at the German
Theater during Zemlinsky's tenure in Prague, 29 were Italian, 19 French,
3 Czech, 2 Hungarian, 1 Russian, and 84 German; the Czech National
Theater presented 71 different operas "of which 32 were Czech, 12 Italian,
11 French, 10 German, and 6 Russian." 12
Prague 39
After he assumed his post in Prague, Zemlinsky immediately inaugurated

more efficient rehearsals, insisted on artistic sets instead of the generic back-
drops that had been used from one opera to the next, and achieved excel-
lence at all levels of his productions. Although Zemlinsky worked with only
average musicians during most of his time in Prague, he was able to achieve
amazing results.13 With characteristic energy, he performed Tannhduser,
Der Freischiitz, Die Walkure, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro,
Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg in his
first season,14 opening with Beethoven's Fidelio on 24 September 1911.
(The operas of Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and Richard Strauss would be
the foundation of his repertoire during his years in Prague.) The Czech
critic/musicologist Zdenek Nejedly soon exclaimed, "A Kapellmeister who
works. In our theater [the Czech National Theater], instead of work we
only get complaining." 15
Zemlinsky's duties also obligated him to conduct orchestral concerts for
the Philharmonic Concert series. He made his debut on 23 November 1911
conducting Schubert's Symphony, no. 8 in B minor (Unfinished), Brahms's
Piano Concerto, no. 1 in D minor with Paul Goldschmidt, and Beethoven's
Symphony, no. 5 in C minor. 16 Although he began his tenure with tradi-
tional orchestral repertoire, 17 he was later able to present the works of
modern composers, including those of Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern,
Stravinsky, and Bartok. Even in 1912, he performed Richard Strauss's Sym-
phonia domestica, op. 53, and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 in E-flat
major.18 (At the opera, Zemlinsky also performed Strauss's Ariadne auf
Naxos on 7 December 1912, less than two months after its premiere in
Stuttgart.) Zemlinsky did not hesitate to tackle other massive orchestral
works and even managed to perform Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony,
op. 64, in 1916, while World War I was raging, resources were scarce, and
orchestra players were in short supply. His workhorse mentality also al-
lowed him to accept guest conducting appearances in Germany, Spain, and
Italy during his years in Prague. He, like Mahler before him, was forced to
do most of his composing during summer holidays. In 1912, he wrote to
Schoenberg: "In the summer I will absolutely take no engagements, but will
compose somewhere, really secluded."19 But his duties as conductor were
so strenuous as to leave little time for composing. In a letter of 1913, he
mentioned part of his grueling schedule to Schoenberg, who had been
hounding him for the completed score of the Maeterlinck songs: a perform-
ance of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos on Monday, Wagner's Rheingold on
Wednesday, Siegfried on Friday, and Gotterddmmerung on Sunday, and
on the days in between he had to polish these works.
Arnost Mahler, who lived in Prague during the "Zemlinsky Era," pointed
out that Zemlinsky's Prague premiere of Mahler's Symphony no. 8, the
"Symphony of a Thousand," was one of the high points in the musical life
there.20 But this concert in March 1912 was for Zemlinsky a rude intro-
duction to Prague. The Prague Aryan Choir, scheduled to sing with the
Philharmonic, decided it would not perform the w o r k of the Jewish com-
poserMahler, under a Jewish conductorZemlinskyin an opera house
run by a Jewish directorHeinrich Teweles ( 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 8 ) . But Zemlinsky
refused to be defeated. He enlisted the aid of his friend Franz Schreker,
conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Choir, w h o brought his chorus of
110 singers to Prague just t w o days before the concert. Although the un-
sympathetic government ministry would not grant cheaper fares to choir
members traveling from Vienna to Prague, the German-speaking members
of the Prague public opened their homes to choir members during their stay
there, and the concerts were a gigantic success. Performances for 28 and
29 March were sold out and received overwhelming ovations. 2 1
Zemlinsky also had to face other nationalistic prejudices from his
German colleagues during his first year in Prague. Cellist Pablo Casals,
engaged to perform with the N e w German Theater Orchestra on 29 Feb-
ruary of 1912, wished to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto, but Heinrich Tew-
eles, director of the German Theater, would not permit the performance of
the work by a Czech composer. 2 2 Casals was forced to change his choice
to cello concertos by H a y d n and Saint-Saens. N o t until the Austrian/
German alliance was defeated in World W a r I would the Czechs control
their own country. Zemlinsky then began to perform Czech music on a
regular basis.
Zemlinsky was continually promoting Schoenberg, inviting him to con-
duct his Pelleas und Melisande and Mahler's arrangement of Bach's Or-
chestral Suite, no. 2 in D major, on the same concert with Casals. O n 29
January 1914 in a Philharmonic concert, Zemlinsky performed three songs
from Schoenberg's op. 8 and invited Schoenberg to present Pierrot lunaire
on 24 February 1914. But Prague was not ready for Pierrot, and the
"greatest concert scandal" Prague had ever witnessed occurred in the Ru-
dolphinum Hall. Schoenberg, the speaker Albertine Zehme, and the instru-
mental ensemble were derided with hissing, shouting, coughing, whistles,
and general pandemonium.23 Zemlinsky observed the uproar from the au-
dience. But he did not back away from the music of his friend and contin-
ued to present the works of Schoenberg as long as he worked in Prague.
Zemlinsky's works were still performed in Vienna, often on the same
program with the music of Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg. Berg described
a successful 29 June 1912 concert:
Zemlinsky String Quartet in A major, op. 4 (Rose Quartet)

Berg Piano Sonata, op. 1 (Richard Goldschmied, piano)
Webern Four Pieces for violin and piano (Arnold Rose, violin, Anton Webern,
piano)
Schoenberg Second String Quartet, op. 10 (Rose Quartet with Martha Winternitz-
Dorda, soprano) 24
Prague 41
Zemlinsky premiered his orchestral arrangements of four Maeterlinck songs

on the infamous scandal concert of 31 March 1913 that also included the
works of Webern, Schoenberg, Berg, and Mahler.
For many years, Zemlinsky repeatedly and patiently offered Webern mu-
sical positions in Prague, responding to Webern's requests for work, which
were often couched in the most desperate language. In 1911, Webern was
appointed Zemlinsky's personal assistant, but Webern stayed only five days
before returning to Vienna.25 Webern then moved with his family to Berlin
in order to be with Schoenberg.26 The next year, he again asked Zemlinsky
for a job. A position finally materialized for August 1913, but at the be-
ginning of August, Webern, who was undergoing psychoanalysis with the
well-known physician Dr. Alfred Adler, requested sick leave. Zemlinsky
kindly granted leave for the full season, but Webern eventually submitted
his resignation. He again asked Zemlinsky for a job in 1914, and Zemlin-
sky promised to let him know when an opening occurred. After World War
I began, Webern was inducted into the infantry in 1915. Realizing that he
could be granted a leave of absence if he had an artist's position, he asked
Zemlinsky to request him as a musical coach in Prague. Zemlinsky suc-
cessfully petitioned the military, and Webern joined him in early 1916. But
Webern now felt guilty, both for shirking his duty and because Schoenberg
had also been drafted. He secretly applied to have his leave canceled and
was promptly sent back to his post. In 1917, he again applied for a job in
Prague, and this time he lasted one season. Despite the admonitions of
family and friends, Webern resigned his Prague position and moved to
Modling on the outskirts of Vienna, a short distance from Schoenberg's
new residence. In 1920, Webern again requested and was given a position
in Prague. He wrote to Zemlinsky: "Believe me, I am fully conscious of
your tremendous patience and of your loving indulgence towards me. And
I promise that I will not disappoint you." He stayed less than two months. 27
Zemlinsky's loyalty to family and friends is evident throughout his life.
While he was conductor at the Carltheater, he helped Schoenberg support
a young wife and baby daughter by providing Schoenberg with work as
an orchestrator and arranger for the theater. 28 After he moved to Prague,
Zemlinsky hired Schoenberg's brother Heinrich, a bass-baritone, in 1913, 29
Schoenberg's cousin tenor Hans Nachod in 1915, and several of Schoen-
berg's students. In a letter of 1916, Zemlinsky wrote despondently to
Schoenberg that everybody looked on him as their uncle, but no one tried
to help him.30
Musical activities were restricted during World War I as members of
Zemlinsky's orchestra were drafted. In September 1915, he reported to
Schoenberg that the orchestra had "melted away" to thirty-nine men, and
his ability to perform large orchestral works was often limited.31 Yet Zem-
linsky managed to give Prague opera premieres of Bizet's Djamileh (1915),
Korngold's Der Ring des Polykrates (1916) and Violanta (1916), Max
Schillings's Mona Lisa (1916), Felix Weingartner's Kain und Abel (1916),
Zemlinsky's own Line florentinische Tragodie (1917), and Albert's Die to-
ten Augen (7 September 1918). Zemlinsky, because of his view of the war
from Prague, had a more realistic understanding of what was happening
than did Schoenberg. Exposed to less governmental propaganda and quite
conscious of Czech nationalism and Czech sympathies for Russian inter-
vention, Zemlinsky did not assume the war would be short nor that the
Germans would win. Many Germans in Prague felt they were in an enemy
camp. The great Czech nationalist Tomas Masaryk left Prague in 1914 and
spent the war years lobbying the Western powers for Czech independence.
By 1917, he had even convinced the Russians to equip an independent
Czechoslovakian army. When Czechoslovakia gained its independence at
the end of the war, Masaryk was elected its first president on 14 November
1918.
The brutality and suffering that occurred during World War I took a
tremendous toll on those who witnessed it. Poet Georg Trakl, sickened by
the horrors of war, "fell into despair over the slaughter at Grodek, and
killed himself with an overdose of pills." 32 But Schoenberg, like Thomas
Mann, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, Richard Dehmel, and many oth-
ers, was not only highly patriotic but confident that the German/Austrian
alliance would be victorious. Schoenberg initially believed the war would
be won with a few decisive victories. Webern's pronouncements on the war
were also confident and nationalistic. He wrote to Schoenberg in September
1914: "Day and night the wish haunts me: to be able to fight for this great,
sublime cause. . . . It is the struggle of the angels with the devils. . . . Oh,
everything will end well." 33 Many in the intellectual world like Max Brod
held totally unreal views of war: "We were a spoiled generation, spoiled
by nearly fifty years of peace that had made us lose sight of mankind's
worst scourge." 34 Karl Kraus, often the conscience of his Austrian com-
patriots, was an open and vocal opponent of the war, but his caustic writ-
ings and lectures on this subject were largely unheeded.35
In 1915, Zemlinsky mentioned his intention of performing Schoenberg's
Chamber Symphony, op. 9, but it was Schoenberg who "blinked." Refer-
ring to the poor reception Prague had given Pelleas, his orchestral songs,
and especially Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg decided to avoid controversy
while World War I was in progress. Schoenberg noted that his successes
had been in countries outside of German-speaking territory, which were
now off limits because of the war; he suggested that his more conservative
music should be performed.36
Zemlinsky decided to conduct some of Schoenberg's early compositions.
After a highly successful first Prague performance of Verkldrte Nacht in
the version for string orchestra on 29 November 1916, Zemlinsky warmly
told Schoenberg that he hoped to perform all of Schoenberg's works. 37 The
Prague premiere of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder took place in June 1921. Zem-
Prague 43
linsky wrote to Schoenberg, who had been unable to attend, that the per-
formance of this gigantic undertaking was an enormous success, generating
great enthusiasm from the orchestra, chorus, soloists, and the "conduc-
tor." 38
Zemlinsky would eventually cultivate an audience willing to "tolerate"
new music, even Pierrot lunaire, which Zemlinsky himself later con-
ducted.39 Pierrot was also performed in Prague by Schoenberg's Society for
Private Musical Performances on 25 May 1922. 40 By the 1920s, Zemlinsky
was finally able to explore a much wider operatic repertoire. In 1922, Der
Auftakt reported the Prague premieres of Strauss's Elektra (3 December
1921), Zemlinsky's Kleider machen Leute (20 April 1922), and Korngold's
Die tote Stadt (4 February 1922) at the Deutsches Theater.41 By 1925, Leo
Schleissner reported in Der Auftakt that "when Prague citizens today meet
the name Arnold Schoenberg with the respect owed to an artistic person-
ality of such imposing stature, then it is due to the service of Alexander
Zemlinsky." 42 In 1927 Zemlinsky's Prague performances included Jonny
spielt auf (16 June) by Krenek, Kurt Weill's Quodlibet (27 January), and
Hindemith's Cardillac (13 March). 43 Zemlinsky had already introduced
Prague to Hindemith's operas in 1923, when he performed three one-act
expressionist operas by a young Paul Hindemith: his Morder, Hoffnung
der Frauen on a play by the painter Kokoschka, the erotic Sancta Susanna
on a work by August Stramm, and Franz Blei's impudent Das Nusch-
Nuschi.
Zemlinsky brought the works of many progressive composers to Prague.
Schleissner reported that just shortly after Paul Hindemith had premiered
his three one-act operas in Germany, Zemlinsky performed them in Prague
with great artistic success (3 March 1923). He also presented Richard
Strauss's Intermezzo soon after its premiere in Dresden, although this was
"not exactly a triumph." 44 Zemlinsky performed Honegger's Pacific 231,
Stravinsky's Rag Time, Bloch's Schelomo, Ravel's La Valse, Milhaud's Ser-
enade, and Malipiero's Impressioni dal vero,4S but it is clear from the re-
ception of Berg's Wozzeck at the Czech Opera under Otakar Ostrcil on 11
November 1926 that, despite great support for Berg's opera from many
quarters, tremendous hostility to contemporary music still existed in
Prague.
Although he wrote some of his greatest works during his busy years in
Prague, Zemlinsky also failed to publish or even to complete many of his
compositions. His incidental music for orchestra to Shakespeare's play
Cymbeline, originally intended to be op. 14, for example, composed be-
tween 1913 and 1915, was not published during his life. (Five of the eleven
sections have been arranged as a suite for solo tenor and orchestra by
Antony Beaumont.) He did, however, successfully complete his String
Quartet, no. 2, op. 15, in 1915 and a one-act opera, Fine florentinische
Tragodie (A Florentine Tragedy), op. 16, on a play by Oscar Wilde in 1916.
A Florentine Tragedy was premiered at the Stuttgart Court Opera on 30

January 1917 and then performed in Vienna at the Court Opera on 2 7
April 1917, where it received only five performances and a lukewarm re-
ception from the press. 4 6 Arnold Schoenberg, quite familiar with the vicis-
situdes of the critics, called A Florentine Tragedy "a magnificent w o r k . " 4 7
But Alma Mahler hated the opera and broke off contact with a mystified
Zemlinsky. He wrote to ask what was wrong and told her, "And d o n ' t
you always k n o w still that I cannot show what is still buried in me!" 4 8
Schoenberg, w h o went over some of the opera with her, tried to comfort
Zemlinsky by observing that she simply had not understood the work. 4 9
When Heinrich Teweles resigned as director of the N e w German Theater
in 1918, he nominated Leopold Kramer as his successor and recommended
that Zemlinsky be promoted from first Kapellmeister to Opernchef. Yet
Zemlinsky's desire to return to Vienna persisted throughout his years in
Prague and continually surfaced in his correspondence. In a letter to Alma
Mahler (ca. 1915), Zemlinsky had confided that "my heart was always in
Vienna, and I have longed to go back there . . . but no one thinks of me,
or those w h o do say, 'Zemlinsky is very happy in Prague, has a good
position, earns enough, e t c ' " He spoke with frustration of his descending
star: "I cannot find anyone (moreover, I am not looking) w h o still believes
in me and would be happy to assert themselves for me. . . . I have become
hardened and steeled against all kinds of disappointments. But life is flow-
ing away. . . . I k n o w that I, modestly said, am not one of the worst." M )
But after World W a r I, Vienna lost some of its compelling charm. In the
peace agreement of St. Germain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 50 mil-
lion people was dismembered: 5 1 Emperor Charles I was deposed, all titles
of nobility were abolished, and Vienna, with a population of 2 million,
became the capital of a tiny country of 6 million. But its population was
now German, lending weight to arguments that favored joining with its
neighbor Germany, something forbidden by the victorious powers. The
Hungarian portion of the Dual M o n a r c h y became a separate republic, ter-
ritory was lost to the new states of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Po-
land, and land was transferred to Rumania and Italy. Austria, deprived of
much of its economic base, was nevertheless responsible for war reparations
and mired in severe economic hardship.' 2 Schoenberg complained to Zem-
linsky that he had neither food nor heat in Vienna. M o r e than 3 million
Germans were left in Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudeten Germans, and
a series of unsolved political problems prepared the way for future disaster.
The official information most Austrians received during the war was, at
best, inaccurate and unrealistic. When writer Berta Szeps-Zuckerkandl,
daughter of newspaper editor Moritz Szeps, traveled to Switzerland in Jan-
uary 1917 on her first journey outside Austria since the war began, she
was stunned to read Swiss newspaper accounts of the war: "I had not
realized with what a dreadful and monstrous tissue of lies we are sur-
Prague 45
rounded in Vienna. I understood immediately that if it goes on like this

Austria and Germany are lost." 53
After the war, many Germans began to brood over their catastrophic
defeat. Since the German High Command had assured the populace
throughout the war that they were winning, many could not understand
how they were "suddenly" defeated. They accepted the popular fiction that
the army had been betrayed by communists, republicans, and liberals.54
Composer Hans Pfitzner, caught up in the nationalist cant of the time,
raged in his Die neue Asthetic der musikalishen Impotenz (supposedly a
musical treatise): "Our hate has been directed against Ludendorff and not
Wilson. What gave the enemy his victory, which he otherwise could not
have won and played into his hands, was sympathy for the enemy . . . a
lack of love for one's own people." 55 Germany had actually been betrayed
by General Ludendorff and the High Command who, when they realized
the war was lost, cleverly foisted the surrender onto a civilian govern-
ment.56 When Thomas Mann heard rumors that the surrender of Alsace-
Lorraine was certain, he confided to his diary: "Since the papers, even the
Social Democratic ones, have said nothing to prepare anyone in Germany
for the loss of Alsace, I refused to believe it at first."57
After the war, a spirit of lawlessness reigned in Germany but especially
in Bavaria. In 1919, communists were in control there for several weeks
until the federal government stepped in. Hitler, also active in Bavaria, cul-
tivated the support of ex-soldiers and army officers, who looked to the day
when the Weimar Republic could be overthrown and the ignominious
Treaty of Versailles repudiated. Economic instability fueled the hatred of
extremist political groups on the Right and Left, who fomented violence,
anti-Semitism, and nationalistic fervor. As early as 1922, hate groups dis-
rupted the Munich premiere of Jewish composer Erich Korngold's Die tote
Stadt, which was removed from the roster after only six sold-out perform-
ances.58
Nationalistic fervor also permeated many of the musical debates about
modernism and tradition, a debate that began mildly enough with Ferruccio
Busoni's 1907 progressive Entwurf einer neuen Asthetik der Tonkunst
(Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music). In 1917, Hans Pfitzner, speaking for
the conservative side, answered with "Futuristengefahr" (The Danger of
the Futurists). Pfitzner engaged in an aggressive debate over modern music
not only with Busoni but with critic Paul Bekker, a supporter of Schoen-
berg, Hindemith, and Krenek. Bekker's book Die Sinfonie von Beethoven
bis Mahler (The Symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, 1918) was an-
swered by Pfitzner with the earlier-mentioned Die neue Asthetic der musi-
kalischen Impotenz (The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence). Pfitzner
accused modernists like Bekker of destroying the very foundation of
German music59 and declared that the nation's declining health was directly
linked to the degenerating artistic health of its music.60 "Just as the destruc-
tion of the German Reich came from ourselves, so will German art be
conquered by its own comrades." 6 1 He then drew confused parallels be-
tween Judaism and internationalism: "I say, international Judaism' but I
don't mean the Jews as individuals. There is a difference between a Jew
and Judaism. The dividing line in Germany does not separate Jew and non-
Jew, but on the contrary cuts between German national sympathy and
international sympathy. I myself k n o w a great number of Jews . . . w h o are
as honorable in their [German] sympathy as anyone could wish and w h o
fulfilled their duties in the war." 6 2 Pfitzner inspired a sympathetic outcry
from reactionary voices w h o believed that "an international Jewish con-
spiracy [Mahler and Schoenberg] . . . was bent on destroying the national
identity of German music. 6 3 Obviously, these same conservative voices op-
posed organizations such as the Society for Private Musical Performances
and the soon-to-be-formed International Society for Contemporary Music
(ISCM), an organization that would sponsor performances of Pfitzner's mu-
sic as well as works of the avant-garde.
Pfitzner's sense of German artistic superiority was reflected in his
emotional discussion of Schumann's piano piece "Traumerei" from the
Kinderszenen and his assertion that technical analysis could not reveal what
was beautiful about this "simple" piece. 64 Alban Berg responded in the
journal Musikbldtter des Anbruch (June 1920) with "Die musikalische Im-
potenz der 'neuen Asthetik' H a n s Pfitzners" (The Musical Impotence of
H a n s Pfitzner's N e w Aesthetic) and included a skillful analysis of "Trau-
merei" that revealed many subtleties of its delicate structure. He reasoned
that "if it really was impossible to produce any 'arguments' except those
of feeling then anyone would have the same right to 'enthuse into the illim-
itable' in the same tone as Pfitzner about any inspiration which he feels to
be 'beautiful,' 'genial' and 'genuine,' and one would not be able to contra-
dict him." 6 5 Berg concluded with a mocking analysis of one of Pfitzner's
own songs, using Pfitzner's nebulous musical descriptions and exclamation
" h o w beautiful that is." 6 6 After Berg's article appeared, Alma Mahler wrote
Helene Berg that Pfitzner was right: " N o t h i n g is more inexplicable than
music." 6 7
In 1920, an advertisement in Der Auftakt announced that Zemlinsky (in
addition to his conducting responsibilities) was now rector of the new
German Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Deutsche Akademie fur
Musik und darstellende Kunst) in Prague, a teacher of master classes in
composition, and head of the opera and conducting schools. The German
Academy of Music was formed after the Prague Conservatory of Music, a
German/Czech institution until 1918, was reorganized into an exclusively
Czech institution. 6 8
Because their national aspirations had been continually suppressed, the
Czechs viewed the large German minority living in Czech territory with
hostility. In November 1920, Zemlinsky wrote Schoenberg that one of his
Prague 47
theaters had been taken over. 69 O n 16 November 1920, a group of Czech

actors from the National Theater occupied the Landestheater to protest
Sudeten Germans' confiscation of Czech theaters in the Sudeten area of
Czechoslovakia. The Czech government legalized the Czech takeover, mak-
ing the Landestheater, now called the Theater of the Estates, part of the
national theater system. 70 The riots, which lasted three days, were directed
against both Germans and Jews. M o b s looted German newspaper offices,
attacked anyone they suspected of being a Jew, and burned precious He-
brew manuscripts. 7 1 Franz Kafka wrote to a friend, "I've spent all after-
noon out in the streets . . . bathing in Jew-hatred. . . . [F]ilthy broodis
what I heard them call the Jews." 7 2 Years later, Zemlinsky remembered
President Masaryk's moral and financial support for the beleaguered
German artistic community during those arduous times. 7 3
Yet in the early 1920s Zemlinsky was a respected musical figure. In an
8 June 1921 entry to his diary, Thomas M a n n recounted a recital of songs
by Zemlinsky and Debussy in his Munich home, performed by a young
Viennese singer, Gerty Rheinhardt. 7 4 Zemlinsky's picture appeared on the
front of Vienna's Musikalischer Kurier in June 1920, and his fiftieth birth-
day, which coincided with the anniversary of his tenth year in Prague, was
celebrated with a special 1921 issue of Der Auftakt.75 Zemlinsky's activities
as a composer, conductor, teacher, and founder of the Prague Academy
were honored in this special edition with contributions from distinguished
admirers including Franz Werfel, Heinrich Jalowetz, Arnold Schoenberg,
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Franz Schreker. In step with the times, Auf-
takt even included an article on "Zemlinsky from a Psychological Perspec-
tive" by Georg Klaren, the librettist for Zemlinsky's opera Der Zwerg.
In this commemorative issue of Der Auftakt, Schreker, now director of
the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, wrote that Zemlinsky "is too little ap-
preciated and has found everything but recognition." He recounted watch-
ing Zemlinsky in a rehearsal of Schreker's opera Der feme Klang: "The
way he helped the musicians forget all of the difficulties and formidable
places in the score with extreme good temper and warmhearted corrections
I experienced with true gratefulness." 7 6 Zemlinsky had given the Prague
premiere of Der feme Klang on 20 May 1920 and presented Schreker's
Der Schatzgrdber four years later.
Stage director Louis Laber, w h o worked with Zemlinsky in Prague, re-
counted Zemlinsky's gifts as a conductor, his complete absorption in music,
and his magnetic personality.
[Zemlinsky] spews out ideas, is impulsive and lively. . . . He hears and sees simul-
taneously a thousand different things, and he criticizes with a loud voice . . . from
the conductor's podiumthe movements of the performers, the stage scenery, the
lighting, and a multitude of different little things on which the success or failure of
the performance depends. While conducting, he suggests to the singers the expres-
sion of every phrase. His face when he conducts! . . . Zemlinsky mimes from the
podium the entire opera, all the roles. . . . The result of all this work is always a
truly artistic success.77
Zemlinsky's superb musicianship made him a formidable advocate for

the music of his contemporaries. Not only did he conduct the works of
Schoenberg, but gradually he added to his Prague programs Debussy's Pel-
leas et Melisande, Bartok's Rumanian Dances and his Rapsodie for piano
and orchestra,78 Stravinsky's Pucinella, Bloch's Schelomo, and Webern's
Passacaglia. On 22 April 1923, Zemlinsky also premiered a revised version
of his opera Kleider machen Leute at the Prague Neues Deutsches Theater.
Zemlinsky was also chosen to represent Czechoslovakia in the newly
formed ISCM. The international jury for 1923 included American musicol-
ogist/writer Oscar Sonneck (1873-1928), conductor Hermann Scherchen
representing Germany, composer Andre Caplet (1878-1925) from France,
conductor/composer Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) representing England,
composer/conductor Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) from Italy, and con-
ductor Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969) from Switzerland, with Busoni,
Schoenberg, Sibelius, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Ravel chosen as a sitting hon-
orary committee.79 The society was founded to promote contemporary mu-
sic on an international level and sponsored a festival each year that would
include music from each country represented.80
Very early after coming to Prague, Zemlinsky had achieved the respect
of the Czech critics and theatergoers. One reviewer, for example, compared
productions of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at both the Czech National
Theater and the German Theater, noting that the Czech production had
better soloists, orchestral players, and chorus and adhered closely to the
Wagnerian traditionbut he liked Zemlinsky's version better.81 In 1923,
Zemlinsky was invited to conduct Mahler's Sixth Symphony with the Czech
Philharmonic,82 an orchestra he would direct many times in the following
years. Zemlinsky, for his part, became the first conductor to perform Czech
opera at the German Theater. On 20 March 1924, he conducted the first
of many German-language performances of Bedfich Smetana's The Kiss in
celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Smetana's birth and, on
18 October 1925, The Bartered Bride-, in 1926, Zemlinsky performed Leos
Janacek's Jenufa with Janacek in the audience.83 He would return fre-
quently as a guest conductor for the Czech Philharmonic after he left
Prague; Tancsik notes that between 1928 and 1937, Zemlinsky conducted
thirteen performances of the Philharmonic as well as performances with
both the German and Czech opera companies.84 For his final engagement
in Prague on 3 December 1937, Zemlinsky conducted Mahler's Symphony
no. 4 and Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor, op. 129, with Pablo
Casals as soloist.85
On 28 May 1922, Zemlinsky's one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf)
Prague 49
op. 17, based on another Oscar Wild story, "The Birthday of the Infanta,"
was premiered by O t t o Klemperer in Cologne. 8 6 When it was performed
the following year at the Vienna State Opera (25 November 1923), Alban
Berg provided an interesting account of the dress rehearsal and opening
performance in a letter to his wife. Although the Vienna premiere was
ultimately successful and well received, Berg thought the staging, direction,
and sets (supposedly those by the great set designer Roller) were poor,
conductor Karl Alwin stiff, and many of the performers third-rate. He also
felt the opera alternated between the undramatic and the unbearably tragic.
" W h a t a pity considering the wonderful music. . . . Incidentally, the music
isn't too easy to understand (because there's so much polyphony)." 8 7
Also in 1923, Zemlinsky traveled to Berlin to conduct his Maeterlinck
songs with the Vienna State Opera soprano Felicie Himi-Mihacsek (5 June
1923). His songs were being performed as part of the Austrian Music Week
festival in Berlin, yet he was so little k n o w n in the international musical
community that Prague critic Felix Adler felt compelled to announce Zem-
linsky's virtues in Universal Edition's journal Musikbldtter des Anbruch.
Adler noted that the German community in Prague was "an island . . .
hermetically sealed from the outside world," and although Zemlinsky's mu-
sic was k n o w n to only a small group of cognoscenti, its artistic beauties
could be matched by very few of his contemporaries. Adler described Zem-
linsky's style as falling between Strauss and Schoenberg and praised the
Maeterlinck songs for their emotional concentration and spiritual depth. 8 8
For once, Zemlinsky's work achieved the success it deserved. Alban Berg,
whose Orchestra Pieces, op. 6 (nos. 1 and 2), were on the same program,
reported to Schoenberg, "Zemlinsky enjoyed the greatest success of the
evening. The audiences wouldn't stop applauding until the last song was
repeated." 8 9
Although economic conditions in Prague were relatively stable at this
time, inflation in Berlin was so severe that workers felt obliged to spend
their wages immediately, or they could buy nothing. Bruno Walter re-
counted that when members of the Berlin State Opera received their pay
during a break in rehearsals, he had to allow them a lengthy recess so they
could spend their salaries before the money was worthless. 9 0 Such desperate
circumstances contributed to discontent throughout society and fed the
growth of radical ideas. Although the disastrous inflation was brought un-
der control after Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) became chancellor in
August 1923, dissident elements continued their disruptive tactics, and in
November, Adolf Hitler, General Erich Ludendorff, and the Nazi Party
tried to seize power. The rebellion was averted and Hitler was sentenced
to prison for five years. He was out of prison in nine months and had
written the first volume of Mein Kampf.
Zemlinsky thought highly of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, and in a letter to
Berg in 1923, he discussed some of the difficulties he perceived concerning
the opera's performance in Prague. "I believe [Wozzeck] would present a

symphony orchestra with the greatest difficulties. . . . Where is there a Woz-
zeck? Where is there a tenor w h o could learn the part of the doctor and
yet can also sing? . . . Certainly it will happen. The opera is entirely won-
derful and that will decide it finally."91 Zemlinsky performed Wozzeck-
Bruchstucke (Fragments from Wozzeck) on 19 May 1925 with Mathilde
de G a r m o as soloist. 92 During the rehearsals for the Prague performance
of his Fragments from Wozzeck, Berg wrote to his wife Helene:
17th May 1925

Zemlinsky is a colossal chap. How he gets hold of the Fragments, even at the
piano. . . . With such passion it makes it even more thrillingif that's possible.
18th May 1925

Orchestra rehearsal this morning. Zemlinsky does it wonderfully . . . the orches-
tra is technically faultless.93
According to critic Leo Schleissner, the Wozzeck Fragments made a strong

impression in Prague, and he looked forward to a complete staging of the
work as soon as the Berlin premiere had taken place. 9 4 Zemlinsky hoped
to conduct the entire Wozzeck in Prague and was quite w ounded when he
was preempted by the Czech Theater.95 Perhaps Wozzeck would have fared
better under Zemlinsky's tutelage; it was attacked by Czech nationalists as
the work of a German and by other groups as the opera of a Jew (although
Berg was not Jewish) and was discontinued after just three performances
in Prague. 9 6
For the ISCM's second music festival, which took place in Prague in June
1924, Zemlinsky conducted the premiere of Schoenberg's m o n o d r a m a Er-
wartung (6 June 1924) with soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder (1874-1935)
in the solo role. Although written fifteen years earlier, Erwartung had never
been performed. Zemlinsky had planned to perform Erwartung a year ear-
lier in Prague and had asked Schoenberg to conduct, but the director of
the German Theater, Leopold Kramer, would not pay Schoenberg a con-
ductor's fee. Schoenberg refused to conduct, angrily pointing out that if
Richard Strauss were invited to conduct one of his own works, he would
receive such a fee. Still, Schoenberg was eager to have Zemlinsky conduct,
for, as he explained in a letter of 12 February 1923 to Zemlinsky, "not
only is it instructive for me and agreeable to hear you perform my work,
but I also k n o w how to treasure its value when someone of your authority
with the orchestra and the public identifies himself with the work. . . .
[Y]our not directing would be taken as a refusal: 'Even his own brother-
in-law doesn't like this m u s i c ' " 9 7 T w o days before the performance of
Erwartung, Zemlinsky premiered his own Lyrische Symphonic In the draft
of a letter to Zemlinsky, Alban Berg complimented Zemlinsky on his won-
Prague 51
derful performance of both works, noting that Erwartung was "perhaps

the most difficult work in music literature." He then went on to compare
Zemlinsky's accomplishments as a composer/conductor to those of M a h -
ler. 98
In the August 1924 issue of the Berlin periodical Die Musik, Zemlinsky
was profiled in a five-page article that included his picture. Ernst Rychnov-
sky wrote: "Zemlinsky evenings are always musical feasts for the otherwise
depressed, never completely happy Prague Germans, feasts for the many
Czechs w h o enjoy music . . . and for the international public w h o is grad-
ually coming to Prague." 9 9 Rychnovsky noted that Zemlinsky's Mozart
performances were so excellent that the public came to the opera like pil-
grims, overwhelming him with an orgy of applause.
Zemlinsky's third String Quartet, op. 19, was completed in 1924 and
dedicated to his friend, cellist Friedrich Buxbaum, w h o premiered it with
Buxbaum's Quartet in Leipzig on 2 7 October 1924. Early in October, We-
bern, w h o coached the quartet for its performance, wrote to Zemlinsky to
tell him how "beautiful" and how "enormously difficult" he found the
quartet.100 It was later performed at the ISCM festival in Siena on 11 Sep-
tember 1928 by the Kolisch Quartet on the recommendation of Berg, w h o
was at that time on the ISCM committee. (Berg used his position on the
program committee of the ISCM to have works by his Viennese friends
performed: In the 1926 Zurich festival, for example, Schoenberg's Wind
Quintet, op. 26, and the premiere of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra,
op. 10. 1()1 In 1933, the Nazis, obsessed with German purity and threatened
by international cultural cooperation, banned German participation in the
ISCM and extended this ban in every country they conquered. 1 0 2
In 1925, Leo Schleissner wrote a lengthy article in Der Auftakt in which
he called Zemlinsky's time in Prague "The Era of Zemlinsky." Schleissner
pointed to Prague's musical progress during Zemlinsky's tenure there, citing
his magnificent performances of both Mahler's and Mozart's works as well
as his advocacy for contemporary music, especially the works of Arnold
Schoenberg. Schleissner acknowledged that Zemlinsky had not only im-
proved the quality of the orchestra and opera but had educated the public
as well. He reminded readers of the public's resistance to modernism,
clearly shown by the tremendous scandal at the performance of Schoen-
berg's Pierrot lunaire in the early years of Zemlinsky's career in Pragu e.
N o t only were the works of Schoenberg n o w attended with great respect,
but Zemlinsky had successfully brought Prague new operas by Schreker,
Hindemith, and Richard Strauss shortly after their premieres. 1 0 3
It is clear from the frequent references to Zemlinsky in Der Auftaktklthat
he was warmly respected and loved by the Prague public. H e was contin-
ually called gifted, his work was praised and proudly reviewed, and his
conducting was favorably compared with Mahler's. 1 0 4 Yet despite his great
successes Zemlinsky tried on many occasions to leave Prague. He was in a
foreign city with few German ties and was separated from his closest col-
leagues; he was out of the mainstream of avant-garde musical life, and his
efforts to bring contemporary music to Prague continued to meet with re-
sistance. His letters to Schoenberg frequently contained expressions of dis-
content and plans to find a new position. In 1923, for example, he
negotiated with Max von Schillings (who in 1917 had premiered A Flor-
entine Tragedy in Stuttgart) to come to Berlin as a conductor for the Berlin
State Opera, but the negotiations failed.105 Rampant inflation in Germany
made it impossible for Zemlinsky to arrange a contract that would match
his Prague salary.
Although Zemlinsky had little time left to compose and was clearly over-
worked, surely some of this was his own choice. He confided to Alma
Mahler that he hadn't left Prague because "I certainly fail to have the
courage to take the risk to relinquish a certain comfort, eventually to live
a year without so relatively large an income." 106 Zemlinsky appears to have
embraced work but complained to Alma Mahler in his letter from about
1925, "I work like a pack horse and, consequently, am continually in an
atrocious mood. . . . It is too prosaic how I am nailed fast here (perhaps
also through my guilt in part) and how I feel more miserable from year to
year. . . . The time when I can compose is still the happiest." 107
Finally, after sixteen years in Prague, Zemlinsky made definite plans to
leave. He accepted an offer from Otto Klemperer to assist him at the Kroll
Opera in Berlin. Although Klemperer promised Zemlinsky he would be able
to conduct Schoenberg's Erwartung at the Kroll,108 the final incentive may
well have been, as Arnost Mahler suggested, the discomfort Zemlinsky felt
because of his ambitious assistant conductor William Steinberg (1899-
1978) who had come to Prague in 1925. 109 This competitive, talented
young man may indeed have motivated the choice that led to Zemlinsky's
precipitous decline in power and reputation. But Zemlinsky, nevertheless,
appears to have maintained good relations with Steinberg and chose Stein-
berg to conduct the Prague premiere of Der Zwerg. Arnost Mahler, present
on this occasion, related that when Zemlinsky stepped to the podium to
conduct Korngold's Violanta after the performance of Der Zwerg, the au-
dience went wild.110
Zemlinsky's departure was marked by performances that included Mah-
ler's Symphony no. 8 on 1 June 1927, with the Czech Philharmonic, soloists
from the New German Theater, and all the German choral societies of
Prague. 111 Zemlinsky conducted Mozart's Marriage of Figaro for his final
concert at the Prague German Theater on 24 June 1927, an appropriate
gesture of farewell from a man who loved Mozart and had made his rep-
utation as a distinguished conductor of Mozart's operas during his sixteen
years in Prague. When the opera was over, the audience would not stop
Prague 53
applauding. Zemlinsky was finally allowed to speak: "All I have to say, I

have already said during my many years of artistic work in Praguehere
at the conductor's stand. If I have been able to achieve the satisfaction of
the public, I am happy." 112
Chapter S
Berlin
[S]ince Germany was at one and the same time the home of the most
modern, avant-garde trends and the most violent reaction against them,
it naturally became the most interesting country in Europe.
Walter Laquer1
[In Berlin] it was as if all the eminent artistic forces were shining forth
. . . imparting to the last festive symposium of the minds a many-hued
brilliance before the night of barbarism closed in. What the Berlin the-
aters accomplished in those days could hardly be surpassed in talent,
vitality, loftiness of intention, and variety.
Bruno Walter2
Zemlinsky's move to Berlin has generally been regarded as a step down.

He was no longer a preeminent musical figure but an assistant conductor
to the star O t t o Klemperer. But Zemlinsky was ready to make his break
with Prague at any cost and to become part of one of the most exciting,
dynamic musical centers in Europe. "It was Berlin that emerged, after the
dissolution of the German Empire, to challenge Paris as the musical capital
of Europe." 3 And many of Zemlinsky's friends and colleagues were already
there: Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg, H a n n s Eisler, Bert Brecht, Kurt
Weill, and Paul Hindemith, to name a few.
After World War I, chaos, hunger, and fear had reigned in Berlin.
Maimed, unemployed veterans returned home to a demoralized society
with little means of paying rent, buying food, or finding a decent job.
Crime, social unrest, suicide, alcoholism, and prostitution were all too com-
mon. After French troops took over the industrial areas of the Ruhr valley
Berlin 55
in 1 9 2 3 , debilitating inflation destroyed the modest economic recovery that

had just begun. 4 One British writer noted that while 184.8 German marks
equaled the British pound in November 1918, five years later the pound
was worth 18 trillion marks! 5 "Traditional middle-class morality disap-
peared overnight," 6 and Berlin became notorious for its flagrant decadence
and corruption. Inflation was abruptly brought under control in December
1923, and a modest economic recovery began, as Berlinwith its cabarets
that ranged from the intellectual to the obscene, vibrant avant-garde film
industry, and wealth of popular and high culturebecame an exciting mag-
net for the rest of Europe. Innovative films such as Dr Caligari, Der letzte
Mann, M, and The Blue Angel attracted international audiences and influ-
enced the art of filmmaking throughout the world. 7 Berlin also boasted a
vibrant music scene, a highly sophisticated theater public, and a wealth of
literary journals. 8 Yet it was also a modern city that projected a "blend of
exciting modernism together with that surprising parochialism that you find
in a big city isolated from other centers." 9
From 1927 to 1 9 3 1 , Zemlinsky worked as Kapellmeister for the new
Berlin Staatsoper am Platz der Republik, or the Kroll Opera as it was
widely k n o w n since it was housed in the Kroll Theater. It was a branch of
the State Opera (Staatsoper), which along with the Municipal Opera (Stad-
tische Oper) constituted the traditional-style opera houses of Berlin. The
Kroll Opera was created primarily to perform both contemporary and tra-
ditional opera in fresh, unconventional productions. O t t o Klemperer, 1 0
w h o was engaged to form the new company, had great respect for Zem-
linsky, and Zemlinsky "was by far the most seasoned member of the Kroll's
leadership. . . . [H]e had a practical knowledge unrivalled by that of his
colleagues, including Klemperer." 1 ' During the entire existence of the Kroll
from 1927 to 1 9 3 1 , both Zemlinsky and Fritz Zweig worked as conductors
under Klemperer's regime. 1 2
Zemlinsky also viewed Klemperer with respect and had granted Klem-
perer the premiere of Der Zwerg at the Cologne Opera in 1922, although
Zemlinsky considered Cologne to be provincial at that time. 1 3 But now
Zemlinsky was in Klemperer's shadow. Klemperer, as the principal con-
ductor at the Kroll, had first choice of which productions he would conduct
and was the focus of the Berlin media attention. N o t all of this attention
proved to be flattering. Klemperer's Der fliegende Hollander caused a tre-
mendous furor and was remembered as one of his most controversial pro-
ductions. He had decided to use Wagner's original score of 1844, a more
elemental version of the opera, instead of the familiar, philosophical version
that Wagner had revised between 1846 and I860.14 Conservatives were
horrified by this heresy, while modernists embraced this new perspective
on Wagner. In their Entartete Exhibition of 1938, the Nazis made a special
point of reviling this production.
Klemperer modernized staging and introduced new literature into the
traditional opera repertoire, 15 placing his stamp upon the history of the
short-lived company, which not only became something of a legend in the
operatic world but would become "a model for the future." 16 In Klem-
perer's words, "I didn't want an avant-garde opera in the sense that that
term is used today. . . . I wanted to make good theatrejust that and noth-
ing else." 17
After its renovation in 1924, the Kroll had become the largest of Berlin's
three full-scale opera halls with its 2,100 seats.18 The Prussian Ministry of
Culture decided in 1927 to make the Kroll Berlin's most innovative theater,
hoping it would combat the growing belief that "traditional opera was
dying." 19 At the same time, it was also designated by the government as
the opera for the Volksbiihne, a subscription society of workers for whom
inexpensive tickets to the opera were provided.20 But leaders of the Volks-
biihne had not been consulted about the Kroll's innovative fare, which did
not appeal to most of their members.21 The Volksbiihne failed to support
the aims of the new company either by buying its allotment of tickets or
with its moral support. Still, the link between the Kroll and the socialistic
Volksbiihne became a source of suspicion among a portion of Berlin press
and society, which accused the Kroll of harboring Bolshevist sentiments.22
Nevertheless, the Kroll developed a loyal following within the intellectual
community, but unfortunately, its support was insufficient to counter the
massive financial woes that battered the Weimar Republic when it was
struck with the effects of the worldwide depression of 1929.
Zemlinsky was not only eclipsed by his more famous colleague Klem-
perer, but he was also overshadowed by other "stars" who were conducting
in Berlin at this time: Leo Blech (State Opera), 23 Erich Kleiber (State Opera),
Bruno Walter (Municipal Opera), and Wilhelm Furtwangler (Berlin Phil-
harmonic and the General Municipal Music Director). Nevertheless, Zem-
linsky played an important role at the Kroll and conducted a great variety
of repertoire (sung in German), including Bedfich Smetana's The Kiss; Sme-
tana's The Bartered Bride; Puccini's three one-act operas (// trittico)//
tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchiand his Madame Butterfly;
Richard Strauss's Salome; Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann; French one-act
operasRavel's Vheure espagnole, Darius Milhaud's Le pauvre matelot,
and Jacques Ibert's Angelique; Verdi's Rigoletto; Schoenberg's Erwartung;
and Gustave Charpentier's Louise.
Critical response to Zemlinsky's part in these productions was frequently
positive. On 7 September 1928, for example, reviewer E. Bachmann at the
"Berliner Borsen-Courier," discussing the Kroll's production of Salome,
commented that "under Zemlinsky's sovereign baton, the orchestra
achieved a splendid bravura. The eminently complicated vocal web was
clearly delineated. The delicate sonorities and refined charm of the inventive
score became sensual, captivating sound." 24 Zemlinsky's performance of
Puccini's // trittico was reviewed by Adolf Weissmann in Die Musik in May
Berlin 57
1928 as "praiseworthy throughout."25 Weissmann had earlier objected to

Zemlinsky's production of Smetana's The Kiss, saying that what was a hit
in Prague probably wouldn't please the Berlin public. 2 6 For the "Berliner
Zeitung am Mittag," H . H . Stuckenschmidt (later to become a distinguished
Schoenberg scholar) wrote of the three French one-act operas by Ravel,
Milhaud, and Ibert on 28 September 1929: "Zemlinsky made music with
all his unique spiritualization and clarity, unveiling every detail of the dis-
tinctive scores." 2 7 Stuckenschmidt praised Zemlinsky's 7 June 1930 per-
formance of Schoenberg's Erwartung: "Zemlinsky, who has already
conducted this work in Prague in 1923 [sicactually 1924], is the authen-
tic interpreter here. He proves himself again the master of this intense work,
as spiritual musician of the highest level." 28 Musicologist/composer H u g o
Leichtentritt called Zemlinsky's directing of Louise "masterly" in a January
1931 issue of Die Musik,29 and esteemed musicologist Alfred Einstein, writ-
ing for the "Berliner Tageblatt" on 24 February 1 9 3 1 , called Zemlinsky's
conducting of Madame Butterfly "a little bit German but wit h warmth,
colorfulness, and nobility, which is better than all the 'southern authentic-
ity.' " 3 0 As late as 1932, Die Musik spoke of Zemlinsky respectfully, refer-
ring to "a Kapellmeister of the rank of a Zemlinsky." 3 1 But Paul
Zschorlich, critic for the Deutsche Zeitung, while complimentary of Zem-
linsky's conducting of a February 1929 production of Offenbach's Tales of
Hoffmann, displayed the ugly anti-Semitic undercurrent of contemporary
ideology in his attack on the Kroll itself:
The Klemperer ensemble, which for the most part is made up of foreigners, gnaws
away little by little at the entire existence of opera "in the spirit of the Time,1' that
is : from a Jewish spirit. . . . [We] point out his [Klemperer's] incompetence with
the results that public protest already rises against the sin to German cultural good.
. . . The protection of Jacques Offenbach, whom we do not count as a German
composer [he was a Jew, as was Klemperer|, we leave to the "central society of
citizens of Jewish belief."32
O n 10 June 1930, Zschorlich wrote a sarcastic review of Schoenberg's

Erwartung, conducted by Zemlinsky, and Die gliickliche Hand, conducted
by Klemperer, performed together on 7 June 1930. In the article entitled
"SchoenbergHypocrisy at the Kroll," Zschorlich commented, "Both ti-
tles, Erwartung (Expectation) and Die gliickliche Hand (The Lucky Hand),
resoundingly refer to Arnold Schoenberg like a sneer. We 'expect' nothing
from him nor have for many years, and we have long k n o w n that he has
a highly 'unlucky hand.' " 3 3
During his years at the Kroll Opera, Zemlinsky was also conducting
outside of Germanyin Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and Warsaw. 3 4 The Berlin
periodical Die Musik printed several reviews of his performances in Russia,
one in a July 1928 issue of Verdi's Requiem in Leningrad and another in
May 1932 of Beethoven's Fidelio as well as an orchestral performance of

the Brahms Violin Concerto and Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Zemlinsky also participated in the fledgling recording industry of his
time. Existing recordings include his conducting of the Berlin State Opera
Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic at the end of the 1920s and the
beginning of the 1930s during his tenure in Berlin. On a recording entitled
The Great Conductors of the Twentieth Century, he is in the company of
Leo Blech, Wilhelm Furtwangler, and Willem Mengelberg. But even on an
album Alexander von Zemlinsky, he is not conducting his own works but
opera overtures by Mozart and Beethoven, overtures to lighter works by
Rossini, Flotow, and Maillartcomposers whose music brought in large
audiences, often the bread and butter for music companies trying to meet
their budgetsand also music by Czech composer Bedfich Smetana.
The Kroll's funds were controlled by the State Opera, which allotted to
itself a generous operating budget and could boast on its roster superb
conductors such as Erich Kleiber and George Szell as well as singers of the
rank of Lauritz Melchior, Alexander Kipnis, Lotte Lehmann, and Richard
Tauber. 35 But Klemperer, working with limited funds, could not afford
international stars and had to chose his singers for their musicality and
ability to work within the framework of the Kroll's ideology rather than
for their overwhelming vocal beauty. Singers at the Kroll lacked the name
recognition of their competitors at the Deutsche Staatsoper and early on
drew the ire of at least one critic who scornfully declaimed that the singers
whom "Otto Klemperer has assembled from the provincestogether with
a few Berlin artists of second and third rankare not able to meet the
expectations that we have here." 36
Wall Street's economic crash of 1929 set off a worldwide depression that
devastated the convalescing German economy, and soon millions of
German workers were unemployed, thousands homeless and hungry. The
barely departed postwar miseries had returned with a new vengeance. On
6 November 1930, the government announced it could no longer support
the Kroll, which would have to close at the end of the season. Prominent
voices such as those of Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Kurt Weill, and
Paul Hindemith were raised in protest, and Thomas Mann asked "why the
opera house that cost the least and offered the most intellectual stimulus
should be singled out as a victim of the difficult times the German economy
was going through." 37
This new economic crisis strengthened repressive voices within Germany,
and in the election of 1930, the Nazi Party increased its 12 seats in the
Reichstag (from the election of 1928) to a surprising 107 members. Unruly,
vociferous Nazis disrupted gatherings of those who tried to speak against
them, such as Thomas Mann in a lecture at the Beethoven Hall in 1930. 38
Members of the Communist Party also gained seats, increasing their mem-
Berlin 59
bership from 54 to 77. 3 9 M a n y Western governments feared the commun-

ists more than they feared the Nazis.
In January 1929, Zemlinsky's wife Ida died, and one year later, Zemlin-
sky married singer/painter Louise Sachsel, w h o had k n o w n him for many
years. Although she had been born a Jew, Louise Sachsel Zemlinsky was
baptized into the Christian faith on 24 November 1930. She had painted
Zemlinsky's portrait in 1919 shortly after she had begun her studies in art
at the Prague Academy of Art40 but was also a talented singer and had
been Zemlinsky's student for about t w o and a half years in Prague before
studying voice at the Academy of Music in Vienna. 4 1 A soprano, Louise
Sachsel made her debut at the Volksoper in Vienna singing the role of
Venus. "Her Venus was gripping, not only because of her beautiful ap-
pearance but her delicate voice is brilliant and particularly noble in the
high register." 4 2
Zemlinsky continued to champion avant-garde music during his years in
Berlin, conducting Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and the Berlin premiere of
Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at the Theater am
Kurfiirstendamm. This production was so popular that it was repeated
forty times within the following year. 4 3
At the end of her life, Louise Zemlinsky noted that her husband was
basically nonpolitical but recalled that during the 1920s he was quite in-
terested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. 44 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Van-
zetti, accused of robbery and murder in the United States, became a
worldwide cause celebre because of the suspicion that their execution in
August 1927 was actually punishment for their anarchist views. But the
assassinations of such prominent figures as Elizabeth, empress of Austria,
William McKinley, president of the United States, H u m b e r t I, king of Italy,
M.F. Sadi Carnot, president of France, and Archduke Francis Ferdinand
had caused fearful government officials to respond to anarchists with re-
pressive measures. Zemlinsky was acquainted with the politically active
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill during the 1920s, and it may be that the
depiction of Jim Mahoney's execution in the electric chair in Mahagonny
as well as the deteriorating political situation recalled the fate of Sacco and
Vanzetti for Zemlinsky. 4 5
Zemlinsky's sixtieth birthday in 1931 went unmarked by a Festschrift in
his honor. Critic Paul Stefan ( 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 4 3 ) , commemorating Zemlinsky's
birthday in a 1932 article in Anbruch, lamented the general neglect of
Zemlinsky and his works: " W h o has written such Lieder, such chamber
music (the Third String Quartet!), such an opera as the charming Kleider
machen Leute} ... He has students but no disciples, admirers but no prop-
agandists, a public but no Society. . . . [0]thers younger than he, already
have greater success. . . . One has a duty to speak of this man, of his works
without needing a special occasion." 4 6
As his dream for recognition faded, Zemlinsky seems to have become
embittered. Schoenberg commented in a letter to Berg in 1930 that there

were few people Zemlinsky thought well of.47 (His view of Zemlinsky at
this point in their relationship was, of course, not unbiased.) Peter Giilke,
in his essay on Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau, p oints out that Zemlinsky's
high degree of self-criticism and willingness to entertain others' critical
views of his works may have contributed to his failure to promote many
of his works with sufficient energy, allowing them to lie neglected and
unperformed.48 Others have noted that although Zemlinsky, as a conductor
and music director, had the power to perform his own works, he only used
his position in this manner occasionally.
After the closing of the Kroll, Zemlinsky was offered a position as gen-
eral music director at the Wiesbaden State Theater, but he declined the
offer and remained in Berlin.49 His longtime friend Franz Schreker hired
Zemlinsky to teach choral conducting and score-reading at the Berlin
Hochschule fur Musik, where Zemlinsky taught from 1931 to 1933. 50 He
would later mention in a New York Times interview of 1939 that he had
twenty-three conducting students during his time in Berlin. Zemlinsky had
earlier conducted the Hochschule's chorus in 1929, and in a review of
Kodaly's Psalmus Hungaricus and Janacek's Festlicher Messe for a May
1929 issue of Die Musik, reviewer Adolf Weissmann praised Zemlinsky's
high standards while lamenting that these standards were not continued in
a later performance conducted by Bruno Kittel.51
Schreker and Zemlinsky had performed one another's works for many
years and collaborated on projects such as the earlier-mentioned 1912 per-
formance of Mahler's Symphony no. 8 in Prague. Both were intrigued by
a production of Oscar Wilde's Birthday of the Infanta at Vienna's Kunst-
schau Garden Theater in 1908, which inspired Schreker's ballet Der Ge-
burtstag der Infantin (The Birthday of the Infanta) of 1908 and
Zemlinsky's one-act opera Der Zwerg of 1922. Zemlinsky even asked
Schreker, who wrote almost all of his own opera libretti, to write a libretto
"about the tragedy of the ugly man." Thus, Schreker began working on a
libretto that he decided to set to music himself, resulting in the opera Die
Gezeichneten. As compensation, he prepared another libretto for Zemlin-
sky from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," which Zem-
linsky did not use.52 In 1920, Schreker became the director of the Berlin
Hochschule fur Musik 53 and held this position until 1932 when Nazi agi-
tators forced him to resign as director. He then conducted a master class
in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts until 1933 but was again
pushed out of his position by the National Socialists. Schreker, humiliated
and frightened, suffered a heart attack and died a few months later.54
As the depression worsened, the number of Nazi seats in the Reichstag
swelled to 230 in the election of July 1932. Still no party held a majority,
and the numerous minority parties were unable to form a stable working
coalition, precipitating another election in November 1932. The new Com-
Berlin 61
munist Party held 100 seats, while the Nazis lost 34 seats. Conservative
forcesaristocrats, industrialists, army officers, large landowners
believing they could keep the Nazis under their thumb, naively decided to
work with the Nazis and use them for their own advantage. 55
Chapter 6
"The Gates of Hell Had Opened"
She . . . fell on my neck crying bitterly [after seeing] . . . the unleashed

mob . . . the maltreatment of people in the Berlin streets, the wrecked
shops, the fear and torment of the defenseless, and the howling delight
of their persecutors.
Bruno Walter1
The honor of the language, of thought, of literature has been disgraced.
Thomas Mann 2
I still feel their breath on my cheeks.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal3
O n 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party (the National
Socialist German Workers), was appointed by German president Field M a r -
shal Paul von Hindenburg as chancellor of a coalition cabinet. The largest
minority party at that time, the Nazis held 196 seats in the Reichstag, and
Hitler quickly moved to seize total control. He called for a new election,
hoping to gain a majority of Reichstag seats, and began a campaign of
intimidation and fear. M a r a u d i n g bands of Nazi Brownshirts wandered the
streets, creating panic in the electorate, and then secretly set fire to the
parliament building. The Nazis blamed the fire on their rival, the Com-
munist Party, which had steadily grown in power during the previous three
elections. (Thomas M a n n later contended that the Western powers failed
to intervene early enough in Germany, because of their great fear of com-
munismif they deposed Hitler, they worried that the communists would
take over.) 4 Hitler moved to suspend freedom of speech and the press, then
"The Gates of Hell Had Opened" 63
granted himself total power, although the Nazis failed to gain a majority
in the 5 March election with 44% of the vote. The Nazis called their gov-
ernment the Third Reich, claiming the Holy Roman Empire as the first
Reich and Bismarck's Germany as the second.5 "An age of the masses is
dawning, one which is at the same time an age of contempt for the masses
and for mankind." 6
Klaus Mann would later concede that he and other intellectuals "refused
to admit that a minor political party, a gang of fanatics and adventurers
who called themselves 'National Socialists,' could threaten the entire code
of Occidental values and traditions. . . . The malignant weakness and com-
placency in our ranks were the most powerful allies of the enemy." 7
Hitler designated racial minorities within Germany as non-German, im-
mediately implementing a campaign of disparagement and terror against
Jews, Gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, and anyone who dissented with his
policies. Already on 1 March 1933, at a meeting of the Senate of the Prus-
sian Academy of Arts, which was attended by Arnold Schoenberg, com-
poser Max von Schillings, president of the Academy, told the audience that
the government was determined to eliminate Jewish influence in the Acad-
emy. Schoenberg immediately left and, on 17 May, traveled from Berlin to
Paris where on 24 July he officially returned to the Jewish religion. He
never entered a German-speaking country again.8 Max von Schillings, com-
poser of Mona Lisa and director of the premiere of Zemlinsky's Florentine
Tragedy at the Stuttgart Court Opera in 1917, died in July 1933, shortly
after he was appointed Intendant of the Berlin Municipal Opera, a post
previously held by Carl Ebert, a Jew who had been removed from this
position.9
On 7 April 1933 and 20 July 1933, Hitler issued laws that removed all
Jews, members of the left wing, and those with Republican sympathies from
the civil service. Nazi control over the press, the music establishments, the
theaters, and the radio was solidified with a law of 4 October 1933 that
created Joseph Goebbels's Reich Chamber of Culture. 10
Hitler's ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), sympathetic to the
racist theories of Richard Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamber-
lain, defined the racial doctrines of the Third Reich in Der Mythus des 20
Jahrhundert (The Myth of the 20th Century, 1934), declaring that the
"true" German, the "Aryan," had descended from a superior Nordic race
destined to rule the rest of Europe." In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took
away citizenship from all Jews, forbade marriage or sexual relations be-
tween Jews and "citizens of German or cognate blood," and defined a Jew
as a person with at least one Jewish grandparent. 12 During 1937, these
laws were relaxed to allow musicians who were one-quarter Jews (persons
with one Jewish grandparent) to continue to work: "but not if they have
offended the state or National Socialism, or if they prove that they are
inclined toward Judaism; persons married to Jews are to be treated in prin-
ciple like half-Jews; persons married to half-Jews in principle like quarter-

Jews." 13 The Nazis were undeterred by the resulting self-imposed
bureaucratic nightmares these rulings created.
Despite Nazi belief that Jews were inferior musicians, government offi-
cials and concert managers were frequently unable to identify which mu-
sicians were Jewish. In the first edition of a handbook of Jewish musicians
(Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, 1940), compilers Theo Stengel and Her-
bert Gerigk omitted Zemlinsky's name along with many others. But in the
supplement (Nachtrag) to the 1941 edition, Zemlinsky is listed as a half
Jew. 14 The names of some of the most distinguished composers, scholars,
librettists, and performers of that era are listed: Arnold Schoenberg, Stefan
Zweig, Ernst Bloch, Manfred Bukofzer, Otto Erich Deutsch, Alfred Ein-
stein, Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Alexander Kipnis, Otto Klem-
perer, Wanda Landowska, Arthur Schnabel, Bruno Walter, Kurt Weill,
Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, and many others. In one of his many ti-
rades against Jews in Mein Kampf (My Battle), Hitler had written that "the
two queens of all arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to
Jewry." 15 In their zeal to identify and expunge the names of Jews from
history, the Nazis sought out not only the living but also the dead, so that
Jewish works would not accidentally "contaminate" musical concerts of
the Reich: Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, composers Felix Mendels-
sohn and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, violinist Josef Joachim, for
whom Brahms wrote his great violin concerto, and composers Jacques Of-
fenbach and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. It was important also to identify
living foreign Jewish composers such as Aaron Copland, Paul Dukas, and
Darius Milhaud.
After the Nazis seized power in Germany, Zemlinsky and his wife Louise
settled in Vienna, where he devoted much of his time to composing and
free-lance conducting. In 1933, Zemlinsky became a conductor of the Vi-
enna Concert Orchestra, founded by Hermann Scherchen in 1931, an
orchestra that included many previously unemployed musicians. Although
both Zemlinsky and Scherchen were champions of modern music, Ernest
Hilmar points out that by 1933 it was becoming politically "more difficult
to offer non-conformist programs that went against dictated tastes." 16
There was, in fact, a "war against modernism" 17 being waged in Nazi
Germany, with many sympathizers in an already musically conservative
Vienna. The economic disasters at the end of the 1920s had reinforced
reactionary attitudes in both Germany and Austria, encouraging the growth
of Nazism. While a number of Austrians such as Schoenberg had already
fled Europe, the musicians who moved from Germany to Austria found
themselves facing an increasingly conservative wall. Apprehension grew
among those who feared for the future. Distraught with the course of
events, Zemlinsky considered returning to Judaism but was dissuaded by
The Gates of Hell Had Opened 65
his wife. 18 Zemlinsky's choral setting of Psalm 13, in April 1935, begins
with the despairing words:
How long will you forget me?

How long will you hide your face from me?
But Psalm 13 ends with an affirmation of faith:
But I continue to hope that you are merciful.

My heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord because he has shown me such mercy.
This hope allowed Zemlinsky to remain in Austria for three more years.
After Berg's death in 1935, writer Elias Canetti recounted regularly see-
ing Zemlinsky on a streetcar in the suburbs of Vienna: "I knew him as a
conductor, not as a composer; black birdlike head, jutting triangular nose,
no chin. I saw him often, he paid no attention to me, he was really deep
in thought. . . . The sight of him always intimidated me, I sensed his ex-
treme concentration; his small, severe, almost emaciated face was marked
by thought and showed no sign of the self-importance one would expect
in a conductor." 1 9
Theodor Fritsch's Handbuch der Judenfrage: Die wichtigsten Tatsachen
zur Beurteilung des jiidischen Volkes (Handbook on the Jewish Qu estion:
The Most Important Facts for the Evaluation of the Jewish Race) sold more
than 200,000 copies during the Nazi era. 2 0 It included an article entitled
"Das Judentum in der M u s i k " (The Jews in Music), which denounced Jew-
ish musicians of the past and present, stating, "Jewishness in music: that is
a short, frightening, and many-sided history of the acceptance of foreign
ideas devoid of any kind of original, creative power." 2 1 Names of com-
posers and conductors, including Alexander von Zemlinsky, 2 2 were listed
so that their work could be identified and expunged from the music world.
The article made no claim of completeness, saying that "has-been artists
were left out. If we added the names of mixed breeds as well as those
baptized into the Protestant faith, then we would further have to list names
of those w h o , although of Aryan origin, thought and acted Jewish in the
most recent past, swimming along in the stream of muck and decadence
(the case of Hindemith, Krenek, Mersmann); then truly one could fill a
whole book with it." 2 3
After the Anschluss in 1938, Nazi censorship was extended to Austria
where a war over modernism was already in progress. Party ideologues
bolstered their efforts to suppress avant-garde music with racial arguments,
blaming Jews (Schoenberg, especially) for modernism in classical music and
black musicians for the "pernicious" influence of jazz. But " A r y a n " mu-
sicians w h o were considered degenerate were also attacked. 2 4 By 1937, a
censorship division of the German government's Propaganda Ministry be-

gan publishing lists of music unacceptable to the German Reich. This was
followed in 1938 with an exhibition in Diisseldorf of so-called degenerate
music (Entartete Musik), prompted by a highly successful Munich exhibi-
tion of degenerate visual art in 1937 that had been endorsed and attended
by Hitler. 2 5 The Diisseldorf exhibition included jazz and classical music,
the musical writings of Jews such as Adorno, Alfred Einstein, and Ernst
Bloch, and theoretical works such as Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, Alois
Haba's Neue Harmonielehre, and Hindemith's Unterweisung im Tonsatz.
Anton Webern, an "Aryan," was cited as a master student of Schoenberg, 2 6
and works such as Berg's Wozzeck, Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, and
Hindemith's Neues vom Tage were ridiculed; Brecht/Weill's Mahagonny
and Threepenny Opera were condemned as musical Bolshevism.27
Zemlinsky seems to have conducted the Vienna Concert Orchestra for
just one year, presenting twentieth-century works such as Mahler's Das
Lied von der Erde and Hindemith's Concert Music for piano, t w o harps,
and brass, op. 49, with Edward Steuermann (1892-1964) as soloist. 28 Zem-
linsky featured pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961) in Franz Schmidt's
(1874-1939) Concertante Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, for left
hand (1923), 2 9 one of several works Schmidt wrote for Wittgenstein. But,
as Biba points out, Scherchen and Zemlinsky also tried to present econom-
ically prudent programs that would attract audiences. 3 0 A program with
Mahler's orchestral songs would also include Beethoven's Symphony no. 5
in C minor and his Leonore Overture no. 3 (22 October 1933). Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 and Brahms's Symphony no. 4 in E minor
were performed along with Hindemith's Concert Music. For his final con-
cert with the Vienna Concert Orchestra on 30 May 1934, Zemlinsky, w h o
at that time was head of the Austrian-Czechoslovakian Society in Vienna,
conducted an all-Smetana program in honor of the fiftieth year of Sme-
tana's death, with the great Czech soprano Jarmila N o v o t n a as soloist.
Whether Zemlinsky was forced to leave the orchestra for political reasons
is not clear, but Hilmar notes that neither Zemlinsky nor H e r m a n n
Scherchen, a Jew, were granted the title of "Standing Director and Educator
of the Orchestra," a title given to the next director, Paul Breisach. 31 The
orchestra failed for financial reasons in 1935, although the quality of its
programs remained high. 3 2
In October 1933, Zemlinsky's opera Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle)
was premiered with great success in the Swiss city Zurich. Paul Pisk, mu-
sicologist and former composition student of Schreker and Schoenberg,
called Der Kreidekreis "one of the best German operas of the last ten years"
in a New York Times review and noted that "the composer was called
repeatedly to the stage and the success of his work was extraordinary." 3 3
But Zemlinsky's luck had run out. The premiere of Der Kreidekreis took
place in Zurich because simultaneous first performances that had been
The Gates of Hell Had Opened 67
scheduled for April 1933 in Berlin, Niirnberg, Cologne, Frankfurt, and

Stettin had been canceled by Nazi officials. A performance of Der Kreide-
kreis eventually took place in Stettin, but additional performances were
forbidden by the head of the Stettin police, w h o declared the libretto went
against the morals of the German peoplehe had not attended the per-
formance. 3 4 Surprisingly, Heinz Tietjen, Intendant at Berlin Staatsoper,
managed to have the opera performed more than twenty times in 1934
before it was again barred from production.
The Berlin periodical Die Musik, a Nazi publication by 1934, noted the
performances and cancellation of Der Kreidekreis and commented: "Zem-
linsky is a wolf in sheep's clothing, w h o under the guise of a serious com-
poser, seeks to smuggle again that kind of music into the country whose
leaders, Schoenberg and Schreker, have finally left Germany. Zemlinsky
offers only a weak infusion and poor copy of their music. If one were to
affirm Zemlinsky, then these gentlemen would be justified in again taking
an honored position since the original always has priority over the imita-
tion." 3 5 Less than ten years earlier, in a special profile on Zemlinsky that
had appeared in Die Musik, he had been glowingly featured as a great
artist; even as late as 1932, Die Musik had published a positive account of
Zemlinsky's trip to Leningrad.
After 1933, Zemlinsky not only devoted his energies to free-lance con-
ducting but once again focused on his composing. He wrote the Sinfonietta,
op. 2 3 , in 1934 and a number of songs, which were unpublished during
his life: Sechs Lieder, op. 22, and "Das bucklichte Mannlein." In the fol-
lowing year, he composed a setting of Psalm 13 for chorus, organ, and
orchestra, the song "Ahnung Beatricens" on a poem by Franz Werfel, and
began working on a new opera, Der Konig Kandaules (King Kandaules)
with a libretto adapted from Franz Blei's German translation of Andre
Gide's play Le roi Candaule. Although Zemlinsky completed the piano/
vocal score for Der Konig Kandaules in 1936, he left the orchestration
unfinished. After Zemlinsky's death, Louise Zemlinsky spent many years
trying to find someone to complete the opera, which was finally premiered
in 1996 at the H a m b u r g State Opera in a version by scholar/musician An-
tony Beaumont. Zemlinsky wrote his String Quartet no. 4, op. 2 5 , in 1936
and between 1937 and 1938 completed the twelve songs of op. 2 7 , also
not published during his life.
Chapter 7
Flight
I have been detached . . . from all roots and from the very earth which
nurtures them. I was born . . . in a great and mighty empire, in the
monarchy of the Habsburgs. But do not look for it on the map; it has
been swept away without trace. I grew up in Vienna . . . and was forced
to leave it like a criminal. . . . And so I belong nowhere, and everywhere
am a stranger. . . . I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason
and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. . . .
When I carelessly speak of "my life," I am forced to ask, "which
life?"the one before the [first] World War, the one between the first
and the second, or the life of today?
Stefan Zweig, 1941'
To wish to return to my accustomed former life would make no sense,
since it is not there to be reclaimed.
Thomas Mann, 1934 2
I have effected the break with the old world, but not without feeling
it to my very core, for I wasn't prepared that it would leave me both
homeless and speechless.
Arnold Schoenberg, 1934 3
Journalist Dorothy T h o m p s o n wrote that "practically everybody w h o in

world opinion stood for w h a t was currently called German culture prior
to 1933 is now a refugee." 4 Although many of Zemlinsky's friends and
colleagues left Germany or Austria well before World W a r II began
(Schoenberg, Klemperer, H a n n s Eisler, Erich Korngold, M a x Reinhardt),
Zemlinsky, like so many others, resisted emigration. Bruno Walter later
Flight 69
admitted that he had naively signed a new three-year contract with the
Vienna State Opera in February 1938 after receiving assurances that Aus-
tria was safe from its frightening neighbor. But on 12 March 1938 Hitler's
troops invaded Austria, which was annexed into the German Reich on the
following day. On the night of 13 March 1938, 76,000 people were ar-
rested in Vienna alone.^ Composer/musicologist Hans Gal saw Zemlinsky
shortly after this "on a bench at the roadside in Grinzing, a suburb of
Vienna. He looked very old, very miserable, a broken man." 6
Zemlinsky and his family finally made plans to leave Austria. Rapidly
developing events made Prague an unsafe choice, although Zemlinsky still
had close ties there, and Louise Zemlinsky's family, including her mother,
were living in Prague. Since 1935, Hitler had subsidized a covert Nazi
movement within the Czechoslovakian Republic, fomenting tremendous
unrest among the three-and-a-quarter million Germans who lived there as
a minority.7 Many Czech/Germans saw opportunities for themselves as part
of a German majority and wanted to join the Third Reich. At the beginning
of October 1938, while the rest of the world spinelessly rationalized events,
Hitler demanded and received an area of Bohemia known as the Sudeten-
land where a majority of these Germans lived within the Czechoslovakian
borders, an area that provided the small, beleaguered nation its natural
defenses of mountains and fortifications. Czechoslovakia was now com-
pletely exposed and unable to protect itself.8
Both Zemlinsky and his wife had friends in the United States, and they
began to plan their escape to this unknown land. A heart-warming letter
(26 May 1938) from Melanie Guttmann, sweetheart from Zemlinsky's
youth and the sister of his first wife, Ida Guttmann Zemlinsky, contained
a check for $110, indicating her willingness to sponsor the Zemlinskys'
entry into the United States. She also provided information about obtaining
a travel pass to the United States.9
The Nachlass of Louise Zemlinsky in the archive of the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde in Vienna contains documents relating to the Zemlinskys'
emigration and immigration, including the 19 August 1938 document of
appraisal of Louise Zemlinsky's possessions, an evaluation demanded by
the Nazi government before it levied its tax (extortion) on citizens leaving
Germany. It also included her declaration: "I am not Aryan and intend to
emigrate after fulfilling all of the legal formalities."10 Another document
dated 20 August 1938 lists the penalty for nonpayment of the tax within
a month: "[Y]our entire fortune will be confiscated and this will be pub-
lished in the Reichsanzeiger (Government Publication). Once named in the
Reichsanzeiger, any official of the administrative government: police, se-
curity police, the tax police, customs service or any other official of the
Reichs Administration and their assistants is ordered to arrest you." 11
Many of Zemlinsky's Czech students and acquaintances would "disap-
pear" during the war. One of his most gifted former students, composer
Hans Krasa (1899-1944), was dispatched to Auschwitz and died there.

Bohemian-born German composers Viktor Ullmann and Erwin Schulhoff
were murdered in concentration camps, and Erich Steinhard, the chief ed-
itor of Der Auftakt, librarian at the University of Prague, and teacher of
music history and aesthetics at the German Academy for Music and Per-
formance, was murdered in a concentration camp. Many Jewish singers
from the Neues Deutsches Theater also lost their lives in the hands of the
Nazis: Soprano Paula Ferry, soprano Irma Pater, alto Ada Schwarz, bass
Ludwig Flaschner, baritone Hans Fleischmann, and tenor John Frey all
perished during the war. Of the 78,150 Jews living in Bohemia and Mo-
ravia before World War II, 66.1% were murdered. 12 Zemlinsky's former
students Karl Weigl and Jan Meyerowitz, a student of Zemlinsky in Berlin,
fled to the United States and became important contributors to American
culture. Some 50,000 Austrian Jews were eventually sent to their deaths;
this was 27% of Austria's prewar Jewish population; 569,000 Hungarian
Jews69% of the prewar Jewish population of Hungarywere murdered;
71,000 Slovakian Jews were murdered during World War II79.8% of
the prewar Slovakian Jewish population. 13
Zemlinsky, his wife Louise, and his daughter Johanna arrived in Czech-
oslovakia 10 September 1938. In Prague, they were granted a transit visa
to the border of France by the French Consulate and a transit visa through
Belgium from its embassy on 21 November 1938. Reports from Germany
and Austria must surely have strengthened their resolve to flee: Ten days
earlier, Hitler had unleashed several days of brutal violence against the
Jewish population, the so-called Kristallnacht, signifying the broken glass
left from Nazi Storm Troopers' savage destruction of Jewish property, the
murdering of 91 Jews and injury of hundreds more, the burning of 7,500
Jewish businesses and 177 synagogues, and the frightening terrorization of
the Jewish population. 14
On 14 December 1938, the Zemlinskys departed from Rotterdam via
Boulognia on the SS Stattendam, bound for the United States. When they
arrived in their new country on 23 December 1938, they had cause to hope
that a positive new life lay before them. Zemlinsky had friends, acquain-
tances, and former students in the United States including Arnold Schoen-
berg, Theodor Adorno, Hanns Eisler, Felix and Trudy Greissle, Melanie
Guttmann, and Erich Korngold, and, as mentioned earlier, his opera Der
Kreidekreis had been praised in the New York Times by musicologist/
composer Paul Pisk.15 Zemlinsky's good friend and former student Artur
Bodanzky, a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera since 1915, 16 stood
ready to assist Zemlinsky's introduction into the new world. When Zem-
linsky was interviewed by the New York Times a little more than two
weeks after his arrival, Bodanzky acted as his interpreter. Zemlinsky re-
vealed in the interview that he had already enrolled in an adult education
Flight 71
course to learn English and was working on the orchestration of his new
opera (Der Konig Kandaules).17
Although Zemlinsky hoped to have Der Konig Kandaules performed at
the Metropolitan Opera, Bodanzky advised him that the opera was too
sexually explicit for conservative American audiences. H e was probably
right, for even today, a reviewer of Antony Beaumont's recently completed
version of Der Konig Kandaules in the October 1997 issue of Classic CD
described Zemlinsky as having "a strong interest in the gamier side of sex.
. . . The whole work runs on voyeurism." 1 8 It is easy to forget that operas
already within the " c a n o n " present a multitude of situations that eschew
"family values." Schoenberg's Moses und Aron has a scene of debauchery
and copulation as two young women are about to be offered as h u m a n
sacrifices; Strauss/Wilde had Salome's necrophilia acted out with a severed
head; and Berg's Lulu creatively engages in a variety of scandalous deeds.
Zemlinsky stopped working on the orchestration for Kandaules and began
a new opera, Circe, with a libretto by the actress Irma Stein and her hus-
band Walter Firner, friends from Zemlinsky's past.
While trying to establish himself and also earn money in his new country,
Zemlinsky decided to write several songs for the popular market under the
pseudonym of Al Roberts. To his embarrassment, the songs were published
under his real name. 1 9 Zemlinsky's former student Korngold and composer
Kurt Weill, w h o also escaped to the United States, found themselves in
similar straits. When forced into alternate avenues of creativity because
their new homeland was unreceptive to their earlier modes of expression,
Korngold became highly successful as a composer in the new film medium,
and Weill established a career on Broadway. M a n y of their former disciples
failed to appreciate the profound obstacles Korngold and Weill faced with
their catastrophic uprooting and loss of identity. Weill never looked back.
Korngold did, much to his sorrow, for when he returned to Europe after
World War II, he found his star had fallen. W a r casualties are not always
those w h o die in battle.
Zemlinsky, like Sigmund Freud, resisted leaving Austria until the final
hour, and like Freud, his love/hate relationship with Vienna turned out to
be mostly love. When he arrived in the United States, Zemlinsky was sixty-
seven years old, he could not speak English, he needed money, and he was
in poor health. Although he had earlier expressed interest in aspects of
American culture and literature (in his reading of Edgar Allan Poe, in his
settings of Langston Hughes's poetry, and even in his use of "Yankee doo-
dle" in an uncompleted string quartet), he was not happy in a strange land.
Louise Zemlinsky's brother, O t t o Sachsel, w h o was living in N e w York,
wrote to their mother in August 1940: "Alex complains a lot. You k n o w
him." 2 0
Zemlinsky suffered his first stroke sometime in June 1939. (This was the
recollection of Louise Zemlinsky, 2 1 but the exact sequence of events is not
documented.) Whether this was a mild stroke or whether the stroke actually
occurred later is not clear since Zemlinsky was interviewed by Werner
Wolff for the New York Times in September 1939, and Wolff's article did
not mention that Zemlinsky was in poor health. He then suffered a severe
stroke, and by December 1939, conductor Fritz Stiedry reported in a letter
to Schoenberg that Zemlinsky " 'was a dead man': Zemlinsky sat in his
small bedroom, his left hand paralyzed, his face not actually distorted but
still strange. Zemlinsky spoke slowly with occasional mistakes in his
speech, but still [he spoke] about everything and often with astonishing
feats of memory." 22
Obviously, conducting was out of the question. His condition was so
serious, in fact, that he was not told of Artur Bodanzky's death on 23
November 1939. 23 Bodanzky's sudden death was a great blow to Zemlin-
sky's hopes for having his operas produced at the Met. But life became
even more overwhelming when Louise Zemlinsky's brother, Otto, who was
living with the Zemlinskys in New York, died in December 1940.
Yet, during this same period, Zemlinsky mentioned in a letter to Schoen-
berg that he was hoping to come to California after his recovery.24 Cali-
fornia had become the great gathering place for some of Europe's most
distinguished refugees: Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Stravinsky, Lotte Lehmann, Darius Milhaud, Bruno Walter,
Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel, Ernst Krenek, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler,
Theodor Adorno, and others. But Schoenberg would write his cousin Hans
Nachod, "I do not quite understand why you want to come to USA. . . .
Do not forget that America and especially Hollywood, is crowded with
Eropean [sic] artists. There is much competition, and fees become lower
and lower." 25
Zemlinsky made plans to join ASCAP (the American Society of Com-
posers, Authors, and Publishers) and sketched out a list of his works for
his application. Interestingly enough, he included in this inventory his pop-
ular songs (the ones he supposedly had not wished to associate with his
name), giving their date of composition as 1940 (the Ricordi Catalog dates
these as 1939).26
A few of Zemlinsky's works were performed in the United States after
he arrived. Schoenberg reported that he had heard some of the Maeterlinck
songs on the radio; three songs from op. 22 and op. 27 were sung in English
at a concert at the Museum of Modern Art sponsored by the League of
Composers; 27 and a Carnegie Hall concert in December 1940 with guest
conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos included Zemlinsky's Sinfonietta for Or-
chestra, op. 23. 28 A broadcast of this concert was heard in California by
Schoenberg, who telegrammed Zemlinsky to congratulate him on the per-
formance.29 Schoenberg's student Dika Newlin reported in her diary on 29
December 1940: "This noon we heard most of Zemlinsky'sSSymphonietta
on the [New York] Philharmonic concert. It seems a very fine work; solid
Flight 73
spirited, and often quite Schoenbergian. One sees where S. learned some of
his cute tricks, all right! I'd gladly hear it again, but probably never will." 30
Conductor Fritz Stiedry, friend of both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, was
involved in bringing about this performance, as he indicated in a letter to
Schoenberg of 17 December 1940.31 Another performance of the Sinfon-
ietta took place in Carnegie Hall on 4 January 1941, along with works of
Liszt, Reger, and Ravel.32
During a trip to New York to direct a performance of his Pierrot lunaire,
Schoenberg visited Zemlinsky on 21 November 1940 and telegrammed his
wife that Zemlinsky was better than expected.33 But on 12 July 1941,
Schoenberg wrote to Hans Nachod, "Zemlinsky . . . is very sick. He had
several paralytic strokes, from which he recovered recently, but the next
might be the end." 34 Zemlinsky died on 15 March 1942 at the age of
seventy. His death certificate lists the immediate cause of death as "hypo-
static pneumonia, crerbral [cerebral] hemorrhage, hemioplegia due to hy-
pertension. Other conditions: Arteriosclerosis." 3 ' But Zemlinsky's health
appears to have been very fragile even before he left Europe. He, like
thousands of other refugees, had endured terrible suffering before he could
force himself to leave home.
After the death of her husband, Louise Zemlinsky struggled to make a
new life for herself in New York, and documents in the Louise Zemlinsky
Nachlass in Vienna show how difficult this was. She received a telegram
from a relative in Prague (no date is clear) informing her that her mother
and aunt had been deported to a concentration camp, probably in Poland
via Terezin, and was told there was little hope. 36 Louise Zemlinsky could
only guess the fate of her mother, who "disappeared July 14, 1942 as a
result of racial persecution and was deported to the East. She was already
near death at that time. . . . [Apparently the place of her death was an
unknown concentration camp in the East." 37 Many years later, Louise
Zemlinsky, obviously mulling over the many people she knew who had
been murdered in concentration camps, began a list of their names. 38
Manuscripts Zemlinsky brought with him to the United States are now
housed in the Library of Congress and include published scores of his
works, drafts for many of his compositions, unfinished works, annotated
poems he planned to set to music, some correspondence, and works by
other composers from his private music collection.39 This collection was
sold by Mrs. Zemlinsky for $6,000 to Robert O. Lehman in 1962, who
donated it to the Library of Congress in two parts between 1966 and
1967. 40 The collection, first cataloged by Lawrence Oncley and then revised
in 1992 by Linda Fairtile and Robert Saladini, contains thirty boxes of
documents that provide a fascinating perspective on Zemlinsky and his
compositional process.
Schoenberg once recounted that they both wrote very rapidly. This is
evident in the hasty "scrawl" of Zemlinsky's first drafts, which sometimes
look like puzzles, with portions crossed out and reworked. Since Zemlin-
sky's music is so often motivically constructed, the idea of solving a puzzle
is apt. In a sketch for an uncompleted song, "O war mein Lieb," for ex-
ample, Zemlinsky played with a motive of sixteenth- and quarter-note
rhythms that permeate both the vocal line and piano parts. Some of his
sketches were written in both pencil and ink (sometimes different colored
inks), perhaps again indicating hasteof seizing whatever writing object
was available. His willingness to write some of his first drafts in ink would
seem to indicate a certain confidence in the total idea he was transferring
to paper. His intense interest in song is clearly reflected in the large number
of complete and incomplete drafts of lieder in the Library of Congress
collection.
He also saved unset typescripts of poems, a worn copy of Schubert's
songs in a solo piano arrangement with text, and the manuscript score of
Hugo Wolf's "Das dich gemalt." Among his personal papers, he had saved
a recital program of lieder performed in Prague in 1936 that included four
songs from his great op. 13, songs by Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Arnold
Schoenberg, Josef Foerster, and Max Reger.41
A manuscript holograph of the song "Es war ein alter Konig" (There
Was an Old King) in the Library of Congress collection is dedicated by
Zemlinsky in 1921 to "Meiner Luise," which indicates how early their
relationship had blossomed. Louise Sachsel Zemlinsky, born 4 June 1900,
was twenty-nine years younger than her husband and lived until 1992. She
became an advocate for the revival of her husband's music, providing im-
portant information about Zemlinsky in interviews with scholars and in
establishing an archive of Zemlinsky documents for the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde in Vienna. She also funded an international competition for
young composers at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music "to perpetuate
the memory of Alexander Zemlinsky."
Zemlinsky commented at various times on his lack of fame, noting in a
letter to Alma Mahler, "One must always blame himself for his fate. I have
certainly failed to have a certain something that one must haveand today
more than everin order to come to the fore." 42 Yet Louise Zemlinsky
recalled a conversation with Zemlinsky in 1920: " 'As long as I live I do
not expect my music to be recognized, but after my death it will be.' Then
after a pause, he added: 'The thought that it should not be soI could not
even thinkI could not bear.' " 43
Chapter 8
Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg,

and Schoenberg's Circle
Consideration for the listener? I have exactly as little of this as he has

for me. All I know is that he exists, and in so far as he isn't "indis-
pensable" for acoustic reasons (since music doesn't sound well in an
empty hall), he's only a nuisance.
Arnold Schoenberg1
[M]y public? I must confess: I don't think I have one.
Arnold Schoenberg2
For many years, Zemlinsky was simply remembered as having been Arnold
Schoenberg's only teacher. We do not really know what Zemlinsky taught
Schoenberg, how formal this instruction was, or h o w long it lasted. M u c h
speculation has been generated by Schoenberg's comment, "I owe most of
my knowledge of the technique and the problems of composing [to] Al-
exander von Zemlinsky," 3 a statement repeated and then frequently mini-
mized by Schoenberg's biographers. But why not take Schoenberga man
w h o never flatteredat his word? There are tantalizing similarities in some
of the ideas shared by both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg on teaching, re-
hearsal techniques, traditional harmony, and variation technique. One
could argue that the starting point for many of Schoenberg's concepts was
inspired and shaped by his experiences with Zemlinsky.
For many years, they were inseparable. They frequented cafes together,
vacationed together, and played tarok together (perhaps also tennis); and
after Schoenberg's first two-year sojourn in Berlin, they even lived in the
same house for many years. Their love for each other appears to have lasted
throughout their lives, althoughironicallythe intensity of their friend-
ship slowly deteriorated over time as each man remained true to his own
musical vision. Schoenberg's courageous development of the twelve-tone
system in the face of violent public opposition was matched by Zemlinsky's
equally stalwart pursuit of a personal style within the existing system of
tonality. While he programmed, promoted, and brilliantly conducted music
of his avant-garde friends, Zemlinsky remained dedicated to his separate
musical path. As the tension between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg intensi-
fied, they gradually found themselves unable to find c o m m o n ground. The
ultimate failure of their friendship, however, did not hinge simply on their
intellectual parting of the ways but was also rooted in a story of h u m a n
foibles and tumultuous times.
Zemlinsky claimed no credit for his famous student, nor did he provide
any clues about his instruction of Schoenberg. It was Schoenberg, in fact,
w h o revealed that Zemlinsky had been his teacher. In his "Thoughts about
Zemlinsky" for the 1921 issue of Der Auftakt honoring Zemlinsky's fiftieth
birthday, Schoenberg said, " H e was my teacher, I became his friend, later
his brother-in-law, and he has been for many years since then the one
whose reaction I try to envision when I need advice." 4 Schoenberg dedi-
cated his op. 1 and op. 2 to "my teacher and friend Alexander von Zem-
linsky." 5 Even if Zemlinsky's own modesty prevented any decisive
revelations on this matter, his generous recognition and support of Schoen-
berg's talent had to be significant for the beleaguered genius.
Schoenberg, in his seventy-fifth year, remembered his friend Zemlinsky:
"I had been a 'Brahmsian' when I met Zemlinsky. His love embraced both
Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed
addict. . . . This is why in my Verkldrte Nacht the thematic construction is
based on Wagnerian 'model and sequence' above a roving harmony on the
one hand, and on Brahms' technique of developing variationas I call it
on the other. Also to Brahms must be ascribed the imparity of measures." 6
Brahms's variation technique formed the basis for the evolving thematic
metamorphosis that each man adapted to his writing style and continued
to refine throughout his career. Wagner's complex tonal vocabulary is
clearly apparent in Schoenberg's Verkldrte Nacht and Gurrelieder and in
the richly chromatic harmonies of Zemlinsky's op. 7 songs. Wagner's icon-
oclasm and musical self-assurance would continue to manifest itself in
Schoenberg's bold experimentation and visionary innovations. For Zemlin-
sky, Wagner's music, especially Tristan und Isolde, was a touchstone and
point of reference, incorporated into his fundamental musical vocabulary
as, for example, in "Entbietung" of op. 7 from 1898 or the Lyric Sym-
phony from 1922.
O n several occasions, Schoenberg referred to musical ideals he and Zem-
linsky held in common: "Alexander von Zemlinsky told me that Brahms
had said that every time he faced difficult problems he would consult a
significant work of Bach and one of Beethoven. . . . H o w did they handle
Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Schoenberg s Circle 77
a similar problem? Of course the model was not copied mechanically, but
its mental essence was applied accommodatingly." 7 Zemlinsky communi-
cated this same principle in letters to his student Alma Schindler, when he
asked her to use Beethoven as a model in order to discover how Beethoven
solved musical problems. 8 Schoenberg followed this dictum in his Har-
monielehre, teaching the principles of the past as a foundation for the pres-
ent. In 1920, Egon Wellesz stated that Schoenberg demonstrates to his
students "the works of the great masters, from Bach to Brahms, discusses
them and makes his pupils analyze them." 9
Both Schoenberg and Zemlinsky also responded to many of the same
literary currents of their era: Both set the words of Paul Heyse, Richard
Dehmel, Maurice Maeterlinck, H u g o von Hofmannsthal, and Danish poet
Jens Peter Jacobsen. When both entered a song competition sponsored by
the magazine Die Woche, each set the same t w o poems, "Jane Grey" by
Heinrich Amann and "Der verlorene Haufen" by Victor Klemperer. At the
same time, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky remained true to their individual
artistic paths and only on a few occasions set the same poem. As colleagues,
however, they obviously discussed their perceptions about poetry and mu-
sic, and often the intellectual Schoenberg was able to verbalize musical
ideals that each realized in his music.
Zemlinsky recounted his meeting with Schoenberg in a tribute titled
"Youthful Memories" in a Festschrift honoring Arnold Schoenberg's six-
tieth birthday.
[0]ver thirty years ago musically enthusiastic students in Vienna founded an

amateur orchestra, proudly naming it, "Polyhymnia" and chose me as their direc-
tor. The orchestra was not large. A few violins, a viola, a cello, and a contra bass
actually only a half. . . . We were all musically hungry and young; we made music
well and badly once every week. . . . At the only cello desk sat a young man who
mishandled his instrument as ardently as he did incorrectly (Which didn't deserve
any better treatmentit was bought by the player for three gulden in a so-called
flea market in Vienna) and this cello player was none other than Arnold Schonberg.
At this time, Schonberg was still a lowly bank clerk, who . . . gave his music notes
priority over his bank notes [S]oon there developed out of this acquaintance-
ship an intimate friendship. We showed one another our works; Schonberg already
at this time composed everything imaginable, such as violin sonatas, duets, choruses
for workers' societies and mainly songs. . . . His first larger work was a string quar-
tet [revised under Zemlinsky's guidance] . . . I was a member of the board of di-
rectors of the Vienna Tonkiinstlerverein . . . and recommended that Schonberg's
quartet [String Quartet in D major] be performed. . . . I believe the success was
great. . . .
Soon after that he wrote a string sextet on a poem by Richard Dehmel. . . . I tried
to get the board of directors of the Tonkiinstlerverein to schedule a performance
of this work, but this time I had no luck. . . . A member of the jury gave his judg-
ment with these words: "It sounds as if one had wiped right over the Tristan score
while it was still wet." Now this sextet, Verkldrte Nacht, is not only one of the
most performed works by Schonberg, but also one of the most performed of all
modern chamber music literature. Schonberg . . . dispatched the entire affair with
his still uncommonly cheerful, optimistic nature. [Zemlinsky's comment on Schoen-
berg's cheerful nature is especially interesting in light of Schoenberg's later defiant
temperament, no doubt the result of the unremitting hostile resistance to his work.]
The Tonkiinstlerverein was destined to come in contact with one of his works for
still a third time, and indeed through one of the society's advertised prizes for a
song cycle with piano. Schonberg, who wanted to apply for the prize, composed a
few songs on the poetry of Jacobsen. I played them for him. (Schonberg does not
play the piano). The songs were beautiful and truly innovative, but we both had
the impression that for that reason they had little prospect for a prize. In spite of
this, Schonberg composed the whole large cycle by Jacobsen. But no longer for only
one voice; now he composed large choruses, a melodrama, preludes and interludes,
and the entire work for a giant orchestra. A very large work, the Gurrelieder,
resulted, a work that established his world success. Still even his great success did
not protect Schonberg from the bitter battles over his later works. Today, however,
on his sixtieth birthday, he already knows that he has emerged as the victor.10
Besides reworking the D major string quartet under Zemlinsky's tutelage,

Schoenberg also prepared a large part of the piano/vocal score for Zemlin-
sky's opera Sarema, possibly as an exercise in orchestral reduction. 1 1 Zem-
linsky, whose opera was performed at the Munich Opera House on 10
October 1897, was obviously also relieved of some responsibilities as he
prepared for the premiere of his opera. Schoenberg would later require his
own students to make piano/vocal scores of his works. A review of Sa rema
in the 17 October 1897 issue of the Neue Musikalische Presse credits
Schoenberg with assisting Zemlinsky with the libretto, but it is not clear
that Schoenberg knew Zemlinsky at the time the libretto for Sarema was
prepared. Zemlinsky appears to have begun the opera in February 1894,
probably before he had met Schoenberg. Clayton points out that Schoen-
berg made musical references to Sarema and to the opening of Zemlinsky's
Trio (1896) in his String Quartet, no. 1 in D minor (1904-1905). 1 2
Schoenberg and his students appear to have consulted Zemlinsky about
musical questions until at least 1908. In a presumably critical reference to
Zemlinsky's influence, Webern, in The Path to the New Music, related that
in 1906, while he, Berg, and Schoenberg were struggling to discover a way
to move from tonality to something new, Webern had written a sonata
movement that only tacitly maintained a relationship to key. "Then I was
supposed to write a variation movement, but I thought of a variation theme
that wasn't really in a key at all. Schoenberg called on Zemlinsky for help,
and he dealt with the matter negatively." 1 3 Actually, Webern held Zemlin-
sky in high esteem for many years, and only after the break between
Schoenberg and Zemlinsky in 1926 did Webern distance himself from Zem-
linsky.
Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Schoenberg's Circle 79
Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde in 1901 and moved to

Berlin in search of opportunities that conservative Vienna could not offer.
Zemlinsky's letters to Schoenberg during this period are w a r m , h u m o r o u s ,
and solicitous. When Schoenberg, his wife, and small daughter Trudi re-
turned to Vienna in 1903, they rented an apartment in Liechtensteinstrasse,
N o . 68/70, where Zemlinsky lived with his mother. 1 4 They were so often
seen together that Gustav Mahler called them Eisele and Beisele, after two
comic-strip characters then popular in Vienna. 1 5
In 1906, Zemlinsky introduced Schoenberg to the highly gifted painter
Richard Gerstl ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 0 8 ) , now recognized as one of the most precocious
Austrian artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gerstl became
intensely involved with Zemlinsky and the Schoenberg circle, giving
Schoenberg painting lessons 16 as well as painting portraits of Zemlinsky,
Schoenberg, Mathilde Schoenberg, the Schoenberg family, Webern's cousin
Ernst Diez, Berg, and Berg's sister Smaragda Berg. Gerstl was devoted to
Schoenberg, but unfortunately, he also fell in love with Schoenberg's wife.
In July 1908, Mathilde left Schoenberg and moved into an apartment with
Gerstl on Liechtensteinstrasse (the street on which Schoenberg lived!). 17
Webern found them and urged Mathilde Schoenberg to return to her hus-
band, appealing to her as a mother of two small children. Finally, bowing
to pressure from family and friends, she returned to Schoenberg, but on 4
November 1908, Gerstl committed suicide, hanging himself in front of a
mirror. Gerstl's biographer, O t t o Breicha, states that Gerstl also stabbed
himself at the same time. 1 8
H o w the Schoenbergs reconciled themselves to each other after Mathilde
Schoenberg returned home is unclear. Schoenberg appears to have tempo-
rarily entertained thoughts of suicide; even in his seventieth year, he was
reminded of their pitiful story by art historian O t t o Kallir, w h o glowingly
referred to Gerstl in a letter to Schoenberg in 1944. 1 9 The Schoenbergs'
tragedy touched every member of the Zemlinsky/Schoenberg circle and sur-
faced at strange times throughout their lives. It soured Mathilde's relation-
ship with Webern forever. Alban Berg used this complicated story as a
secret program for the Adagio movement of his Chamber Concerto. 2 0 One
scholar has even speculated that Zemlinsky could have been thinking of
these events when he wrote "Als ihr Geliebter schied" (When Her Lover
Left), op. 13, no. 4. 2 1
In recent years, Louise Zemlinsky recounted what Zemlinsky had told
her about the affair. " 'When she heard of Gerstl's death, Mathilde stopped
speaking,' Zemlinsky said. [After that], 'she only spoke w h a t was neces-
sary.' " 2 2 In a letter to violinist Louis Krasner, Mrs. Zemlinsky recounted
that
Zemlinsky told me that Mathilde was only a short time away from Schonberg, but
he [Zemlinsky] did not know that it was Webern who persuaded her to come back
to Schonberg. ("I have learned it only after her death.") Zemlinsky thought that
Mathilde went back because Schonberg "war der starkere." [was the stronger]. He
also told me that Schonberg started to paint, to prove to Mathilde that he also
could paint. Zemlinsky loved Schonberg and did not wish to be told anything about
Mathilde at that timeonly Zemlinsky's first wife kept contact with her.23
In a letter to Gerstl's brother Alois shortly after Gerstl's suicide, Mathilde

Schoenberg wrote, "Believe me, Richard has chosen the easier way." 2 4
A posthumous exhibition of Gerstl's paintings in 1931 was highly praised
at the time, but Gerstl, like Zemlinsky, was quickly forgotten after the
Nazis came to power. Today, growing regard for Gerstl's painting, precip-
itated by an exhibition of his works in memory of the one hundredth an-
niversary of his birth in 1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 4 at the Historisches M u s e u m der Stadt
Wien, coincides with a renewed interest in Zemlinsky's music, also stimu-
lated by a centenary celebration of Zemlinsky's birth. These t w o teachers
of Schoenberg are n o w being remembered for their own creative genius.
The years 1907 through 1909 inaugurated a highly creative time for
Schoenberg, despite or because of the agonies he experienced. In his essay
" M y Evolution," he recounted, "In this period I renounced a tonal centre
a procedure incorrectly called 'atonality'. . . . The first step occurred in the
two Songs, op. 14, and thereafter in the Fifteen Songs of the Hanging
Gardens and in the Three Piano Pieces, op. I I . " 2 5 In The Book of the
Hanging Gardens ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 0 9 ) , fifteen songs on poems by Stefan George,
Schoenberg's pitch organization no longer centers around the triad or its
place in a larger triadic complex or key. Without an underlying tonal cen-
ter, the urgency for resolution of nonharmonic tones no longer exists
hence the "emancipation of dissonance." Schoenberg continued, "Coher-
ence in classic compositions is basedbroadly speakingon the unifying
qualities of such structural factors as rhythms, motifs, phrases, and the
constant reference of all melodic and harmonic features to the centre of
gravitationthe tonic. Renouncement of the unifying power of the tonic
still leaves all other factors in operation." 2 6 He related that his "accom-
panying harmony came to my mind in a quasi-melodic manner, like broken
chords. A melodic line, a voice part, or even a melody derives from hori-
zontal projections of tonal relations. A chord results similarly from projec-
tions in the vertical direction."27 Throughout The Book of the Hanging
Gardens, melodic and harmonic material are exchanged as, for example,
in the first measure of song eight, "Wenn ich heut nicht deinen Lieb be-
r u h r e " (If I D o N o t Touch Your Body Today), where the first three beats
of the piano part both vertically and horizontally outline the beginning
voice line. These songs rely on nonharmonic progressions, irregular phrase
lengths, a high level of chromaticism, and chords built on fourthsboth
perfect and augmented and only occasionally have tonal references. The
first performance of the George songs took place on 14 January 1910 in
Ehrbar Hall for the Society for Art and Culture (the former Ansorge So-
ciety). In the program notes for this performance, Schoenberg stated that
"with the George songs I have for the first time succeeded in approaching
an ideal of expression and form which has been in my mind for years. . . .
I am conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone
aesthetic." 2 8 Schoenberg's former student Erwin Stein wrote of this per-
formance:
It was as if a new spatial dimension had been opened up . . . the most delicate
gradations of psychic excitement became clear. One heard new harmonies, with the
luminous quality of the colourful garden flowers they portrayed. At one moment
the sounds would float, released from any division into metre, as if time were trying
to stand still; the next, sharply rhythmical figures, together with harsh chords, drew
sound pictures whose dynamics approached the threshold of pain. 29
Schoenberg's "evolution" also included a new aesthetic for setting text to

music which will be discussed in Chapter 10.
The Book of the Hanging Gardens and the poetry of Stefan George rep-
resent a turning point not just for Schoenberg but for Webern as well. In
Webern's fourteen musical settings of George's poetry from the years 1908
and 1909, key signatures are no longer of significance, songs are extremely
brief, and dynamic levelsminutely notated and offering a unique formal
cohesion to the musicoften hover between triple " p i a n o " and "pianis-
simo." Brief passages of "forte," "fortissimo," or "mezzo forte" are neu-
tralized by "mezzo p i a n o " and " p i a n o " in the phrases that follow. The five
songs of op. 4, for example, are highly restrained and introspective, care-
fully shaped by metronomic markings at the beginning and within sections
of each song. The songs are also peppered with "ritards," "a tempi," and
"accelerandi," which also become important expressive and structural de-
vices. Voice and piano inhabit separate musical planes, rhythmically inde-
pendent of one another, each moving at its own pace; the extreme
complexity of the rhythmic motion, the frequent change of meter, and the
dissolution of metric pulse contribute to a sense of time suspended. We-
bern's constant insertion of rests within the vocal phrase fragments the text,
heightening the delicate, ephemeral images of the poems, delivered by the
voice in the manner of intimate recitative. Voice and piano are often me-
lodically integrated and at times unfold the same set pattern simultaneously
but with rhythmically different designs (i.e., op. 3, mm. 5-6). Webern, like
Schoenberg, presents melodic material both in chordsverticallyand in
melodieshorizontally (i.e., op. 3, m. 7). (Berg also used the same material
both horizontally and vertically; i.e., in the opera Lulu, the twelve-note
series that melodically represents the character Lulu also occurs in four
chords that represent Lulu's portrait.) Circular motion in both piano and
voice based on half-step patterns, parallel motion in the piano part, and
chords of fourths and fifths (parallel, diminished, and augmented) destroy

any sense of tonal center. George's pristine, restrained poems have found
their ideal interpreters.
Zemlinsky supported Schoenberg's innovations at the beginning of their
friendship and tirelessly promoted all of Schoenberg's interests. In a letter
of 1901 to his student Alma Schindler, Zemlinsky recommended she study
with Schoenberg: "How would it be then with Schonberg [as your teacher]:
a highly talented man, a fiery spirit through and through, a regular revo-
lutionary! Consider it." 30 Schindler at first did not like Schoenberg's
compositions31 and chose not to study with him because she considered
him "too Jewish." 32 But she later related that Zemlinsky had assured her:
"You wait. The world will talk of him before long." 33 Eventually, she
would revere Schoenberg's music above Zemlinsky's. Zemlinsky suggested
Schoenberg's name for composition commissions and even raised money
for him when he was in financial trouble. Zemlinsky also performed
Schoenberg's songs, as for example, in 1898, when he accompanied the
singer Eduard Gartner, and in 1907, when he accompanied singers from
the Court Opera at Ehrbar Hall in a song recital that included lieder from
Schoenberg's op. 2, op. 3, and op. 6. (Ticket holders were advised "to listen
quietly, and not to make his views known aloud by applauding or hiss-
ing.") 34 On one occasion, Zemlinsky had to excuse himself from a meeting
with Alma Schindler, lamenting he had to learn twenty of Schoenberg's
songs for a concert that was only eight days away!35 Zemlinsky continued
to promote Schoenberg's songs when he moved to Prague, for example,
accompanying a recital of Schoenberg's music in Prague with Vally Fredric-
Hottges in January 1914.
After Zemlinsky became a respected conductor, he programmed many
of Schoenberg's works: for example, three of the Six Orchestral Songs in
1913, Verkldrte Nacht op. 4, arranged for string orchestra in November
1916, and Gurrelieder in 1921. When he learned that Schoenberg wanted
to gain experience as a conductor, Zemlinsky then invited Schoenberg to
conduct his symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande in Prague (29 February
1912).
Schoenberg's biographer Stuckenschmidt stated that Zemlinsky re-
mained, in hindsight, "Schoenberg's most reliable adviser and helper." 36
Schoenberg often asked Zemlinsky's opinion about poetic texts and singers
and testified to the strength of their friendship in a letter to Zemlinsky on
9 January 1915, saying that "there is nothing as durable as the friendship
of one's youth. And in fact, I have at the most made one new friend (We-
bern) since then!" 37 Their correspondencea mix of family and profes-
sional concernsprovides us with an intimate view of both men.
Zemlinsky would sometimes mention works he was reading and ask for
Schoenberg's opinion,38 and their discussions of World War I, while highly
patriotic, also revealed their concerns about being drafted since each was
over forty years of age. In February 1915, Zemlinsky wrote, "I am curious
whether I will be drafted,"39 and Schoenberg responded that Zemlinsky
was too weak to be drafted.40 Sure enough, Zemlinsky reported to Schoen-
berg in September 1915, "I was called up and not found fit."41 But Schoen-
berg, at the age of forty-one, was called up. The poet Richard Dehmel
enlisted as a private soldier at the age of fifty-one!42
Schoenberg attested to his high admiration for Zemlinsky over and over
again but no more touchingly than in a letter (3 February 1914) to Zem-
linsky after the performance of several of Schoenberg's orchestral songs
from op. 8.
Dear Alex,
Before anything else, I want to say to you that my visit to Prague brought me
extraordinary joy. This entire atmosphere of pure artistic power that you have
created around you . . . was for me above all an aesthetic, but more still, a moral
enjoyment. . . . Your music making, this love of music making, this natural, unaf-
fected, self-understood greatness . . . I who live here alone on a desert islandhave
not felt so good for a long time as in these five days.
Sadly, you are not famous and, thank God, you are not. For I do not know
whether one could remain so honorable if one were famous; I do not even know
whether I should ever wish it for you. . . .
For me and my closest students, Prague is already a Mecca. And we must often
make a pilgrimage there when we want to hear music. . . . For me, you are uncon-
ditionally the greatest living conductor. . . .
I am proud that my things can call forth in you such beautiful form as occurred
in this performance. I know through this that spirit can touch spirit. . . .
In true friendship, I am
Yours,
Arnold Schonberg4^
Three days earlier, Schoenberg called Zemlinsky the "best conductor

alive" 4 4 in a letter to publisher Emil Hertzka of 1914.
In 1914, Zemlinsky wrote to Alma Mahler: "Understandably, I have no
connection with anyone in the theater and so am more and more in the
company of my child and wife. Schonberg remains, finally, the only one
w h o understands m e . " 4 5 O n several occasions, Zemlinsky, feeling totally
isolated in Prague, planned to resign or actually did submit his resignation.
In M a y 1914, for example, Zemlinsky told Schoenberg he wanted to leave
Prague, but Schoenberg encouraged him to remain, assuring him that he
had made great improvements there. 4 6
After Zemlinsky decided to dedicate his String Quartet, no. 2, op. 15, to
his friend, Schoenberg responded in November 1916: "This is for me a
great joy and sign of recognition. I feel first of all the personal act of friend-
ship. But also, there is the sign of recognition, a public word of affirmation,
of belief, of trust in me, spoken by a mature man. I feel the difference
between a dedication of a youthful enthusiast and the expression of friend-

ship and the conviction of a great artist." 47 It was particularly fitting that
Zemlinsky quoted Schoenberg's Verkldrte Nacht in the one- movement op.
15.
After Zemlinsky's performance of Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande,
Schoenberg confided, "I have learned very much from these rehearsals. . . .
One cannot even see that you have a plan or a goal, and one sees only at
the end that you have achieved both. I am very thankful to you for this
performance. It is of the greatest use for my work." 48
Zemlinsky's technique of teaching conducting seems similar to methods
both he and Schoenberg also used to teach composition. A 1921 article in
the Prague music journal Der Auftakt by one of Zemlinsky's (unnamed)
conducting students relates that Zemlinsky spent little time teaching the
mechanics of conducting but insisted his students learn to analyze the music
they would conduct: harmony, melody, form, instrumentation. Zemlinsky,
the highest example of applied musicality, helped his students translate their
analyses into musical concepts, using the text and the musical score as his
foundation. 49
Schoenberg also clearly valued Zemlinsky's gifts as a composer, and his
personal library contained Zemlinsky scores, which Schoenberg had hand-
bound himself.50 He said of Zemlinsky: "I do not know one composer after
Wagner who could satisfy the demands of the theater with better musical
substance than he. His ideas, his forms, his sonorities, and every turn of
the music sprang directly from the action, from the scenery, and from the
singer's voices [sic] with a naturalness and distinction of supreme qual-
ity." 51 He later noted that both he and Zemlinsky wrote music very rapidly
and recalled that while Zemlinsky was a student at the Vienna Conserva-
tory, he had to teach many piano lessons in order to make a living. Between
lessons, Zemlinsky would practice the piano and compose, allowing the ink
of his compositions to dry while he taught his next lesson.52
Although Zemlinsky never chose to join forces with his iconoclastic
friend, his music shows great change over his compositional life as he
pushed against the boundaries of tonality. Part of this change can be at-
tributed to Schoenberg's continuing musical explorations, which provoked
some of the developments in Zemlinsky's musical concepts. Schoenberg,
like Zemlinsky, carefully studied the masters of the past, and Schoenberg's
students maintained that "his examples were drawn nearly exclusively from
the classical repertoirefrom Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms. He
. . . saw his own music a part of historical continuity." 53 But perhaps be-
cause he was primarily self-taught, Schoenberg had not experienced years
of indoctrination and submission to the rules most musicians encounter in
their studies. His unfettered background allowed him to consider a break
with tonality as inevitable, for he believed that tonality had already been
exhaustively explored and no longer offered the opportunity to say any-
thing new. His move from tonality to a system of twelve-tone music took
place over many years but was part of an exploratory process that was
being pursued by other composers, such as Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hin-
demith, w h o , while not arriving at the same conclusions as he, nevertheless
struggled with the restrictions of tonality.
As Schoenberg's music gradually moved farther from the mainstream,
Zemlinsky disarmingly commented: "In my opinion, Mahler will be
counted among the inviolable in the not too distant future.I do not al-
ways have the same love for the last works of Schonberg, but always
boundless respect. I k n o w from experience that those works which today
do not speak to me, can t o m o r r o w become an affectionate standard. So I
wait in confidence, for I have faithin myself." 54
The revolutionary new music of such composers as Schoenberg, Berg,
Webern, and Stravinsky sparked such hostility among shocked critics and
bewildered audiences that concerts became spectacles of noise and violence.
In such a contentious environment, music could not be heard amid the
shouts of angry demonstrators. Arnold Schoenberg began to look for ways
to educate new listeners, and in 1918, intrigued by an idea of his student
Erwin Ratz, Schoenberg invited the public to ten rehearsals of his Chamber
Symphony, op. 9, hoping to assist the audience in understanding and be-
coming familiar with his music. 5 5 This effort was so successful that Schoen-
berg decided to start a music society that would cultivate an appreciation
for modern music among open-minded music lovers. The Society for Pri-
vate Musical Performances (Verein fur musikalische Privatauffiihrungen)
presented finely prepared modern musicfrom works of Gustav Mahler
to current musicon a weekly basis for an audience of subscription hold-
ers. Subscribers to the series were given photo identification cards so that
critics and rabble-rousers could be excluded. N o applause was allowed
during programs, concerts were not reviewed, and pieces might be played
several times during the season (or even on the same program) to allow
listeners a greater familiarity with difficult works. Programs were not an-
nounced in advance of performances so that audiences would not avoid
music they thought they didn't want to hear. 5 6 A wide variety of music by
composers from across Europe was performed, including works by Stra-
vinsky, Busoni, Schreker, Pfitzner, Josef Hauer, Alexander Scriabin, Rich-
ard Strauss, Ravel, Debussy, Zemlinsky, Berg, Webern, Bartok, Modest
Mussorgsky, M a x Reger, and Karol Szymanowski, to name a few.
Until October 1920, no works of Schoenberg were performed by the
Society in order to prevent accusations that Schoenberg was promoting
these concerts to further his own interests. Idealism even led the Society to
include music by composers they considered hostile to their goals, including
even works of Hans Pfitzner, whose outspoken opposition to modern music

was a thorn in the side of Schoenberg and his followers. In the words of
violinist Felix Galimir, "[W]e played, even music of their enemies . . . be-
cause we played just anything in the modern [repertory]." 5 7
From December 1918 until December 1 9 2 1 , 117 concerts of contem-
porary music were held as well as several other special concerts. 5 8 Seventeen
groups of songs were programmed in the first season, with Anton Webern
most frequently the coach for these works. Zemlinsky's music was per-
formed on 6 concerts in the first season: his op. 8 songs, his reduction of
Mahler's Symphony no. 6 for piano four hands (published in 1910), three
performances of his String Quartet, no. 2, op. 15, and two performances
of the songs of op. 13. His music was not performed again until 11 April
1921 when four of his op. 13 songs were sung by Marie Gutheil-Schoder
with Edward Steuermann at the piano. M o d e r n catalogs of the Society's
Vienna and Prague concerts list Zemlinsky's op. 13 as only being performed
by a singer and pianist, yet the Arnold Schoenberg Institute has copies of
two songs from op. 13, "Die Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen" and
"Und kehrt er einst heim," arranged in 1921 by Erwin Stein for flute,
clarinet, harmonium, piano, two violins, viola, cello, and contrabass and
stamped "Archive of The Society for Private Musical Performances." 5 9
Budding young artists such as Rudolf Serkin and specialists in twentieth-
century music such as Edward Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch performed.
Some of the violinists and pianists were women, and an all-woman string
quartet, "Das Quartett Bene-Jary," participated, but no compositions by
women composers were included on these programs.
Large works were presented in arrangements and/or reductions: for ex-
ample, the orchestral version of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
(Songs of a Wayfarer) arranged by Schoenberg for voice, flute, clarinet, two
violins, viola, cello, contrabass, piano, and harmonium; Zemlinsky's re-
duction of Mahler's Symphony, no. 6 in A minor for piano, four hands;
Anton Webern's Passacaglia for Orchestra, op. 1, arranged for two pianos,
six hands; Mahler's Symphony, no. 7 in E minor, arranged for two pianos
by Alfredo Casella; Richard Strauss's Symphonia domestica op. 53, ar-
ranged by O t t o Singer for two pianos. M a n y musicians, including Zemlin-
sky, were troubled by what could be considered a misrepresentation of
works whose orchestral colors were an integral part of the musical con-
ception. Such modifications might be considered equivalent to reducing a
painting by M o n e t to a black-and-white photo copy, implying that instru-
mental color is not an essential feature of music. Even Webern's Five Pieces
for Orchestra, op. 10, in which the tone colors of various instruments are
used to create melody (Klangfarbenmelodie), was presented in a reduction
for violin, viola, cello, piano, and harmonium. In his prospectus for the
Society, Alban Berg had justified the use of orchestral reductions, partly
because the Society could not afford to perform an orchestral work and
also because "it is possible in this way to hear and judge modern orchestral
works, stripped of the sound effects produced only by an orchestra, i.e.
stripped of all sensual resources. This disarms the c o m m o n objection, that
this music is effective only on account of its more or less rich and ingenious
instrumentation, and lacks those properties hitherto characteristic for good
music: melodies, harmonic richness, polyphony, perfection of form, archi-
tecture, etc." 6 0
In March 1920, the Vienna Society for Private Musical Performances
presented four guest concerts in Prague and included Zemlinsky's String
Quartet, no. 2, op. 15, on their 14 March 1920 performance. Zemlinsky
was concerned that Prague audiences would not come to hear piano re-
ductions of modern orchestral music, no matter how good the perform-
ance, 61 and Schoenberg seems to have honored Zemlinsky's apprehensions
by choosing music written for the piano, sonatas for violin and piano,
string quartets, and orchestral works that had been reduced for chamber
orchestra.
In 1922, a Prague Society for Private Musical Performances was created
with Zemlinsky as president and Schoenberg as honorary president. The
programs and performers were supplied by the Vienna Society. By this time,
however, the Vienna Society for Private Musical Performances no longer
existed but now became an interpretive organization under the direction of
Erwin Stein. 62 "fTjhe creation of the Prague Verein at that particular junc-
ture amounted to nothing less than a new lease on life for the parent or-
ganization. . . . It would, therefore, seem proper to say that the Verein
functioned uninterruptedly from 1918 to 1924, except for a change of
venue from Vienna to Prague in 1 9 2 2 . " 6 3
The first Prague Society concert took place on 25 M a y 1922 with a
performance of Pierrot lunaire conducted by Schoe nberg, and Debussy's
Sonata for cello and piano, performed by Wilhelm Winkler and Edward
Steuermann. Unlike its Viennese counterpart, the Prague Society was not a
closed organization, nor did it meet on a weekly basis, but rather monthly,
often on two successive days.
After the concerts of 8 and 9 October 1922 at the beginning of the fall
season, Zemlinsky wrote to Schoenberg on 24 October 1922:
Dear Schonberg,
There were many complaints about the second program. There were too many
repeats and the insignificant Milhaud was considered superfluous. The Webern and
Berg were very good and very interesting. . . . Likewise, it is impossible that we do
Reger on every evening. That was also considered unpleasant. Here, it is quite
different than in Vienna. You have one concert a week and we have one a month.
The members here . . . want to become acquainted with as much music as possible.
. . . Also, we must have some vocal music on the program. . . .
With warm greetings,
Alex64
26 October 1922
Dear Alex,
Today I received a letter from youwith reproaches. . . . Take into consideration
that the Prague programs are around one-third to one-half longer than those in
Vienna, which are at the most ninety minutes long. The repeats here are regarded
purely as "encores." Just as earlier "da capo" was required, thus today there is in
general nothing required; but for pedagogical reasons, which is why the Society
exists, the repeats were put in place from the beginning. It would be very good if
you would tell your members this again and again! People will accept everything
finallyeven the good and the rightwhen one only understands how to persuade
them. . . .
Now to the "insignificant" Milhaud. . . . Milhaud appears to me the most im-
portant representative of the current trend of thought in all the Romance language
countries: polytonality. Whether he pleases me is beside the point. But I find him
very talented. . . . I hoped that he would interest you. Reger must, in my judgment,
be presented often: 1) because he has written a lot 2) because he is dead and there
is still not a clear view of him ( I, by the wray, think he is a genius).A song
collaboration . . . was planned for the next series. Only it is not easy to satisfy you.
A singer costs a lot. . . . People are no longer satisfied with an honorarium. . . .
Many warm wishes from all of us.
Yours,
Arnold Schonberg65
During the years of its existence, the Viennese Society for Private Musical
Performances presented twenty-three pieces by Reger, many of which were
repeated on various programs so that Reger was heard sixty-one times in
the Society's recitals. The second-most-performed composer was Debussy,
with sixteen works represented in forty-five performances. Members of the
Viennese Society sometimes jokingly referred to themselves as "the Reger-
Debussy Verein" because Schoenberg programed so much of their music. 6 6
Although Milhaud's music was never included in the Vienna Society's con-
cert series, Schoenberg met Milhaud at Alma Mahler's house in 1921 when
Milhaud visited Vienna with singer Marya Freund. Milhaud and Freund
performed Pierrot lunaire in French, and then Erika Stiedry-Wagner, along
with members of the Vienna Society, presented Pierrot in German. 6 7 When
Milhaud and Poulenc were later invited to the Schoenbergs' home, they
both played some of their music and concluded with Milhaud's Le Boeuf
sur le toit for four hands. "Schoenberg was charmed by it." 6 8 This was the
piece that Schoenberg scheduled for the 26 M a y 1922 Prague Society con-
cert and then again for the 9 October 1922 concert. Le Boeuf sur le toit,
a collective composition of Milhaud and other members of Cocteau's circle
at that time, "had successfully branded Milhaud in the public mind as an
unprincipled exploiter of fashionable oddities." 6 9 (Zemlinsky would con-
duct the Prague premiere of Milhaud's Serenade on 8 M a r c h 1926.)
These two letters reflect the very different worlds of Zemlinsky and
Schoenberg. Zemlinsky knew that to keep his audiencemostly nonmu-

sicians, music lovers, and prosperous members of his communityhe had
to offer a wide range of musical experiences. He was only indirectly an
educator of the audiences, and although he demanded something of them,
he knew h o w far he could go. Although Zemlinsky was a highly respected
musician and teacher, he commanded no devout following like Schoenberg.
While the Vienna Society did bring in outside musicians w h o received hon-
oraria or pay, a loyal core of followers worked hundreds of hours, making
complex piano arrangements of symphonies for the Society, selling tickets
for concerts, arranging chairs, checking the identification cards of audience
members, and rehearsing every piece in the most minute details. They had
turned their lives over to an ideal that caused them financial hardship. Salka
Viertel, sister of pianist Edward Steuermann, said that "often he had to
sacrifice some concerts with lucrative possibilities. . . . He was always
working for Schoenberg. Edward was a very loyal and very idealistic per-
son. . . . Schoenberg was . . . like an octopus." 7 0
The Prague Society began with about 230 members and, over the two
years of its existence, presented twenty concerts. Works by thirty-four mod-
ern composers were performed, and the recital programs indicate that the
Viennese Society's performers were not simply recycling music they had
previously performed in Vienna but continued to learn new compositions.
Their performances included music by Stravinsky, Korngold, Bartok, Berg,
Honegger, Kodaly, Krenek, Malipiero, Pfitzner, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Ravel,
Reger, Arthur Schnabel, Schoenberg, Cyril Scott, Scriabin, Szymanowski,
Webern, Zemlinsky, and Hindemith. Hindemith himself appeared on 28
November 1923 as a member of his Amar String Quartet, playing Krenek's
String Quartet, no. 3, op. 19, and Zemlinsky's String Quartet, no. 2, op.
15. The 10 October 1923 concert was an all-Schoenberg recital: songs from
his op. 6 and the George Lieder with Marya Freund and Edward Steuer-
mann, as well as two sets of piano works played by Steuermann: Five piano
pieces, op. 2 3 , and Suite op. 2 5 .
Six of the twenty concerts for the Prague Society included songs, with
the entire 11 October 1923 program a song recital. (Zemlinsky also in-
cluded songs on Philharmonic concerts during his tenure in Prague.) De-
spite Zemlinsky's earlier objections, Schoenberg continued to program
music by Reger and Milhaud. Zemlinsky's music was performed at four of
the Society concerts: four songs in manuscript on texts of Hofmannsthal
and Baudelaire (presented at two concerts and lavishly praised by Webern
in a letter to Zemlinsky that is quoted in the introduction); Maeterlinck
songs, op. 13, and his String Quartet, no. 2, op. 15. The Society probably
planned to perform Zemlinsky's Psalm 23, op. 14, since Erwin Stein's ar-
rangement of this w o r k for chamber orchestra (including h a r m o n i u m and
piano) and voices (stamped "Archive of the Viennese Society for Private
Musical Performances") is housed in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in
Vienna. A fragment (forty-nine measures) of Zemlinsky's op. 15 in an ar-

rangement for two pianos by Schoenberg is also located in the Archives of
the Institute.
From M a y 1922 until 18 December 1 9 2 3 , the Viennese Society for Pri-
vate Musical Performances presented seventeen concerts for the Prague So-
ciety, and then the connection between the two societies ended. 7 1 The
Prague Society itself offered three more concerts that included works by
Bohemian-born/German composers Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and
Fidelio Finke with performances by Ullmann and Schulhoff, both pianists.
The final program of the Prague Society on 31 M a y 1924 was a matinee
for the ISCM, which was meeting in Prague at that time. (Zemlinsky also
directed the premiere of his Lyric Symphony on 4 June 1924 and Schoen-
berg's Erwartung on 6 June 1924 for the ISCM.)
Scholar Christopher Hailey has noted that the final demise of the Vienna
Verein coincided with the formation of the ISCM in 1 9 2 3 , founded on
principles similar to Schoenberg's Verein. 7 2 Schoenberg and his circle joined
the ISCM as a way of expanding their sphere of influence, for Schoenberg
was all too aware that his musical successes had been achieved in the in-
ternational arena, not in Vienna. Ironically, this growing international out-
look occurred at the same time Schoenberg expressed his nationalistic belief
that his twelve-tone system of composition would bring honor to German
music for the next 100 years. At the same time, reactionary forces within
the German-speaking musical community opposed the internationalism of
the ISCM, fearing that the greatness of German cultureactually neo-
Romanticism, especially as manifested in the music of W a g n e r w o u l d be
diluted by outside influences. 7 *
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg weathered many difficult periods in their
friendship. As early as 1 9 0 1 , Zemlinsky humorously alluded to his troubles
with Schoenberg when he told Alma Schindler that he was again on a good
footing with Schoenberg. 7 4 But in 1926 they had a major disagreement,
perhaps precipitated by Schoenberg's remarrying less than a year after
Zemlinsky's sister died. Despite their marital problemsmost dramatically
reflected in the Gerstl affairat her death, Schoenberg wrote to Zemlinsky
on 16 November 1923 about his love for Mathilde Schoenberg: "Mathilde
was so clear and simple in her disposition, she understood with few words
how to untie complicated knots and always rather quietly. . . . I need some-
one w h o , at the right moment, even if I am right, will dare to tell me that
I am not right. N o one will ever again have this authority. One n o w has
to be thankful for a lot of things about which one earlier was not even
conscious." 7 5
When he was about to remarry, Schoenberg wrote Zemlinsky to ask for
his blessing.
21 August 1924
Dear Alex,
I would like quickly to tell you (it would be highly unpleasant for me if you
heard this earlier from a third party rather than from me) that I am going to marry
Fraulein Trudy Kolisch. . . . I must say that I myself cannot conceive how it is pos-
sible that I can love another woman after Mathilde, and I tremble that I would
diminish her image. Will you understand and make allowance for me? I know you
are much too big hearted not to see that because I so loved Mathilde, this hole
must somehow be filled and I certainly will not stop thinking of her nor ever forget
what she was to me and what I owe her.76
Zemlinsky would also later remarry quickly after the death of his wife Ida,
but Mathilde Schoenberg was his sister and his link to Schoenberg as part
of his family. Zemlinsky's name was conspicuously absent from a Fest-
schrift honoring Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday. 7 7 Their letters at this time
reflect a growing coolness that was aggravated by their discussions of
Schoenberg's twelve-tone style. In fact, Berg implies that disagreements,
certainly exacerbated by Mathilde Schoenberg's death, were surfacing
among the Schoenberg circle as early as 1923: "I went out to Schoenberg's.
Zemlinsky and Webern were there. N o t very happy atmosphere, as always
these last weeks. In fact the whole afternoon and evening was one long
argument." 7 8 Well before the solidification of the twelve-tone technique,
however, Zemlinsky's skepticism about Schoenberg's changing style was
expressed in a letter by Schoenberg in October 1917: "Dear Alex: I k n o w
you haven't liked my latest music, but this will please you [the libretto to
Die Jakobsleiter]."79 In June 1925, Zemlinsky testily wrote that he did not
understand the foundation of Schoenberg's system; 80 then new dissension
erupted because of a conversation about twelve-tone music between
Schoenberg's student H a n n s Eisler and Zemlinsky. Eisler, according to
Schoenberg's brother-in-law Rudolf Kolisch, was one of Schoenberg's few
rebellious students, and Schoenberg was both antagonized and charmed by
him. 81
Berlin, 3 March 1926

Dear Alex,
Since Herr Eisler claims that you must have misunderstood him when you both
had your talk about twelve-note composition in the train, I'd be very grateful if
you would answer the following questions. Please just write your answers in beside
the questions.
I. Did Herr E. say he is turning away from all this modern stuff?
II. that he doesn't understand twelve-note music?
III. that he simply doesn't consider it music at all?
That is what you told me at the time, and since E. denies it, it would interest me
to know the truth. You will perhaps also recall the praise you bestowed on him,
saying he was the only independent personality among my pupils, the only one who
didn't "repeat after me."82
Schoenberg's terse request that Zemlinsky respond to each complaint in the

margin of the letter was actually a style of writing Schoenberg had some-
times used in his letters to Zemlinsky since 1913. Zemlinsky's ironic reply
in August 1913 after Schoenberg's first letter in this vein was a list letter
of his own in which Zemlinsky claimed to employ Schoenberg's
"method." 83 Many scholars have viewed their disagreement as a serious
breach in the relationship between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. Stucken-
schmidt, for his part, maintained that both men soon reconciled,84 noting
that in 1929 Schoenberg, a member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts,
included Zemlinsky's name in a list of his nominations for new members
(an honor not granted to Zemlinsky).
Schoenberg's masterful personality made life difficult for all those close
to him. Paul Pisk, musicologist and secretary to the Vienna Society for
Private Musical Performances, commented in 1980: "You can't imagine
how wearing it was for a normal human being to be with Schoenberg.
Schoenberg was most, I mean not only temperamental, but tyrannical. He
didn't allow any opposition." 85 Schoenberg had a brief falling out with his
most loyal disciple, Webern, in 1918 over a seemingly superficial misun-
derstanding, wounding Webern severely,86 and the servile language both
Webern and Berg used in their letters to Schoenberg reveals their fear of
his displeasure. Each performed great and menial tasks for "the master,"
making arrangements of his music, even packing his belongings when he
moved. In 1910, for example, Webern had begun to write an opera on
Maeterlinck's Les Sept Princesses but stopped when Schoenberg asked him
to make a piano reduction of Schoenberg's Six Orchestral Songs, op. 8.
Schoenberg's criticism of Berg, which extended well beyond discussions of
Berg's music, is evident in a letter of November 1915 from Berg to Schoen-
berg: "The first time I noticed your dissatisfaction with me was during the
Amsterdam trip. . . . That led to my most earnest endeavor: to change. . . .
Those many small things about me to which you rightfully object, like the
illegible handwriting, rambling letter style, negligent dress, etc. Finally I
naturally took to heart your criticism of the insignificance and worthless-
ness of my new compositions." 87 The charismatic Schoenberg inspired ab-
solute devotion from his students and, for his part, willingly taught them
for no fee if they were talented and couldn't afford lessons.
Later, while he worked independently on Wozzeck, Berg, in letters to his
wife, indicated his fear of being smothered by Schoenberg. As Berg gained
confidence, he tried to avoid Schoenberg, sometimes feigning illness so that
Schoenberg would not demand to see the Wozzeck score.88 (Zemlinsky,
apparently never intimidated by Schoenberg, would simply tell Schoenberg
he wasn't ready to talk about his work until he had formulated his ideas
more clearly.) 89 Yet after the Nazis had taken over Germany and were
menacing Austria, Berg offered his dedication of the opera Lulu to Schoen-
berg, an act of courageous respect for his mentor, a Jew w h o had been
driven from Germany. 9 0 In 1934, a Festschrift honoring Schoenberg's six-
tieth birthday appeared with testimonies in his honor from twenty-eight of
Schoenberg's students and friendsincluding Zemlinsky, Berg, Webern,
Alma Mahler, Adorno, Milhaud, and Werfel.
Zemlinsky continued to perform Schoenberg's music after their quarrel
in 1926 and a year later, in an issue of Pult und Taktstock, even defended
Schoenberg's opera Erwartung against the charge that it was just too dif-
ficult to perform.
In the summer of 1924, on the occasion of the International Music Festival in

Prague, I conducted the premiere of Schoenberg's theater piece, the monodrama
Erwartung. The work made a deep impression in the first performance; the success
was great. In spite of this, there has not been one other theater since then which
has put on the work. . . . I can only find one reason [for this]: the rumor of "almost
insurmountable difficulties" which accompanies this work. Let it be said right at
the beginning that this opinion is unfounded. Certainly, when first reading through
the score, the difficulties appear to be extraordinary. But in my experience, the
hardest part is overcome when two artists, a singer and a conductor, who are
convinced of the high value of this work, dedicate themselves entirely to studying
[this work] until they achieve complete success; . . . the role definitely must be beau-
tifully sung[the singer must] also [possess] a strong dramatic talent for charac-
terization. The orchestral part is not much harder than that of other modern works
and still has the advantage over these, in that, wonderfully arranged, it almost plays
by itself. . . . I subdivided the orchestra into extremely small groups which were
individually rehearsed. . . . To facilitate certain intonation difficulties in the voice, I
had the harmonium built into a lowered part of the stage, and on this instrument
the occasional pitch was given to [the singer]. . . . [In 1911, Schoenberg wrote an
accompaniment for the choral work, "Friede auf Erden," originally intended to be
sung "a cappella," after he learned that some choral groups were unable to perform
the work accurately.] I will have, in the next season in Berlin, the possibility of a
performance of Erwartung. In that case too, I will proceed according to this sys-
tem.91
The anticipated 1928 production of Erwartung at the Kroll Opera in Berlin

did not take place until 1930, but singer Moje Forbach had no difficulties
with pitch, so the harmonium was unnecessary.
Zemlinsky's efficient rehearsal techniques, and his ability to dissect and
conduct the difficult music of the twentieth century at a time when it was
completely new and puzzling to most musicians, illustrate his brilliance as
a conductor. He was a practical musician w h o knew well the time con-
straints imposed in dealing with professional musicians. Schoenberg, on the
other hand, could demand as many rehearsals as he deemed necessary.
Violist Marcel Dick recounted that Schoenberg insisted on 102 rehearsals

for the performance of his Quartet in D minor, op. 7. 92 Even the famous
conductor Erich Kleiber had to schedule 137 rehearsals for the premiere of
Berg's Wozzeck at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1925, and Schoenberg, who
attended the fourth performance on 7 January 1926, complained to Berg
that the performance was not very good. 9 3
The contrast between Zemlinsky, the practical musician, and Schoen-
berg, the idealist/innovator, can also be seen in their music. Zemlinsky's
works can be performed by most well-trained musicians, but Schoenberg's
compositions require musicians of the highest calibre, just to negotiate an
accurate performance of the notes. Schoenberg continued to learn from
Zemlinsky, however, even in later years. He too began to advocate rehears-
ing small groups after observing Zemlinsky's rehearsals of Erwartung.94
Whether or how much Zemlinsky and Schoenberg saw each other after
Zemlinsky moved to Berlin in 1927 is not clear. Perhaps they consulted
together on occasions such as Zemlinsky's performance of both Pierrot
lunaire and Erwartung in Berlin during the summer of 1930. Apparently
no letters exist for the period after February 1929 until July 1937, partly
supporting Louise Zemlinsky's statement that she destroyed Schoenberg's
letters to Zemlinsky after Schoenberg became angry with Zemlinsky for
not returning to Judaism in 1 9 3 3 . 9 ' But if Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were
corresponding at all during this period, it seems likely that Schoenberg
would have kept Zemlinsky's letters. Nevertheless, in 1934, Zemlinsky
wrote his affectionate account of their early friendship for a Festschrift
honoring Schoenberg on his sixtieth birthday, and they were clearly rec-
onciled during Zemlinsky's final illness after he had moved to the United
States.
Alma Mahler declared that although Zemlinsky was first the teacher of
Schoenberg, Schoenberg later became Zemlinsky's master. 9 6 But Zemlinsky
never accepted the role of either master or disciple. That is not to say that
Schoenberg had no influence on him. One has only to look at Zemlinsky's
String Quartet, no. 2 to k n o w that here Schoenberg was very much a stim-
ulus to Zemlinsky's ideas and inspiration. But Zemlinsky, more tied to
tradition than Schoenberg, can more easily be compared with conservatory-
trained musicians such as Mahler or Strauss, members of a continuous
historical tradition. Zemlinsky's early successes partly stemmed from his
adherence to the conservative nature of his early training, which may partly
explain his difficulty in abandoning a tradition that the mostly self-taught
Schoenberg found stifling. M a n y of the differences between Schoenberg and
Zemlinsky are obvious: that is, Schoenberg moved away from tonal music
to atonal music and then to twelve-tone music, whereas Zemlinsky never
abandoned tonality, even when he tested its limits. Schoenberg's music was
more intellectual than Zemlinsky's, more complex, often demanding the
eye as well as the ear for complete understanding (e.g., the musical palin-
drome in the strings and woodwinds of "Der Mondfleck" in Pierrot lu-

naire). His musical intricacies can be compared to those of Bach, while
Zemlinsky's graceful, fluid music is more Mozartianperhaps more Aus-
trian. Although Zemlinsky's music is rooted in motivic development, cou-
pled with intricate harmonic progressions, the results appear natural,
inevitable; the seams of his materials rarely call attention to themselves.
There have been many discussions over the validity of the label "The
Second Viennese School," sometimes used to describe Schoenberg and his
circle. 97 For those w h o oppose this name, the question has been, " W h a t is
the first Viennese School?" 9 8 Writers at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury often referred to Schoenberg and his followers as "Die Wiener Schule
am Anfang des 20. J a h r h u n d e r t s " (The Vienna School at the Beginning of
the 20th Century). 9 9 Berg, in 1929 at the Folkwang School in Essen, spoke
about the Schoenberg circle in a lecture he called "The Viennese School." 1 0 0
Although Zemlinsky was not writing music in the style of Schoenberg and
his students, he held a special place among them. T h r o u g h o u t his tenure
in Prague, Zemlinsky hired musicians w h o had studied with Schoenberg:
that is, Webern, Heinrich Jalowetz, Paul Pella, and Viktor Ullmann. Well
into the 1920s, Zemlinsky was clearly respected by these Viennese friends,
as revealed in Alban Berg's letter to his wife about the Viennese premiere
of Zemlinsky's opera Der Zwerg. Zemlinsky's friends came to rehearsals
of his opera, and on 21 November 1923, the dress rehearsal was attended
by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel, Arnold Rose,
Felix Greissle, Schoenberg's daughter Gertrud Greissle, and Marie Pappen-
heim and her husband. 1 0 1 It is also clear that Berg considered Zemlinsky a
part of the Viennese fraternity, implied in Berg's letter to his wife on 28
November 1923 in which he described a concert by the Hindemith Quartet
that included Schoenberg's String Quartet in D minor. "Really the most
sublime music. H o w it leaves behind absolutely everything n o w being com-
posed! Even Zemlinsky . . . but also Webern, of course. And m e ! " 1 0 2 Berg's
student, the famous literary critic Adorno, certainly considered Zemlinsky
a "member of the family" and defended him with the same fervor he used
to attack other composers such as Stravinsky, w h o was considered an out-
sider. In fact, scholar Rudolph Stephan has called Zemlinsky "the spiritual
center of the Viennese school," protecting the tradition upon which the
new could build. 1 0 3
Berg planned to write a monograph on Zemlinsky to be published by
E.P. Tal & Co. He wrote to Schoenberg in July 1920: "For so many re-
sponsibilities await me in the fall. . . . For example the Zemlinsky book. I
have a terrific desire to do it and have a great many significant things to
say about this music that has grown so dear to me. . . . Here, living incon-
spicuously, is one of the few masters worth more than all the officially
accredited "masters" Pfitzner, Schreker, and the whole German and Nordic
lot." The book was never published. 1 0 4
Adorno reported that Berg captured some of "the lyrical sweetness" of

Zemlinsky's music in Marie's lullaby in Wozzeck and "Alwa's rondo pas-
sages in Lulu."105 Berg's loyalty to Zemlinsky continued even after Zem-
linsky's estrangement from Schoenberg. (Ironically, Berg's reputation as a
composer soared as Zemlinsky's declined.)
Webern's letters to Zemlinsky between 1912 and 1924 are highly def-
erential and filled with praise for Zemlinsky's music. After rehearsing Zem-
linsky's String Quartet, no. 2, and the Maeterlinck lieder, op. 13, for a
performance of the Vienna Society for Private Musical Performances, We-
bern wrote on 16 May 1919: "First, I must say to you: Your works for
me belong to the most beautiful, most precious that there are. I understand
this music more and more: these beautiful thoughts, this wonderful ex-
pression. I am so happy that I was granted the honor to be able to take
part so intensively in the performance of your work. . . . How precious this
music has become." 106
Kokoschka, when interviewed in his later years, spoke of a bond many
of the Viennese radicals felt for one another in the first quarter of the
century. "It probably was because we all were on the edge of society. We
didn't belong to society."107 But those around Schoenberg believed that his
new path was the only path. Kokoschka reflected, "We all thought it was
'the' music so there was no dispute about it. It was just 'the' fact. All the
others were behind and didn't understand it, so we thought." 108
Perhaps, Schoenberg's second marriage and his decision to concentrate
on twelve-tone music finally removed Zemlinsky from this chosen circle.
Theodor Adorno, in his biography of Alban Berg, remarked that "Schoen-
berg, remarried, lived in Modling; his elegant young wife, so it seemed to
the old guard, kept him rather isolated from the friends of the old heroic
days." 109
But Zemlinsky's failure to embrace twelve-tone music would ultimately
influence the opinion of those scholars who viewed serialism as the inevi-
table goal of twentieth-century music. In the words of Christopher Hailey:
"The idea of an inexorable music-historical progression leading from a
diatonic to an increasingly chromatic tonality and on to the twelve-tone
system contained an alluring mixture of Darwinian determinism and di-
alectical materialism. Its founders were depicted as courageous and uncom-
promising pioneers who had braved philistine reactionaries and cultural
ostracism to bear witness to a sacred truth." 110 But with "the rehabilitation
of tonality" 111 many composers who failed to conform to this formula are
now being rediscovered.
Schoenberg continued to remember and honor Zemlinsky after Zemlin-
sky's death. In the preface to his German edition of Style and Idea (Stil
und Gedanke. Aufsdtze zur Musik, 1976), he dedicated this work to "my
dead friends, my spiritual relatives, my Anton von Webern, Alban Berg,
Heinrich Jalowetz, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Adolf Loos,
Karl Kraus." Schoenberg knew, more than we, how much he owed to Al-
exander Zemlinsky. When Louise Zemlinsky was asked what Zemlinsky
thought of Schoenberg, she said: "My husband loved Schonberg to the end
of his life. Schonberg's second wife was extremely jealous of Schonberg's
first marriage and prevented the friendship to continue, but my husband's
great love for Schonberg never stopped." 112
Chapter 9
Zemlinsky and the Eternal

Feminine, Alma Schindler
The eyes of a woman should not mirror her thoughts, but on the con-
trary, mine.
Karl Kraus1
[I]t is not the true woman who clamours for emancipation but only
the masculine type of woman.
Otto Weininger2
Alma Schindler (1879-1964) discovered early in life that her intelligence

and musical talent carried much less power than her beauty. Praised from
childhood for her comeliness and surrounded by successful male artists such
as her father, the landscape painter Emil Schindler, her stepfather, artist
Carl Moll, and the brilliant Gustav Klimt, this talented, vital girl grew into
a w o m a n w h o learned that it was her job "to hold the stirrup" for others. 3
She became Zemlinsky's student and love interest in 1900 and remained a
major force in his life even after she married Gustav Mahler in 1902. Her
roles as patroness of the arts, as celebrated femme fatale, as wife and lover
of several great creative figures, and as a gifted w o m a n w h o failed to pursue
her potential as a musician make her a vivid protagonist in Zemlinsky's
story.
As a child, Alma Schindler was taught reverence for Goethe's Faust by
her father, w h o instilled in his daughter a love for "the most beautiful book
in the world."4 She later emulated her first serious love, Gustav Klimt, by
always carrying a copy of Faust with her. 5 Goethe's final lines of Faust
offered her one of the kinder visions of w o m a n ' s role in the scheme of
Zemlinsky and the Eternal Feminine, Alma Schindler 99
things, words Gustav Mahler used for the final chorus of his Eighth Sym-
phony.
Alles Vergangliche
ist nur ein Gleichnis;
das Unzulangliche,
hier wird's Ereignis;
das Unbeschreibliche,
hier ist es getan;
das Ewig-Weibliche
zieht uns hinan. (Goethe's Faust II)
(Everything transitory is only a mirage. That which is imperfect is here

perfected. The indescribable is here described; the eternal feminine draws
us upward.)
For Goethe, w o m a n was the source of male inspiration; she was
his muse. Peter Altenberg, whose poems on postcards were set to music
by Alban Berg in his Altenberg Lieder, explained that woman's "role is
changed from one of satisfying physical, material, and social needs to one
of providing spiritual support. That she could be an artist in her own
right remains inconceivable: her place is not to create but to be a muse
to the male creator." 6 Altenberg glorified "the aesthetic genius of
woman."7
When the nineteen-year-old Alma Schindler showed her composition
teacher Josef Labor eight of her songs, he complimented her with the
words, " T h a t was a worthy achievement . . . for a girl." She wrote in her
diary, "Yes, it is a curse to be a girl, for one cannot overcome one's de-
fects." 8 In fact, she was flattered when listeners declared her songs did not
sound as if they were written by a woman,9 and she exhibited little respect
for the musical talents of other women, as, for example, when she dispar-
aged the pianistic talents of Marie Baumeyer, w h o performed at the M u -
sikverein: "correct but feebletypical playing by a w o m a n . " 1 0
But a much harsher view of w o m a n was entertained by many in fin de
siecle Vienna, a view expressed earlier by Arthur Schopenhauer in his essay,
"On Women."
[A]s the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence
their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies. . . . A com-
pletely truthful woman who does not practice dissimulation is perhaps an impos-
sibility."
Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-
shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex. . . . More fittingly than
the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor
poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity.12
Even Alma Schindler, w h o considered herself the most beautiful w o m a n in

Vienna, had been convinced by Klimt, whose views were synchronous with
his times, that a perfectly proportioned male was far more aesthetically
pleasing and noble than the loveliest w o m a n . 1 3 Yet Klimt's paintings of
alluring w o m e n far outnumber his paintings of men.
Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), participated wholeheart-
edly in the battle of the sexes.
I love to carry on a monologue with women. But a conversation with myself is

more stimulating.14
The best women are those with whom one speaks the least.15
The purpose of a woman is to make a man feel smart. He cannot do that without
hernor can he if she is too smart herself.16
Artistic Women: The better the poetry, the worse the face.17
O t t o Weininger's book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character),

which appeared in 1903 shortly before the twenty-three-year-old Weininger
killed himself ( 1 8 8 0 - 1 9 0 3 ) , found a receptive audience among many Eur-
opean artists and intellectuals including Kraus, Strindberg, and Kafka.
Weininger defined w o m a n ' s role in terms that resonated with the times:
"The w o m a n is devoted wholly to sexual matters . . . the sphere of beget-
ting and of reproduction. Her relations to her husband and children com-
plete her life. . . . [The man's role, on the other hand, was much broader:]
He is interested "in war and sport, in social affairs and feasting, in philos-
ophy and science, in business and politics, in religion and art. . . . [W]hen
the female occupies herself with matters outside the interests of sex, it is
for the man that she loves. . . . It may happen that a real female learns
Latin; if so, it is for some such purpose as to help her son w h o is at
school." 1 8 Should a w o m a n genuinely show interest in an arena outside his
definition of her sphere, then she was no longer a "real" w o m a n : "A
w o m a n ' s demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct
proportion to the a m o u n t of maleness in her. . . . [A]ll women w h o are
truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability . . . reveal some of the
anatomical characters of the male . . . homo-sexuality in a w o m a n is the
outcome of her masculinity. . . . [A] close investigation shows that w o m e n
really interested in intellectual matters are sexually intermediate forms." 1 9
Weininger, a Jew w h o had converted to Christianity, explained that
w o m e n have no "original capacity," only the power to imitate, 2 0 a char-
acteristic he believed they shared with the Jewsan argument later used
by the Nazis against Jewish creative artists. A superior male, w h o belonged
to the rank of the genius, was capable of realizing his existence: "that he
exists, that he is, and that he is in the w o r l d " was a capacity "altogether
lacking in w o m a n . " 2 1
One of the most influential novels of the late nineteenth century, A Re-
bours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, published in 1884, also reflected Schopen-
hauer's influence: "Yes, it was undoubtedly Schopenhauer who was in the
right. . . . [H]is theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior
minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate
stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disil-
lusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible." 22
The main character in A Rebours, the decadent Due Jean Floress as des
Esseintes, glorified a painting and water color of Salome by French artist
Gustave Moreau. The images of unbridled lust and debauchery contrasted
strangely with the cant of morality his society extolled: Salome "had be-
come . . . the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of im-
mortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties . . .
the dancer, the mortal woman, the soiled vessel, ultimate cause of every
sin and every crime . . . [S]he roused the sleeping senses of the male more
powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charmsthe charms
of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-
house of impiety." 23
Huysmans's decadent vision of Salome's erotic charms as well as Mal-
larme's continuously evolving poem "Herodiade" inspired Oscar Wilde to
write his necrophilial vision, the play Salome. "Wilde, tried in 1895-6 on
the charge of sodomy . . . became for the German and Austrian liberal of
the turn of the century the icon of the persecuted genius." 24 Wilde's Salome
was both the inspiration and libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Salome,
considered so lascivious by Kaiser Wilhelm II that its performance was
banned in Berlin. In 1907, the opera was withdrawn from production by
the Metropolitan Opera after only one performance and described by the
New York Sun as wallowing "in lust, lewdness, bestial appetites, and ab-
normal carnality." 25 Since it was also banned at the Court Opera in Vienna,
its Austrian premiere took place in Graz on 16 May 1906, a performance
witnessed by Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Berg, who traveled from
Vienna for the event.26
Salome was a tantalizing subject for many visual artists as well as writers
and musicians. Gustav Klimt's sexually charged paintings of Judith, the
mythological femme fatale who holds the severed head of Holofernes, were
also considered to be depictions of Salome.27 "Female beauty was endowed
with demonic powers. . . . [H]er seductive powers were enhanced by works
of visual artists in morbidly sensuous variations on the Sphinx and Vam-
pire, Judith and Salome motifs." 28 Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations of Oscar
Wilde's Salome and Edvard Munch's Salome contributed to the lore of the
femme fatale in the visual arts; Munch's The Vampire carries this vision to
the extreme, embodying in his nightmare fantasy "a powerful evocation of
the male terror of female sexuality." 29
Kafka's biographer Ernst Pawel points out that men "grew up without
meaningful contact with the opposite sex. They in fact inhabited an all-
male preserve, segregated not only through . . . school [but even in] the
famous cafes and beer gardens." 30 Consequently, "The fear of women was
pervasive in a social order that institutionalized their status as inferiors."31
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were, in fact, becoming
a threat to the male hierarchy. They were demanding the right to vote, to
divorce their husbands, to inherit their own property, to have custody of
their children, and to have jobs and control over their lives. Karl Kraus
and other powerful voices railed against feminists, attempting to reduce
them to little more than their sexual functions. And many women were
defeated, destined to fulfill the prophecy of society's low expectations. Alma
Schindler's diary reflected her frustration and despair. "My art? What can
a poor female achieve?Nothing. And I, I have too little seriousness." 32
She would forge for herself a unique position within the context of the old
world's expectations. Although she was acquainted with feminists such as
Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938)founding member of the Allgemeiner Os-
terreichischer Frauenverein (General Austrian Women's Association) and
the librettist for Hugo Wolf's opera CorregidorSchindler never joined
their ranks. Although she recognized that women had to be educated before
they could realize true emancipation, 33 the power she ultimately achieved
would represent a distinctive variation on Kraus's theme of female sexu-
ality.
Schindler grew up in a Vienna that was the vibrant center of the psy-
choanalytic movement, and Sigmund Freud's revolutionary ideas were
widely discussed in many social settings. In 1910, when she and Mahler
found their marriage disintegrating, Mahler consulted Freud during this
marital crisis. Her account of their meeting is related in her Memories, and
she agreed with Freud's statement, "I know your wife. She loved her father,
and she can only choose and love a man of his sort." Alma responded, "I
too always looked for a small, slight man, who had wisdom and spiritual
superiority, since this was what I had known and loved in my father." 34
This description fits not only Mahler but also Zemlinsky and Werfel.
Although Freud and his colleagues in the psychoanalytic field contributed
toward a more open discourse on sexuality at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, their views on women were in tune with the condescending,
narrow perspectives of Alma Schindler's contemporaries. As late as 1932,
Freud, father of a gifted daughter/colleague, lectured in "The Psychology
of Women" that the "problem of woman has puzzled people of every kind"
(italics mine).35 Declaring that his statements were founded on "observed
fact," Freud then launched into a subjective discussion of perceived weak-
nesses and inadequacies of woman and her "inferior clitoris." 36 His ter-
minology, "their original sexual inferiority," and "the deficiency in her
genitals," 37 betrays his biased views. Poor "Dora" and all those other "sex-
ually deficient" women who came to him for treatment.
The castration-complex in the girl . . . is started by the sight of the genital organs
of the other sex. . . . She feels herself at a great disadvantage . . . and falls a victim
to penis-envy . . . She is wounded in her self-love by the unfavourable comparison
with the boy who is so much better equipped . . . repudiates her love towards her
mother, and at the same time often represses a good deal of her sexual impulses in
general. . . . [WJomen have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected
with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.38
Freud concluded that "we have only described women insofar as their na-
tures are determined by their sexual function. The influence of this factor
is, of course, very far-reaching, but we must remember that an individual
woman may be a human being apart from this" (italics mine).39
Freud would have found Alma Schindler a worthy subject for study.
Vain, intelligent, self-centered, talented, beautiful in her youth, and prone
to excessive drinking, Alma Schindler-Gropius-Mahler-Werfel was one of
the most colorful members of early-twentieth-century Viennese artistic cir-
cles. A gifted young composer and student of Alexander Zemlinsky, she
was drawn to men with power: the power granted by physical perfection,
intellect, money, or creativity. And she attracted men like flies. She fulfilled
the fears of those men who looked on beautiful women as natural enemies,
for rarely did she show sympathy for the foibles of the men who succumbed
to her considerable charms. She was the wife of Gustav Mahler yet tortured
him with her flagrant affair with Walter Gropius. After Mahler's death,
she carried on a lengthy, torrid relationship with artist Oskar Kokoschka,
inspiring some of Kokoschka's finest works. 40 But she grew tired of Ko-
koschka and married Walter Gropius, a leading architect of the twentieth
century and a founder of the Bauhaus school of design. She began an adul-
terous liaison with poet/dramatist/novelist Franz Werfel and finally di-
vorced Gropius after the birth of a child whose paternity was unclear.41
Composers Franz Schreker, Hans Pfitzner (who dedicated his String Quar-
tet no. 1 to her), painter Gustav Klimt, Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilovich,
New York physician Joseph Fraenkel, and her teacher Alexander Zemlin-
sky were all in love with her.
Alma Schindler viewed her mother Anna Bergena singer before her
marriagewith disdain but passionately loved her handsome father, who
died when she was almost thirteen years old. In her romanticized, solipsistic
autobiography, she reflected on her life up to the moment of his death and
imagined herself as a princess who lived in a castle with her beloved fa-
theran artist who existed for his art, a man "deeply musical," who sang
Schumann songs in his beautiful tenor voice and spoke with captivating
charm. 42 The loss of her father, coupled with her early education, haphaz-
ardly offered at home by inadequate teachers unable to cope with her lively
intelligence, left Alma Schindler unfulfilled in mind and spirit. In her young
adulthood, she would be continually attracted to older men with artistic
credentials. Their mentoring extended from the intellectual to the sexual.
Schindler began composing at the age of nine, and music soon became
the most dependable joy of her life: "fN]othing interested me except mu-
sic." 4 3 She studied counterpoint with the blind organist Josef Labor, dis-
covered Wagner on her own, and claimed to live in a musical dream
world. 4 4 At fifteen she began to collect her own library: Dehmel, Rilke,
Liliencron. Family friend and former director of the Burgtheater, M a x
Burckhard, sent her "a great wash basket full of books carried by t w o
serving men . . . all classics in the most beautiful editions." 4 5 She and Burck-
hard shared many of the same intellectual interests, particularly a love of
Nietzsche. Brought up as a "free thinker," she was also attracted to the
philosophy of Schopenhauer and later of Plato. 4 6 She boasted that her li-
brary was superior to Mahler's when they married.
During a family trip to Italy in 1899, Schindler became completely ob-
sessed with painter Gustav Klimt, a familiar figure in the Moll/Schindler
household. Klimt was also enamored with Alma Schindler but had no in-
tention of marrying her. After her mother and stepfather discovered the
developing relationship, they summoned Klimt and ordered him to leave
their daughter alone. In her autobiography, she recounted that she shed
many tears and threw herself more passionately into her composing. 4 7
Schindler enjoyed the status she gained from her musical talent, and her
songs, sung by her mother at social gatherings, garnered praise from friends
and family. She was especially flattered when the eminent Belgian painter
Fernand Khnopff asked her to set one of his poems to music, and in her
diary she also proudly quoted Bertha Szeps-Zuckerkandl's compliment:
"She is beautifulthat is intolerable. She plays excellentlythat is annoy-
ing. And also composesit's enough to drive you crazy." 4 8
By February 1900, Zemlinsky's name began to appear in Alma Schin-
dler's diary. "Zemlinsky is very original, very Wagnerian." But her descrip-
tion of him was not flattering: "The man himself is the most comical there
is. A caricaturechinless, small, with protruding eyes and a crazy con-
ducting style." 4 9 She met him at a social gathering on 26 February 1900
and noted in her diary:
Almost the entire evening with Alexander von Zemlinsky, the twenty-eight year old
composer of Es war einmal. He is terribly ugly . . . and still he pleases me exces-
sively. . . . Zemlinsky said: "the first man we cannot say anything bad aboutwe
will toast with a glass of punch"After awhile we came to that man: Gustav
Mahler. We drank straight down. . . . At dinner Zemlinsky asked me very quietly:
"And are you opposed to Wagner?" "No," I said quietly, "he was the greatest
genius of all time." "And what do you love most of Wagner?" "Tristan"my
answer. After that he was so delighted he was unrecognizable. He was extraordi-
narily handsome. 50
Schindler's 10 M a r c h 1900 diary entry shows the progress of their rela-

tionship: " M e n swarmed around me like moths around a lamp. . . . Then
Zemlinsky was finally alone with me. That didn't last long . . . [but he] n o w
told me that my song pleased him extraordinarily, that I have a definite
talentand more." 5 1
After Schindler attended a performance of Zemlinsky's opera 5 war
einmal at the Court Opera, she praised the music but thought it too de-
pendent on Wagner's style. 52 She soon learned Zemlinsky was engaged to
a young singer named Melanie Guttmann, a graduate of the Conservatory,
w h o sometimes appeared in performance with Zemlinsky as her accom-
panist. O n 19 April 1900, Schindler spotted G u t t m a n n at a Tonkiinstler-
verein concert and sarcastically wrote, "She is terribly ugly. Such marriages
shouldn't be allowed by the government." 5 3 Schindler's curiosity, tinged
with jealousy, is evident in her constant diary references to G u t t m a n n .
Schindler found herself attracted to Zemlinsky and arranged opportu-
nities to be with him. His respect for her musical potential added to his
appeal. On 23 April 1900, she reported: "I played some of my last songs
for him, and he found very much talent but little skill. He asked me to take
the situation seriously . . . About one key change he said: 'That is so good
that I myself could almost have done it.' " 5 4 She arranged to study com-
position with Zemlinsky, although she was already a student of Josef La-
bor, w h o appears to have expected little of her or even to have given her
much of a musical background. Zemlinsky would later need to instruct her
in fundamentals such as the range of the tenor voice and h o w to notate
the tenor part. 5 5 Her musical education was never completed, and she
sometimes offered strange views on music in her autobiography, claiming,
for example, that Brahms and Verdi should be credited with inventing
jazz. 56 Throughout her life, she would pontificate on music, and because
of her prominence in the musical world, those opinions were and are still
seriously discussed. Her statement, for example, that the "Dance of the
Seven Veils" in Salome was "botched-up commonplace" 5 7 is usually ad-
dressed by scholars when considering Salome.5*
Zemlinsky was disturbed by his lovely student's superficialities, which
seemed to override her musical motivation. "You do not have the incli-
nation, the absolute veneration for work. For exampleyou would cal-
culate the material value of a work, not according to the effort you put
into it, but, quite the contrary, on the basis of h o w much luxury and pleas-
ure you could have as a result of it." 5 9 Schindler found herself attracted to
her new mentor and noted in her diary that she was overcome with over-
whelming sensuality when he was near her. 6 0 On 8 M a r c h 1 9 0 1 , she went
to a performance at the Tonkiinstlerverein to hear Zemlinsky's songs, in-
cluding "Irmelin Rose," which he had dedicated to her. Unfortunately, the
performance was also attended by Fraulein Guttmann, and Zemlinsky did
not come out later to greet Schindler. She angrily confided to her diary,
"That hurt me, and now when I write this, I am more than indifferent. . . .
'Jewish coward!' Keep your crooked-nosed Jewish girl friend. She suits
you." 6 1
But by 28 March 1 9 0 1 , Zemlinsky was back in her good graces: " H e
was again happy about my things [compositions]. He said w h a t a shame
it was that I had not come into the world as a boy. It's a downright pity
about my talent. 'As a girl you will still have to suffer much, if you w a n t
to assert yourself.' And I will assert myself." 62
Thoroughly infatuated with Zemlinsky, Alma pursued him until he
dropped his protective reserve. O n 10 April Alma Schindler reported in her
diary that Zemlinsky had capitulated, admitting he had fought against lov-
ing her the entire winter: " N o w I will write, workall for you! I am so
happy that you have talent, that you are also an artist." 6 3 Apparently,
Melanie G u t t m a n n had accepted defeat. She emigrated to the United States
and married painter William Clarke Rice. But Zemlinsky was vague in his
reference to G u t t m a n n when he told Schindler, "Recently you asked me
again about Fraulein Guttmann: she travels to America at the end of Au-
gust. You are mistaken in all of this." 6 4 W h a t he meant here is nebulous.
His dedications of songs to "Meiner lieben M e l a " and her presence in the
company of his family at concerts and in his home when his father died
clearly indicate the importance of their relationship.
This small, chinless m a n with protruding eyes fell passionately in love
with the twenty-one-year-old Alma Schindler. His intimate letters to her,
housed in the Special Collections division of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
at the University of Pennsylvania, are at first focused around their love
relationship with some discussion of her compositions, his work, and the
musical life of Vienna. Early in their correspondence, Zemlinsky asked
Schindler to destroy "this letter and all others," a request she did not
honor. 6 5
Nine days after Zemlinsky's capitulation to Schindler, her ardor cooled.
Ten days later she was reconsidering a marriage proposal from another
man, Felix M u h r , w h o m she found uninteresting but socially acceptable as
well as wealthy. Eleven days later she wrote in her diary: "[I]f I were to
stand at the altar with Zemlinskyhow laughable that would be . . . He
so uglyso small, I so beautifulso tall. . . . Should I n o w deceive him
again, orshould I tell him the truth. . . . Since my love [for him] has left
my heart, I am musically dead. Nothing inspires me, I am totally sterile.
. . . I have read through his letters . . . He is so kind. I believe I still like
him." 6 6
Throughout the summer of 1901 while vacationing with her family, she
fluctuated between passionate love for Zemlinsky and feelings of disloyalty
to him as she pursued flirtations with other men, especially family friend
M a x Burckhard. Her truthful, soul-searching reflections in her early diaries
contrast dramatically with the romanticized, cosmetic version of herself she
later presented in Mein Leben and in her English autobiography, And the
Bridge Is Love. In And the Bridge Is Love, she offers a fictional recollection
of her relationship with Zemlinsky: "This was the beginning of our love.
T o me it was the time of absolute music. He played Tristan for me, I leaned
on the piano, my knees buckled, we sank into each other's arms. . . . That
time was probably the happiest, most carefree in my life." 6 7 Tristan und
Isolde was an opera with special meaning for Schindler and Zemlinsky, a
constant point of reference in Zemlinsky's letters and Schindler's diary.
The diaries provide an interesting view of Schindler's struggles with her-
self. O n 29 July 1 9 0 1 , for example, she wrote: "I will make my own fate.
7I entirely alone. I am simply curious which of my two souls will w i n
my loving soulor my calculating soul." 6 8 These frank, "stream-of-
consciousness" entries are a fascinating m a p of h o w her mind vacillated
from moment to moment. O n 24 August 1 9 0 1 , for example, she began,
" M y entire love belongs to you, my life!" But she had not received a letter
from Zemlinsky for some time, and as she mulled over this problem, she
continued: "[I]s it possible he could forget me? Such a little, ugly fellow."
She then retreated, remarking that "he is somebodyI am not." 6 9
Although she tortured Zemlinsky with her vacillations, Schindler was
enamored, often obsessed with him. Zemlinsky's pessimistic view of their
future is clear from his request that she write a song only for him so that
he would always have it to remind him of "this time." 7 0 But he obviously
entertained some hope: "I can not live without you . . . you breathe life
into my work; your beloved face, your w a r m spirit inspire me . . . I feel
every day, by God . . . 'Ah, this piece is for Alma.' " 7 1
His letters also reveal the imperfections of their relationship.
Now, I hear and read over and over: "You are ugly, too small, and God knows
what other kind of rubbish. You cannot tell me often enough what great sacrifices
you will make! . . . I absolutely cannot bear it. . . . [Y]ou need above all, money,
then, a man as handsome as you. For that, one needs very little love. But that is
all I have. . . . But when I think of it, what can you give me that I desire? Beauty?
that soon goes andone gets use to it. Moreover, there are beautiful women to
love, but not to marry. . . . I need so much love, so much blind trust and devotion.
. . . I am so terribly ugly?! Agreed. I thank God now that I am so. And I thank
God that so many girls have overlooked my ugliness to see my soul and have never
said a word about this . . . 72
When she wrote him in the summer of 1901 that she had shed tears over
him, he responded that he kissed every tear on her lovely face in his
thoughts; then he added skeptically, "You and cryingthat doesn't sound
right. But anger and obstinacyyes." 7 3 Zemlinsky's song "Irmelin Rose,"
op. 7, no. 4, written before he knew Schindler, is an apt description of her.
But the steel-hearted princess sent away all the suitors . . .

And found in everyone some flaw . . .
Irmelin Rose, Irmelin Sun, Irmelin, everything that is beautiful.
In her autobiography, her devastating description of Zemlinsky conceals

the intensity of their love affair: " H e was a hideous gnome. Small, chinless,
toothless, always reeking of the coffee house, unwashed . . . and yet with a
fascinating intellectual acuteness and unbelievable intensity." 7 4 At one
point in their relationship, he had promised to smoke less and drink less
coffee if that pleased her. 75
But Zemlinsky was bewitched by her physical charms. "I love you, but
you are too beautiful for me: most of the time, men such as I serve but do
not have so much good fortune." 7 6 Yet he was also fascinated by popular
views of ugliness. In a reference to Gerhart H a u p t m a n n ' s play Michael
Kramer, he spoke feelingly of Michael Kramer's son, "a hideous, h u m p -
back, deformed man (almost as ugly as I!!!)." 7 7 His one-act opera Der
Zwerg (The Dwarf) is based on Oscar Wilde's play The Birthday of the
Infanta, the story of an ugly dwarf who is in love with a beautiful Infanta
but does not k n o w what he looks like. When he sees himself in a mirror,
he dies of horror. One of Zemlinsky's songs, "Das bucklichte Mannlein,"
op. 22, no. 6, from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is a strange, seemingly light-
hearted song about a little hunchbacked man who follows around a lovely
young girl.
Contemporary descriptions of Zemlinsky are less harsh: The Prague
Daily News referred to him as "a small man with a striking profile," 7 8 and
his German passport described him as "an opera conductor of middle
height, with an oval face, brown eyes, and brown hair" (italics mine). 7 9
Zemlinsky was actually five feet two inches tall, according to Beaumont, 8 0
more than two inches taller than Franz Schubert! In the last years of her
life, Louise Zemlinsky, writing her thoughts in a feeble, illegible handwrit-
ing, appears to have wanted to address Schindler's disparaging description.
"Zemlinsky met Alma at a party. She asked him to take lessons. . . . that
Zemlinsky was a dwarf ( ? ) . . . middle sized." 8 1 (She is obviously countering
Alma's insinuations that Zemlinsky was a dwarf with the words "middle
sized." In their photos together, standing side-by-side, Zemlinsky and
Schoenberg were about the same height. Schoenberg was described by his
student Dika Newlin as "diminutive," but none of us would ever call
Schoenberg a dwarf!) Composer/musicologist Egon Wellesz said of Zem-
linsky, "In spite of his ugliness, he emanated great fascination. He was
stimulating in conversation, although cynical." 8 2 H o w "toothless" Zemlin-
sky was cannot be deduced from his photographs, but Alma herself refers
to heavy lovemaking sessions with Zemlinsky in her diary 8 3 and mentions
kissing his teeth (she just doesn't say how many). Her own teeth evidently
gave her problems since she spoke of her trips to the dentist and even pulled
a tooth herself.
Family and friends reinforced her sense of Zemlinsky's unworthiness;
they ridiculed his size, appearance, his lack of money, and his Jewish her-
itage. Schindler records in her diary that M a x Burckhard told her " n o t to
marry Zemlinsky. Do not pollute the good race." 8 4 But Burckhard, twenty-
five years older than Schindler, was also enamored with the beautiful Alma
and was carrying on some kind of physical relationship with her at the
same time she was supposed to be in love with Zemlinsky. She responded
in her diary to Burckhard's taunts about Zemlinsky: " H e was rightmy
body is ten times more beautiful than his [Zemlinsky's]. T h a t his soul is
100 times more beautiful than mine, I couldn't think of that." 8 5 But Schin-
dler, w h o would marry Mahler, a Jew, and later Franz Werfel, a Jew,
entertained her own anti-Semitic thoughts (28 July 1901): "I would love
him much more stillmore freely, with less reserveif the dark word
'marriage' were not gleaming on the horizon. For a marriage with him . . .
childrenby him . . . to bring into the world little, degenerate Jewish chil-
dren.Certainly to carry on his name. I love the word 'Zemlinsky.' " 8 6
Their relationship survived a summer separation in 1901 and appears to
have strengthened briefly after Alma Schindler's return to Vienna. O n 2
November 1 9 0 1 , she wrote: "So todayall my thoughts focus on this one
man, on this one small, ugly, sweet man. . . . He played my song "In meines
Vaters Garten" with such beauty, as I never can play it. . . . We both trem-
ble from immeasurable longing. I long for a child by him. I will be a wife
to him." 8 7
Five days later, Schindler met Gustav Mahler at the home of her friends,
the Zuckerkandls, and her life was changed forever. Oddly enough, in this
first meeting, Mahler and Schindler argued about Zemlinsky, w h o had
given Mahler the first act of his ballet based on Hofmannsthal's Der Tri-
umph der Zeit. When Schindler asked Mahler why he had failed to respond
to Zemlinsky, Mahler claimed he did not understand the plot of the ballet.
Schindler sarcastically asked Mahler to explain the plot of Die Braut von
Korea (The Bride from Korea), "one of the dumbest ballets ever given" 8 8
and part of the Court Opera's repertoire. Mahler was charmed by this
defense of her teacher. Schindler commented on Mahler in her diary: "I
must say, he has pleased me exceedingly." Mahler found her fascinating
and intelligent. He told their mutual acquaintance Burckhard (!) that at
first he had thought she was just a pretty doll but was pleasantly surprised
to learn she was interested in serious matters. 8 9
Her relationship with Mahler progressed rapidly, but she waxed hot and
cold with Mahler, too, even after they began to make marriage plans.
3 December 1901
Yes, do I love him [Mahler] then? I don't have a clue. Many times I clearly
believeno. So much irritates me: his smell, his singing, some of his speech! . . .
He is so foreign to me. . . . I don't know . . . whether I love the brilliant conductor
. . . or the man. . . . But clearly: as a composer I don't believe in him. . . . We have
kissed. . . . His hands, although expressive, I don't love as much as Alex's. . . . What
should I do? And if Alex becomes great and powerful [?]90
13 December 1901 [Friday the 13th]

I have sent the fatal letter to Alex. What will happen? . . . I lose infinitely. The
noble teacher! I have certainly miscalculated this time.91
In a 28 December 1901 letter to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky wrote: "The latest

piece of news: Mahler is engaged to Alma Schindler."92 Yet Alma Schindler
continued to study with Zemlinsky after her engagement and was chided
by Mahler for her heartless treatment of someone she claimed to have
loved.93
Mahler also demanded that she give up her ambitions as a composer:
"You writeyour music and my music . . . what do you mean by a married
couple of composers? Do you have a notion of how laughable and later,
debasing for ourselves such a peculiar, competitive situation would be-
come? . . . From now on, you have only one mission: to make me happy!
Do you understand me, Alma? . . . [T]he role of the 'composer,' of the
'worker' falls to me and to you, the loving companion, the understanding
comrade!" 94 Schopenhauer again offers an "appropriate" perspective on
woman's role: "Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should
flow by more quietly, trivially."95
Schindler's mother, after reading Mahler's letter, counseled her against
entering into this marriage, but Alma Schindler, now ready to try out her
vocation as "das Ewig-Weibliche," refused the advice. She could have mar-
ried Zemlinsky, who would have nurtured her talents as a musician, but
Schindler chose the role of dilettante, a pretty girl with talent who was
looking for a famous husband. Her beauty provided her with unadulterated
success as a woman in a society that valued beauty but offered little en-
couragement for her musical and intellectual talents. Many women of
Schindler's era made the same choice without reservations. The beautiful
Helene Nahowski, a promising young opera singer, gave up thoughts of a
career when she married Alban Berg, writing him the day before their mar-
riage: "I quench my own flame, and shall only exist for and through you." 96
But Alma Schindler capitulated with regret, and the seeds for a troubled
marriage had been sown. She and Mahler were married quietly on 9 March
1902 in the presence of four witnesses and a priest in the magnificent Karls-
kirche. (When the great painter Kokoschka looked back on his own rela-
tionship with Alma Mahler, he reflected, "I can see now that a person to
whom social life is absolutely vital will be prepared to pay almost any price
to gain material independence.") 97
Already after one year of marriage and the birth of her first child, her
diary reflects her discontent: "I have again played my compositions, my
piano sonata, my many songs. . . . I long to create again. What I am now
imposing upon myself is a deception. I need my art! . . . If only I could
work with Zemlinsky, but there is Gustav Mahler's completely groundless
jealousy. And so I have no one." 98 Another year passed and her unhappi-
ness continued: "I must take up piano lessons again! I am not allowed to
compose. I want to lead again an intellectual inner life as before. . . .
H o w much I experienced earlier! . . . If only Pfitzner lived in Vienna! If I
could associate with Zemlinsky. Even Schoenberg as a musician interests
me." 9 9
Once she stopped composing, she seems never to have fully recaptured
her compositional inspiration. Her discontent was partly reflected in an
unresolved drinking problem that became a nagging leitmotif in references
to her throughout her life. As early as 1 9 0 1 , Zemlinsky had cautioned her
not to drink so much when she vacationed in St. Gilgen, or she would be
notorious as an alcoholic. 1 0 0
The mother of two small children by 1904, she recounted in Gustav
Mahler: Memories and Letters that she would "affect a cheerful air with
tears ready to burst from my eyes. . . . I could have found in my music a
complete cure for this state of things, but he had forbidden it . . . and now
I dragged my hundred songs with me wherever I wentlike a coffin into
which I dared not even look." 1 0 1
With the founding of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkiinstler in 1904,
Zemlinsky along with Schoenberg became regular visitors at the Mahler
home, and both men formed a powerful bond with Mahler and his mu-
sic. 102 Zemlinsky also visited the Mahlers during their summer vacations
at Maiernigg and again corresponded with Alma. In several letters, he men-
tioned giving her music lessons again. 1 0 3 In 1907, when Zemlinsky married
Ida Guttmann, Mahler, in a letter to Alma Mahler, slyly mentioned h o w
good Zemlinsky looked (fat in the face) and h o w much marriage agreed
with him. 1 0 4 Ida Zemlinsky, however, did not become a part of Zemlinsky's
continuing relationship with the Mahlers.
Shortly before his departure for N e w York to become conductor of the
Metropolitan Opera, Mahler wrote to Zemlinsky: "We would very much
like to say good-by to youcouldn't you and Schonberg come up to see
us one more time?" 1 0 5 Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Jalowetz, and oth-
ers organized students and friends to see the Mahlers off at the train station,
crowding onto the train platform with "flowers in their hands and tears in
their eyes." 1 0 6 In 1 9 2 3 , critic Adolf Weissmann would state, "All young
Viennese music begins with Mahler. The fiery breath of this conductor,
w h o was at the same time a great man, has inspired all those w h o were
young then." 1 0 7
Zemlinsky became a magnificent conductor of Mahler's music. He guest
conducted a Vienna performance of Das Lied von der Erde in 1919 that
was so successful it had to be repeated t w o additional times in the following
days. 1 0 8 He had all of Mahler's symphonies in his repertoire, even two
movements of Mahler's unfinished Symphony no. 10, which Zemlinsky
performed in Prague in 1924. For his farewell to Prague, Zemlinsky com-
bined Czech and German orchestras and choruses in 1927 to present Mah-
ler's Symphony no. 8.109
The Mahlers returned to Europe from the United States for extended
periods, especially during the summer months so that Mahler could work
at his retreat in South Tyrol. In 1910, while visiting a fashionable spa in
Tobelbad, Alma Mahler began an affair with young architect Walter Gro-
pius. Mahler, at the family summer home in Toblach, detected a strange
quality in the few letters she sent him and complained: "I do not know
why you cannot brace up once [to send] me a timely postcard.If I would
or could be resentful, then I should actually not write to you anymore. . . .
How should one begin with a child and wife? Write and suffer."110 His
reference to his child/wife is again reminiscent of Schopenhauer: "Women
are . . . big children . . . a kind of intermediate stage between the child and
the man, who is the actual human being, 'man.' " i n
When Mahler learned of the affair, he asked Alma to choose between
him and Gropius. She stayed with Mahler but did not sever her contact
with Gropius. One afternoon as Alma returned from a walk with their little
girl Anna, she heard Gustav playing her songs. Apparently, he had never
looked at his wife's music until he realized she might leave him. She wrote:
"Mahler came to meet me with such joy in his face. . . . 'What have I done?'
he said. 'These songs are goodthey're excellent. I insist on your working
on them and we'll have them published. I shall never be happy until you
start composing again. God, how blind and selfish I was in those days!' " 112
Fourteen of the 100 songs Alma Mahler "dragged around in their coffin"
were published during her life, the first five (Funf Lieder) in 1910 under
Mahler's guidance. Four of them were performed in December 1910 with
Zemlinsky accompanying Thea Drill-Orrigde at their Vienna premiere. 113
Mahler reported to his mother-in-law in February 1911 that Alma "is dil-
igent and has composed a couple of charming new songs that show great
progress. That contributes naturally also to her wellbeing. Her published
songs are making a furor here [New York] and will soon be sung by two
different singers." 114 Mahler revised two songs from this period as well as
two of Alma Mahler's earlier songs; these were published as Vier Lieder in
1915 with a cover by Kokoschka. 115 The last five songs, Funf Gesdnge,
appeared in 1924 with her 1915 setting of Franz Werfel's poem "Der Er-
kennende" included.
Shortly after Mahler's death in 1911, Alma Mahler began a lengthy affair
with Kokoschka that lasted until her marriage to Walter Gropius in August
1915. She and Gropius had one child, but the marriage did not last. In
1916, she came across "Der Erkennende," a poem by Franz Werfel: "I was
completely spellbound and surrendered to the soul of Franz Werfel. The
poem belongs among the most beautiful that I have ever known. I set the
poem on the way back to Semmering."116 She would soon abandon Walter
Gropius for Werfel, although they did not marry until 1929. After World
War II began, they fled to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, but
with Werfel's death in 1945, Mahler-Werfel moved to N e w York, where
she held court until her death in 1964. M a n y of the works she mentioned
in her diarysongs, piano pieces, attempts at opera compositionshe later
claimed were destroyed when her home in Vienna was bombed during
World W a r II. She was able to save her love letters and diarynot her
music.
Although her compositions are not dated, clearly some of her songs were
written during the time she studied with Zemlinsky. His influence is ap-
parent throughout "In meines Vaters Garten" from Fiinf Lieder, mentioned
in her 2 November 1901 diary entry. While the form of O t t o Erich Hart-
leben's ( 1 8 6 4 - 1 9 0 5 , translator of Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire into
German) poem acts as a unifying device, with its repeated phrases "bluhe,
mein Herz, bliih' auf" (blossom, my heart, burst into blossom) and "siisser
T r a u m , siisser T r a u m " (sweet dream!), alsoin true Zemlinsky fashion
musical material of the first stanza is reshaped throughout the song. The
melody of the first "bluhe, mein Herz," for example, is repeated two more
times with the same melody, rhythm, and pitches but is then transposed
down a major third (m. 40) and again appears as a rhythmic variation of
the original (m. 71). The textual refrains that differ from their original
appearance are either linked to each other or incorporate melodic material
from the first stanza that was not originally associated with them. Despite
H a n s Pfitzner's praise of her melodic gift, ("[H]e was very glad to find I
had a real talent for composition and a sound feeling for melody"), 1 1 7 many
are simple scale passages without great rhythmic differentiation. N o t only
does the voice part of "In meines Vaters Garten" open with a diatonic scale
(the scale begins on e-flat, the dominant of the key of A-flat major) doubled
in both hands of the piano part, but the scale continues in the piano and
becomes an integrating feature, skillfully used throughout the song. Scale
passages in contrary motion, in segments, ascending and descending, occur
in both voice and piano. The juxtaposing of diatonic and chromatic scale
segments presents many harmonic opportunities throughout the song, as,
for example, in mm. 9 - 1 0 , where a chromatic melody not only enhances
the meaning of the text "sweet d r e a m " but is later extended in mm. 9 1 -
92; the chromatic melody of mm. 9 - 1 0 is followed by a diatonic melody
in m m . 1 1 - 1 2 , which not only varies the expression of "siisser T r a u m " but
also suggests a new key. In mm. 9 3 - 9 4 , the diatonic melody also contrasts
with the chromatic melody of 9 1 - 9 2 that precedes it and then follows it.
In "Die stille Stadt" (The Quiet Town), no. 1, and "Ich wandle unter Blu-
men" (I Walked among the Flowers), no. 5, of Fiinf Lieder, Alma Mahler
also fashioned melodies from scales.
"In meines Vaters Garten," like several of her other lieder such as "Ern-
telied" from Vier Lieder and "Hymne" from Fiinf Gesange, is lengthy
134 measures, carefully organized, and on a grand scale, with a vocal range
of an octave and a fifth and a piano part encompassing more than a five-
octave range. Material from the first stanza is reshaped throughout the song
(i.e., mm. 3-4 are varied in mm. 58-59 and mm. 77-78) and then returns
in only slightly varied form in the final stanza. Her harmonic material is
extremely interesting and includes a number of harmonic surprises in the
manner of Richard Strauss (i.e., C major chord in m. 12 when we are
expecting an E major chord); she uses a variety of piano figurations that
define the various stanzas and enhance the meaning of the text. Despite
Zemlinsky's guidance in this song, he allowed her to pursue her own style,
and the music is uniquely her own: It does not sound like Gustav Mahler's
music nor Zemlinsky's.
In her diary entry for 16 June 1900, Schindler had referred to two of
her songs on texts by Richard Dehmel and Rainer Maria Rilke: "half song,
half speech, half hymn." This terminology could easily be used to describe
many of her melodic lines, which are often static, focused around one pitch
with little rhythmic variety (e.g., "Bei dir ist es Traut" or "Ich wandle unter
Blumen" from Fiinf Lieder, nos. 4 and 5). Many songwriters at the turn
of the century concentrated their attention on text declamation and the
harmonic structure of their music. Hugo Wolf, the great master of late-
nineteenth-century song, seldom wrote an independent melody and often
negated basic meter in order to allow textual inflection to dominate. 118 His
larger interest in the synthesis of poetry and music resulted in phrasing that
was rarely predictable or melody that was merely tuneful.
Schindler-Mahler chose passionate poetry by Dehmel, Bierbaum, Rilke,
and Novalis that reflected her own ardent lifestyle. None of the poems
chosen by Schindler-Mahler were set by Gustav Mahler, who often set
words derived from folk literature such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn or
from Riickert's mystical poetry and poetry on the death of children. In
"Lob des hohen Verstands" (In Praise of the Highest Intellect) from his
Wunderhorn lieder, Mahler playfully imitates the nightingale and cuckoo
with graphic, jocular word-painting. He used robust Austrian country
dance rhythms in songs such as "Hans und Grete" and imitated sounds of
war in songs such as "Aus! Aus!," "Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz" (At
Strassburg on the Entrenchments), "Revelge," and "Der Tamboursg'sell,"
with drum rolls, bugles, and marching music. Long before she knew Mah-
ler, Alma Schindler wrote in her diary, "I am only moved to write songs
that agree with my mood, and they cannot be Alpine ditties. I have never
written either a lighthearted song or a lighthearted [instrumental] piece; I
cannot!" 119
Two of her four songs published in 1915 had been revised by Mahler
before his death. The marvelous "Erntelied (Harvest Song), like "In meines
Vaters Garten," is a long, expansive work but much different from any-
thing in Alma Mahler's first collection. It is Straussian in its strange dis-
sonances, in its lovely vocalise at the end, in its full, rich accompaniment,
and even in its portamento on the word "Fliigeln" (wings).
Alma Mahler's flamboyant lifestyle should not obscure her important
role as patroness to many of the twentieth-century artists and politicians.
Klaus M a n n wrote that her home was the meeting place for all of Vienna
diplomats, artists, musicians, playwrightsand she became an important
advocate for many of them. Alban Berg gratefully dedicated Wozzeck to
her after she convinced a wealthy friend to subsidize its publication. 1 2 0 She
made sure that Arnold Schoenberg received the prize money from the Gus-
tav Mahler Foundation in 1912 and 1913, although Richard Strauss, one
of the judges, wrote to Alma Mahler, "I believe he would do better to
shovel snow than to scribble on music paper, but, all the same, give him
the grant. . . . One can never tell what posterity is going to think." 1 2 1 She
also used her personal influence with wealthy friends to raise money for
an Arnold Schoenberg Fund that was begun by Alban Berg and Anton
Webern. When differences arose between her and Schoenberg over admin-
istration of the fund, Berg tried to comfort Schoenberg by telling him that
although they had been able to raise money during wartime only because
of Frau Mahler, Schoenberg had to remember that: "[S]he is, after all, only
a woman!"122
Zemlinsky also requested Alma Mahler's assistance during his time in
Prague.
Dear, Most Honored Friend,

. . . I found, when I returned here, an application . . . [that] deals with a con-
ducting engagement of the Giirgenich concerts in Cologne. . . . Do you have any
good connections with an influential person in Cologne, so that you could mention
particular advantages I have [?]123
Throughout her life, Alma Mahler, with periodic waverings, remained

interested in Zemlinsky's music. In letters to his wife, Berg mentions Alma
Mahler's eagerness in discussing Zemlinsky's music and performances of
his music at her house. 1 2 4 But Zemlinsky, like other artists including
Schoenberg, 1 2 5 experienced her wrath. He was bewildered by her angry
response to his opera Line florentinsche Tragodie after its Vienna premiere
on 2 7 April 1917 and wrote to ask why. In this letter he tells her, "And
don't you always k n o w still that I cannot show what is still buried in
me!" 1 2 6 Schoenberg, w h o went over some of the opera with her, tried to
comfort Zemlinsky by observing that she simply had not understood the
work. 1 2 7 Zemlinsky's letters to Schoenberg contain many references to
"Frau Mahler," indicating concern for her health ("Is she healthy and has
she delivered [her baby] yet?") and her connections with important peo-
ple. 1 2 8
Alma Mahler, one of Vienna's most dramatic personalities, discontent-
edly pursued her career as "the eternal feminine." Her own ambitions were
never far from the surface as she wrote and rewrote her memoirs with an
eye toward us, her invisible public. The keeper of her own myth, she
wanted us to know that men found her irresistible and that she was the
Muse/Salome/Judith to many of them. Her relationship with Zemlinsky,
represented in her autobiography as a minor diversion, unfolded in her
diary as a confrontation with her better self: with her inability to sacrifice
for genuine love, with her realization that she would need to reject her
materialism and concern for social status if she were to develop her musical
talent, and with the racial/ethnic prejudices of her class that cut her off
from some of her most gifted friends. She was defeated on all fronts. Her
diaries also provide a poignant glimpse of Zemlinsky, an enigmatic man
whose portrait has yet to be completed. His capacity for passion, his realism
and irony, and his strength to survive an adventure with a mythic siren add
a few brush strokes to the canvas of his vivid life.
Chapter 10
Poetry and Song: Zemli nsky

and the Second Viennese School
The most important feature of any lyric poem is likely to be not its
literal meaning but rather its connotations, ambiguities, or "para-
doxes." . . . These are more often revealed by rhythm, rhyme, sound
values, and images than by what the poem literally says. It was the
French symbolistsVerlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmefollowing the
direction set by Baudelaire, who were bold enough to carry this ten-
dency to its logical extreme, ignoring literal meaning to an unprece-
dented degree and raising to absolute prominence the poem's
connotations, free associations, and ambiguitiesin short, its purely
lyric aspects. This kind of verse . . . set the patterns that dominate much
of the poetry of the twentieth century.
Jack Stein1
The musical art . . . gives the most profound, ultimate and secret in-
formation on the feeling expressed in the words. . . . It expresses their
real and true nature.
Arthur Schopenhauer2
N e w developments in poetry, down through the centuries, have had an

enormous impact on songwriting, often spawning new kinds of song or
revitalizing existing styles. The poetry and literary theories of Pietro Bembo
( 1 4 7 0 - 1 5 4 7 ) , for example, were fundamental to the development of the
sixteenth-century Italian madrigal; Elizabethan poetry also played a critical
role in fostering the highly sophisticated lute song in England during the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the lyric poetry of Goethe, Miiller, Heine,
Eichendorff, Morike, and others inspired composers such as Schubert,

Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf to create a monumental body of great song:
the German lied. In the twentieth century, German composers returned to
the early German lyric poets for inspiration while also drawing on a new
kind of lyric poetry that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century in the works of H u g o von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Richard Dehmel ( 1 8 6 3 - 1 9 2 0 ) , Stefan George, Paul Heyse ( 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 1 4 ) ,
and Georg Trakl. 3
As the son of a writer, Zemlinsky developed a respect for words early in
his career, and he gained practical experience in text setting with the li-
bretto for his first opera, Sarema, probably under the guidance of his father,
Adolf von Zemlinszky. Literature was a source of creative inspiration for
Zemlinsky throughout his life, nourishing new approaches in his writing
style and giving shape to his amorphous ideas. His encounter with the
works of Dehmel, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, and Hofmannsthal initiated
magical results in his music, clearly revealing his sensitivity to great liter-
ature.
Schoenberg, too, was quite conscious that words could be of invaluable
assistance in composition and related that when he finished the Kammer-
symphonie, op. 9, in 1906: "I was inspired by . . . Stefan George ... to
compose some of his poems and, surprisingly, without any expectation on
my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had
written before. . . . It was the first step towards a style which has since been
called the style of 'atonality.' " 4
Composers in search of poetic inspiration have followed a variety of
paths. Zemlinsky's reading was often motivated by the desire to find poems
for songs or libretti for operas. He wrote to Schoenberg: "I am reading like
crazy in order to compose something new." 5 But Zemlinsky was also stim-
ulated by literary and philosophical ideas, and in his letters to Schoenberg
and Alma Schindler, he spoke of Schopenhauer, "a very fine American poet,
E.A. Poe," 6 Zola, Gorki, Tolstoy, Gottfried Keller, Balzac, and Strindberg. 7
Webern, in a letter to one of his favorite poets, Hildegard Jone, wrote,
"[H]ow these words have fostered my ideas!!" 8 "Never have I gone looking
. . . 'for a text' with the intention . . . of writing something vocal . . . [T]he
text was always provided first! Given a text, then of course 'something
vocal' was bound to originate." 9
But Schopenhauer, in his discussion of poetry and music, wrote:
Far from being a mere aid to poetry, music is certainly an independent art; in fact,
it is the most powerful of all the arts, and therefore attains its ends entirely from
its own resources . . . it does not require the words of a song or the action of an
opera. . . . The words are and remain for the music a foreign extra of secondary
value, as the effect of the tones is incomparably more powerful, more infallible,
and more rapid than that of words. If these are incorporated in the music, therefore,
Poetry and Song: Zemlinsky and the Second Viennese School 119
they must of course occupy only an entirely subordinate position, and adapt them-
selves completely to it. . . . |I|t might perhaps appear more suitable for the text to
be written for the music than for the music to be composed for the text. With the
usual method, however, the words and actions of the text lead the composer to the
affections of the will that underlie them, and call up in him the feelings to be
expressed; consequently they act as a means for exciting his musical imagination.
Moreover, that the addition of poetry to music is so welcome, and a song with
intelligible words gives such profound joy, is due to the fact that our most direct
and most indirect methods of knowledge are here stimulated simultaneously and in
union.10
Schoenberg often encouraged his students to write a song if they were

experiencing writer's block, as his 1912 letter to Berg indicates: "Why
aren't you composing anything! You shouldn't let your talent rest so long.
Write a few songs, at least. It's a good idea to let poetry lead one back into
music. After that: something for orchestra." 1 1 His statements reflect the
importance of songwriting among the Viennese composers and his belief
that true inspiration could be generated through song composition. At the
same time, song was often the place where musical problems could be
solved before tackling larger instrumental works; for example, in his Das
Buch der hdngenden Garten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens) and in
Alban Berg's first foray into twelve-tone music with "Schliesse mir die Au-
gen beide."
In fact, song has played an important role in the development of many
composers' compositional techniques. The Sieben friihe Lieder (The Seven
Early Songs), for example, written between 1905 and 1908 after Alban
Berg became Schoenberg's student, illustrate Berg's experiments with whole
tone scales and chords (Nacht), with arpeggiation and syncopation in the
expansive style of Brahms (Die Nachtigall), and with the late Romantic
chromaticism of Wagner/Wolf (Schilflied). Song, because of its brevity,
does not require extensive development and is often used as a tool in the
teaching of composition. But, perhaps for this reason, twentieth-century
composers, like many composers before them, have been ambivalent about
granting song a major position in the hierarchy of important musical gen-
res. Schoenberg wrote to publisher Emil Hertzka that Berg had "only" been
able to write songs when he came to study with Schoenberg. "You can
hardly imagine the lengths I went to in order to remove this defect in his
talent." 1 2 Perhaps this explains why Berg wrote only one song for voice
and piano after 1910, although he had written more than eighty up to this
point. Although Schoenberg sometimes spoke slightingly of songwriting,
his own first published works were songs, and some of his own most im-
portant works such as The Book of the Hanging Gardens were songs. Over
half of Anton Webern's works were songs, and Webern also frequently
turned to song composition when he wished to solve compositional prob-
lems.
Composers of the nineteenth-century lied had pondered a variety of ideas

about the relationship of text and music: about how important the quality
of a poem should be in a song, whether words or music were of equal
importance, the role of word-painting in song, how to balance the demands
of the poem in a musical setting. These subjects were reconsidered by many
twentieth-century songwriters, especially when they chose to confront tra-
dition with radically new ideas. Since instrumental music, because of its
abstract nature, has often been proclaimed to be superior to music with
words, the practice of composing programmatic music or of providing pro-
grams for instrumental music was discarded by many composers. Mahler,
w h o used a program for his first symphony, later denied its validity, al-
though some scholars have contended that all of Mahler's symphonies are
based on programs, either explicit or implied.13 Schoenberg's Verkldrte
Nacht was shaped around a texta Dehmel poem of that n a m e a n d his
Pelleas und Melisande, also an instrumental work, closely conformed to
Maeterlinck's play. Schoenberg would even state that after functional har-
mony ceased to be an acceptable means of organizing music, "I discovered
how to construct larger forms by following a text or a poem. The differ-
ences in size and shape of its parts and the change in character and m o o d
were mirrored in the shape and size of the composition, in its dynamics
and tempo, figuration and accentuation, instrumentation and orchestration.
Thus the parts were differentiated as clearly as they had formerly been by
the tonal and structural functions of h a r m o n y . " 1 4
Schoenberg and his followers felt no p a r a d o x in using text as a formal
guide in the creation of their works. In fact, they considered the process a
movement from the subjective to the objective. 15 Their goal was not to
portray the surface features of the poem but its inner meaning, its essence.
Mahler defined the composer's task: "The text is actually a mere indication
of the deeper significance to be extracted from it, of hidden treasure
within." 1 6 M a n y twentieth-century composers placed words in an ancillary
role to music, often contradicting traditional ideas of how text should be
set. Schoenberg emphasized that the true delight of music existed on the
level of "pure perception" and that banality resulted when a composer was
only concerned with setting text so that the "dynamic level and speed in
the music . . . correspond to certain occurrences in the poem and . . . run
exactly parallel to them." 1 7 In fact, Schoenberg, w h o believed that an "un-
polluted and pure mode of expression is denied to poetry, an art still bound
to subject matter," 1 8 spoke less about the technical problems of text setting
and focused on the philosophical relationship of music and text. After a
recital of his George lieder, Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg
criticized the singer M a r t h a Winternitz-Dorda for "taking everything from
the words instead of from the music." 1 9
Zemlinsky's approach to text setting, while weighted on the side of mu-
sic, was less radical than that of his Viennese colleagues and closer to the
ideas of composers such as the Russian Nikolay Medtner. In his book The
Muse and the Fashion, Medtner had stated, "Poetic text may beget purely
musical song which flows along sometimes uniting itself with the text, but
never forsaking its own musical bed." 2 0
Zemlinsky, clearly identifying himself with the lied tradition, used text
as the centerpiece of his inspiration. He shaped his music to complement
the text and honored the responsibilities of the interpreter to present this
text clearly and audibly. He continued, however, to observe the tradition
of word/tone unity that had permeated the nineteenth-century art song by
portraying both the inner and outer characteristics of his chosen texts. He
was also obviously inspired by words, even using literary titles for his piano
works, as had Robert Schumann before him. Zemlinsky's piano fantasy on
the poetry of Richard Dehmel, Fantasien iiber Gedichte von Dehmel, op.
9, is divided into four movements with poetic titles: (1) Stimme des Abends
(Voice of the Evening); (2) Waldseligkeit (Forest Bliss); (3) Liebe (Love);
and (4) Kaferlied (Song of the Beetle). Five early unpublished piano bal-
lades, miscellaneous early piano works, and four later (1903) unpublished
piano pieces for four hands were also given programmatic titles. 21
In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, words and ideas influ-
enced a surprising number of pieces that were accepted as purely abstract
instrumental music. Berg secretly wove complex messages about his friends
and himself into his musicmost notably in his Lyric Suite, which contains
references to his affair with H a n n a Fuchs and a musical quotation from
Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony:"You are my own, my own (Du bist mein
Eigen, mein Eigen)." 2 2 Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern also
wrote music with themes and motives that symbolized their personal situ-
ations, ideals, and superstitions. Schoenberg, for example, a believer in nu-
merology, chose twenty-one of Albert Giraud's poems and emphasized the
mystical numbers three and seven in his title Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus
Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Gi-
raud's Pierrot lunaire). Both of Zemlinsky's orchestral song cycles are di-
vided into seven sections.
Although Schoenberg might use text as the starting point for a compo-
sition, his statements about the setting of text present new ways of consid-
ering the union of words and music. In his often-quoted essay "The
Relationship to Text," he related that when he thought about familiar
Schubert songs, he confessed that he did not k n o w the actual content of
the poems in these songs. But after he studied them, he realized that
I had grasped the . . . real content, perhaps even more profoundly than if I had
clung to the surface of the mere thoughts expressed in words. . . . [I] composed
many of my songs straight through to the end without troubling myself in the
slightest about the continuation of the poetic events, without even grasping them
in the ecstasy of composing. . . . It became clear to me that the work of art is like
every other complete organism. . . . [I]n every little detail it reveals its truest, inmost
essence.23
This statement not only provides crucial ideas for changes that are apparent
in the songs of many composers of the twentieth century but also reveals
why symbolist poetry was such a sympathetic medium for their music.
"Mere thoughts expressed in w o r d s " had been a fundamental concept of
the nineteenth-century art song. A unity of words and music for nineteenth-
century composers had implied a clear presentation of the text and a choice
of poetry that could be understood on at least some basic level in its first
hearing. W . H . Auden and Chester Kallman, in their introduction to An
Elizabethan Song Book, state that "elements of the poetic vocabulary . . .
which are best adapted for musical setting are those which require the least
reflection to comprehend. . . . Complicated metaphors which, even if the
words are heard, take time to understand." 2 4
Yet musicians have always relied on the power of music to express the
inexpressible. Mahler believed that a suitable poem for music was one that
was not complete in itself but more like a block "of marble which anyone
might make his own." 2 ^ Even when the balance between words and music
tipped in favor of the music, as it often does in many Schubert songs (and
rarely does in the songs of H u g o Wolf), words had a potent interest in the
nineteenth-century art song. But Schoenberg's desire to represent "the es-
sence" of a poem, not an outward correspondence, 2 6 led him to maintain
that he had understood George's poems "from their sound alone with a
perfection that by analysis and synthesis could hardly have been attained,
but certainly not surpassed." 2 7
Word-painting obviously ceased to be a significant factor for Schoenberg
(although it is still present, e.g., coloratura on the word "Mondesglanz" in
"Herzgewachse"), and the text itself might not even be understood in
highly disjunct vocal lines in which extremes of vocal register made artic-
ulation of words impossible. In "Herzgewachse," for example, the voice
sings the word "mystisches" (Gebet) " p p p p " on P . With the words "richtet
sich empor," the voice ascends from b-flat below c1 to c 3 so that the in-
flections of the poetry are not preserved in the melodic line but subordi-
nated to Schoenberg's musical structure. In this new style, individual words
might be emphasized while the meaning of the textual phrase is lost. The
poem as an independent entity in partnership with the music had been
supplanted by a new concept in song. Schoenberg's search for what he
considered to be the "real" meaning of a poem led him to choose poetry
such as George's, because it did not project "simple" surface meanings.
Wolfgang Martin Stroh, in his analysis of the fourteenth song in the Geor-
gelieder, op. 15, states:
Certainly, many of George's and Rilke's poems do not on the face of it appear to
provide appropriate bases for musical clarification or extensive tone-poetry. . . . But
perhaps composers sensed in these poems the possibility of using a pointillistic

method of composing, for in these pieces single words are used as independent
units. The words are not connected in terms of their sense.
On two levels the text, through the relation of its individual words to its form
(not through its content), works as a control. It works as a control in exactly the
sense that a row does, that is on the level of a chosen musical parameter. 28
In Adorno's afterword to the Insel edition of Georgelieder, he states that

"the new music in its formative years emphasized vocal music . . . not be-
cause it found in the coherence of words a substitute for the lack of co-
herence in itself, but rather because its coherence grew in the encounter
with another medium." 2 9 Webern also moved away from the traditional
partnership between words and music that he had explored in his earliest
songs. In his op. 14, the subtle music of Georg Trakl's words, for example,
are obscured by Webern's disjunct vocal lines and pointillistic instrumental
parts. In " N a c h t s , " for example, the singer must deliver the words "Die
Blaue meiner" on b 2 , b-flat 2 , a 2 .
Schoenberg, although touting the superiority of music over words in ar-
tistic expression, often found himself indebted to words, particularly during
his atonal period where few structural guideposts existed. But as Robert
M o r g a n observes: "[A]ll the larger atonal works are vocal and thus rely
upon a text as an 'outside' agent of control and comprehensibility, while
the purely instrumental pieces are all relatively brief." 30 H o w much words
guided Schoenberg in his instrumental works can only be speculated. His
diary entry of 2 7 January 1912 in response to a request by the publisher
Peters requesting titles for his five orchestral pieces, op. 16, is vague enough
to offer several tantalizing possible interpretations left to the reader's imag-
ination: "[T]he wonderful thing about music is that one can tell all, so that
the educated listener understands it all, and yet one has not given away
one's secrets, the things one doesn't admit even to oneself. Whereas titles
are a give-away." 3 1
Music historian Paul Henry Lang has pointed out that the lied flourished
in the early Romantic era because it was "a literary era par excellence."
Song cannot be treated in the same manner as an opera libretto; poetry has vested
rights in it that cannot be ignored. The eighteenth century neglected the song as
being incompatible with a purely musical approach to vocal music. . . . Schubert
. . . was far more creative in the purely musical sense than any other song writer,
with the occasional exception of Schumann and Brahms. Had he accepted the ro-
mantic dictum of the poet's absolute supremacy, merely providing music to the
text, he would not have created the modern song; but by consciously elevating such
purely musical elements as harmony and instrumental accompaniment to equal im-
portance with poem and melody, he brought to bear upon the atmosphere of the
song the force of an overwhelming musical organism, a force sufficient to establish
a balance between poetry and music.32
While it is possible to argue that Lang's conclusion is Schoenberg's as well

since he intended to reestablish the rights of music in a song setting, on
closer examination, it is clear that Schoenberg and many of his successors
embraced a new kind of song.
The nineteenth-century art song represented a synthesis of poetry and
music as composers, consciously or unconsciously, tried to strike a balance
between the demands of two independent arts. Piano and voice were closely
linked to the poetic phrase, and the musical building blocksmelody, har-
mony, and rhythmwere shaped to reflect the meaning and mood of the
poems they interpreted. "Every song composer of the nineteenth century
was highly individual in the use and relative emphasis of these various
elements." 33 At the end of the century, two of the most prominent song
composers, Brahms and Wolf, provided two quite different approaches to
songwriting. Although Brahms used poetry as a stimulus for his musical
ideas and sometimes even allowed its metrical structure to determine the
opening rhythmic patterns of a song, his developing musical ideas subor-
dinated the poem to an artistic/musical whole. Words became the foun-
dation on which musical ideas were explored and developed as the balance
between words and music tilted in favor of the music. While the works of
secondary poets such as Daumer, Frey, Kugler, Lemcke, Wenzig, and Groth
occupy more than half of Brahms's song settings, his settings are successful
because of his artful music, which communicates the poetry's essential
mood, not its weaknesses.
But Brahms's contemporary Hugo Wolf closely tailored his music to il-
luminate the smallest nuances of each poetic phrase, and it was essential
for him to choose fine poetry because of this close word/tone relationship.
Wolf revealed the subtleties of individual words by channeling all of his
musical resources into an integration of voice and piano parts. "In the
delicate balancing of text and music, it is the text that controls the direction
of his music." 34 His brilliant text declamation established a standard for
the next generation of traditional song composers.
Zemlinsky's songs combine features from both Wolf and Brahms, for he
skillfully observed textual accents and mood while crafting motives that
take on a musical life of their own. Like Brahms, Zemlinsky wrote many
beautiful melodies, yet seldom does his music emphasize weak syllables or
insignificant words to accommodate musical concepts. But it is in Zemlin-
sky's choice of poetry that we find a subtle guide to traditions and changes
in the German lied at the beginning of the twentieth century. He began his
song career by setting mostly German poetry: folk poetry, imitations of
folk poetry, poetry written by his contemporaries, and traditional poems,
a number of which were popular with other German composers. Many of
Zemlinsky's settings of poetry with a folk character were written while he
was under the influence of Brahms, who not only harmonized folk melodies
but wrote numerous songs based on folk poetry or modern poetry written
in a folk style.
Mahler, another model for Zemlinsky, also had a profound interest in
folk poetry, particularly in the collection of folk lyrics Des Knaben Wun-
derhorn, which had been an important literary source throughout the nine-
teenth century with composers such as Johannes Friedrich Reichardt, Luise
Reichardt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms
and in the twentieth century with composers Richard Strauss, Arnold
Schoenberg, and others. In fact, folk influences were present in the German
art song from its beginnings. Johann Peter Schulz, in his 1781 collection
Lieder im Volkston bey dem Klavier zu singen, advocated that "melodies
should be composed that can be sung by everyone and are suited to folklike
poetry." 35 Although German nationalists in the twentieth century gloried
in the folk song as an expression of the German people, many composers,
including Zemlinsky, also believed that folk influences had an important
role to play in the creative process. Ernst Krenek, in his lecture "Music of
Today" (October 1925), extolled the originality of Janacek, "whose work
is rooted in the national folksong. . . . The folksong is an inexhaustible
source of power for those who are able to find roots in it." 36 Zemlinsky
set two poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn"Altdeutsches Minnelied"
(Old German Love Song), op. 2,11:2, and "Das bucklichte Mannlein" (The
Little Humpbacked Man, 1934)as well as other poems written in the
style of folk poetry such as "Das verlassene Madchen" (The Abandoned
Girl), op. 2, 11:4, by Leixner; "Der Traum, Ein Kinderlied" (The Dream, a
Child's Song), op. 2, 11:3, by Victor von Bliithgen; "Elfenlied," op. 22, no.
4, by Goethe; and "Volkslied," op. 22, no. 5, by Christian Morgenstern.
Morgenstern (1871-1914) inspired six of Zemlinsky's songs between
1898 and 1934, all of which were written during periods when Zemlinsky
was changing his compositional style. "Da waren zwei Kinder," the first
song of Zemlinsky's op. 7, inaugurates a new musical direction that is
further explored in the two Dehmel songs that follow. Although Morgen-
stern was internationally known for his satirical/nonsense poetry, Zemlin-
sky seems to have preferred Morgenstern's serious, lyrical verse, clearly
shown in his beautiful setting of "Voglein Schwermut" (The Little Bird of
Melancholy) from op. 10, which uniquely portrays the strange, eerie gloom
of the text. Thirty years later, in a new, spare style, Zemlinsky captured
the world-weariness of Morgenstern's "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen" (On
Brown Velvet Shoes), op. 22, no. 1, and the subdued loveliness of his
"Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht" (Evening Goblet Full of Sunlight), op. 22,
no. 2.
Zemlinsky also chose poetry that reflected foreign literary currents in
German and European cultural history. His interest in the Indian poet Kal-
idasa (he set five of Kalidasa's poems in op. 27), for example, had been
shared by Goethe, who wrote the "Prelude" in Part I of Faust under the
influence of Kalidasa's drama Abhijnana-Sakuntala. This drama also in-

spired numerous composers including Schubert, Frederick Delius, Franco
Alfano, and Felix Weingartner.
Zemlinsky set the poems of more than fifty poets, two-thirds of whom
were his contemporaries. Although he chose verse by lesser-known writers
such as his friend Paul Wertheimer (five songs),37 his most effective songs
were settings of poems by distinguished contemporaries such as Richard
Dehmel, Stefan George, Christian Morgenstern, Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Detlev von Liliencron, and three Nobel Prize winnersMaurice Maeter-
linck, Rabindranath Tagore, and Paul Heyse. Zemlinsky published four
songs on poems by Heyse and apparently at one time planned a large group
of Heyse settings, indicated by the numbers 88, 90, 100, and 101 (incom-
plete) of four unpublished Heyse songs in the Library of Congress Zemlin-
sky Archive.38 Heyse's poetry and his translations of Italian and Spanish
lyrics appealed to many composers including Brahms, Wolf, Schoenberg,
and Franz Schreker.
The writings of eminent Danish poet/novelist/translator Jens Peter Ja-
cobsen (1847-1885) captured the interest of both Zemlinsky and Schoen-
berg in 1897 when some of Jacobsen's poetry was published in a German
translation by Robert Franz Arnold.39 Zemlinsky set four of Jacobsen's
poems between 1898 and 1901, choosing the story of the steel-hearted
princess, "Irmelin Rose," for op. 7; two poems of lyric grandeur for his
op. 8, "Turmwachterlied" and "Und hat der Tag all seine Qual"; and the
joyful "Meine Braut fiihr ich heim" for op. 10. He also began a setting of
Jacobsen's "Mit Toves Stimme fliistert der Wald" from the Gurrelieder but
failed to continue, perhaps because of Schoenberg's involvement with the
same text in his monumental Gurrelieder for solo voices, chorus, and or-
chestra.
By 1898, Zemlinsky had already written more than sixty songs in the
style of his nineteenth-century predecessors, when he became interested in
the poetry of Richard Dehmel. Schoenberg, already fascinated with Deh-
mel's work, had set two of his poems in the previous year. Responding to
the emotion and eroticism of Dehmel's "Entbietung" and "Meeraugen,"
Zemlinsky composed songs of equally intense passion in his op. 7. Dehmel
inspired a new maturity in the lieder of Zemlinsky, whose interest in the
poet was particularly intense in 1898 when he wrote op. 9 and also set
"Aurikelchen" for women's chorus. 40 Dehmel inspired Schoenberg's mas-
terpiece Verkldrte Nacht in 1899 as well as several fine songs during this
same period.41 During a transitional period nine years later, Zemlinsky set
five other Dehmel poems that remained unpublished until their recent com-
pletion by Antony Beaumont.42
North German poet Richard Dehmel, patriarch of the Expressionist
movement, rejected the bourgeois moral codes of his day and, like Nie-
tzsche, extolled "sensuous pagan love." 43 But in 1897 Dehmel found him-
self in a court of law, having offended the moral sensibilities of Kaiser

Wilhelm II, w h o like his grandmother Queen Victoria demanded that his
subjects observe strict morality. Dehmel was ordered to expunge offensive
pages from the collection Weib und Welt (Woman and World), an event
that brought him infamy as well as admiration. Richard Strauss, w h o ap-
pears to have thrived on controversy, set nine of his ten Dehmel songs
between 1898 and 1 9 0 1 . Dehmel's notoriety brought him to the attention
of other composers as well: Alma Schindler worked with a number of Deh-
mel's poems and included four in her published lieder; Anton Webern set
at least eight Dehmel poems; Conrad Ansorge, Armin Knab, M a x Reger,
Jean Sibelius, Karol Szvmanowski, O t h m a r Schoeck, and Oskar Fried were
among the many composers w h o set Dehmel's poetry to song. 4 4
In 1910, Zemlinsky's music again reflected major changes with his set-
tings of poems by Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, w h o became the
catalyst for one of Zemlinsky's greatest works: the songs of op. 13. Zem-
linsky was already acquainted with some of Maeterlinck's dramatic works
long before he began to set Maeterlinck's poetry: Maeterlinck's play Monna
Vanna had been produced at the Carltheater in 1903, Zemlinsky had con-
ducted Paul Dukas's opera based on Maeterlinck's play Ariane et Barbe-
bleue at the Volksoper in 1908, and he had a thorough knowledge of
Schoenberg's 1903 Pelleas und Melisande, a symphonic work closely struc-
tured around parts of Maeterlinck's play of that name. Maeterlinck in-
spired operas, orchestral music, and song from many of the most notable
composers of his day, including Claude Debussy, whose great opera Pelleas
et Melisande has been called "the foundation of modern music theater." 4 5
Between 1895 and 1920, at least fifteen orchestral works and operas by
major composers were based on Maeterlinck's plays.
The Viennese Secessionists were also fascinated by this playwright/poet/
philosopher and in 1899 had published Maeterlinck's LLnterieur and La
Mort de Tintagiles in their periodical Ver Sacrum in a German translation
by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (1873-1936). 4 6 Enthusiasm for
Maeterlinck's work among writers, artists, musicians, and the public
reached its apex in 1911 when Maeterlinck received the Nobel Prize for
Literature. T w o years earlier, in a letter to his future wife, Alban Berg
referred to his gods "Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Mahler, Strauss." 4 7 But na-
tionalistic fervor would eventually destroy Berg's admiration for Maeter-
linck: In 1914, after the outbreak of World W a r I, Maeterlinck spoke out
against the German soldiers w h o had killed a group of civilian hostages in
Belgium. Propaganda from the German leadership misled the German pub-
lic into believing that the army was merely defending itself against a guer-
rilla war movement by the Belgians. 48 Berg would then criticize
Maeterlinck's "hazy m o o d " and Debussy's "hazy harmonies." 4 9 Even Zem-
linsky was indirectly caught up in this nationalism, for when Universal
Edition published the piano/vocal score for his op. 13 in 1914, they inten-
tionally omitted Maeterlinck's name.
The poems for Zemlinsky's op. 13 were taken from Maeterlinck's second
poetry collection, Quinze Chansons (Fifteen Songs), translated into German
by Oppeln-Bronikowski. 50 Maeterlinck's suggestive, cryptic phrases, un-
answered questions, and imprecise images attempted to tap into a level of
the unconscious, a domain considered the province of instrumental music
but not necessarily the territory of words. His writings were a part of the
symbolist movement that at first was centered around the poet Stephane
Mallarme in Paris. Tuesday evenings at Mallarme's home attracted some
of the great poets, artists, and musicians of his day including Maeterlinck,
George, Debussy, Paul Claudel, Andre Gide, Edward Manet, and James
McNeill Whistler. But in the words of Anna Balakian: "Symbolism was
not French; it happened in Paris. . . . With symbolism, art ceased in truth
to be national and assumed the collective premises of Western culture. . . .
Paris served as the neutralizer of diverse cultural formations, and at the
same time was the fertile ground on which a philosophy of art, mutually
acceptable, yet subject to individual variations, could be sown." 51
The choice of words in a symbolist poem was intentionally vague. "[The]
poem becomes an enigma. The multiple meanings contained in words and
objects are ingredients of the mystery and mood of the poem. There is never
the sense of triumph of comprehension." 52 In his essay "La Morale mys-
tique," Maeterlinck spoke of the limiting quality of words. "As soon as we
express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to
the depth of the abyss, and when we reach the surface again the drop of
water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles the sea
it came from." 53
Mallarme, also discussing the limitations of words, said, "To name an
object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the
poem, which consists in the pleasure of discovering things little by little:
suggestion, that is the dream." 54 Symbolist poetry was the ideal partner for
twentieth-century song: Its reliance on ambiguous images, enigmatic
phrases, and paradox freed composers to delight in the abstractions of
musical sound.
Symbolism and many of the concepts that shaped aesthetic ideals at the
turn of the century can be traced to the great French poet/literary critic
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Baudelaire's wonderful verse, his fasci-
nation with Wagner, his "discovery" of Edgar Allan Poe, and his search
for synesthesia as a stimulus to the imagination all found resonance among
fin de siecle European artists. He believed that "experience is transferred
intuitively between different planes of our awareness and across different
art-forms," 55 a concept at the heart of his poem "Correspondances."
Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.
(Like long, distant echoes which blend into a shadowed, profound unity,
vast as night and clarity, sofragrances, colors, and sounds answer each
other.)
This idea of synesthesia was later reflected in the comments of German
poet Richard Dehmel (1894): "Nowadays we aim to make poetic technique
more sensuous by incorporating painterly and musical effects, just as paint-
ing and music attempt to learn new means of expression from the sister
arts." 56
Baudelaire's search for correspondence provided an interesting comple-
ment to Richard Wager's emphasis on a synthesis of the arts (Gesamtkunst-
werk). For Wagner, opera was the ideal genre in which he could unite
drama, music, art, and design (scenery and costumes). Balakian notes:
"What better locus for synesthesia than the stage? The form, the color, the
gesture, the accompanying music, even perfumes . . . announced the man-
made correspondences that would replace the marriage between Heaven
and earth." 57
Attempts to integrate the arts were made, often in strange ways, through-
out the artistic world. Colored lights and fragrances were sometimes ad-
vocated for fin de siecle recitals to enhance the mood of each song as it
was performed.58 Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, a great admirer of
Wagner's operas, told Alma Schindler that his efforts to represent the third
act of Tristan und Isolde in color had caused him to be overcome with a
nervous affliction. He decided to limit his translation of music into art by
portraying just two notes from act I of Tristan]59 When Schoenberg com-
posed his opera Die Gliickliche Hand (1913), he not only wrote the music
and words for the opera but planned some of the stage designs and exper-
imented with color as part of the dramatic detail, including a list of colored
stage lights that were to be synchronized with his music during perform-
ance. Around 1907, Schoenberg had also become deeply involved in paint-
ing. Later in his life (ca. 1930), he discussed his efforts to integrate the
elements of theater and music: "I make it my task to arrive at a vocal line
that bears within it the text, the stage, the characters, the decor, the music,
and everything else that is expressive, while still unfolding purely in accor-
dance with musical laws and musical demands." 60
Baudelaire's "Harmonie du soir" (from Les fleurs du mal), set by Zem-
linsky in 1916 as "Harmonie des Abends" (Harmony of Evening, complete
translation in Chapter 15), links music, fragrance, and dance.
The evening approaches with melancholy silence, an incense pours out from the
trembling blossoms, the air is filled with enveloping fragrance. Oh painful waltz,
oh feeble dance! An incense pours out from the trembling blossoms. Like a sick
heart, the violins shudder.
Symbolist poetry was often imbued with a sense of foreboding and per-
vasive atmosphere of death: 6 1 "At the core of symbolism . . . was man's
struggle against the void, as he visualized the power of death over con-
sciousness. . . . Most of the great vein of cosmic poetry prevalent under the
guise of symbolism is a defense of the h u m a n element in the midst of the
abyss, rather than the admiration of the cosmic which occurs when the
cosmic is taken as the creation of God." 6 2 Death is a dominant theme in
Zemlinsky's Maeterlinck songs and is introduced in the first song as three
sisters go in search of Death, "Die drei Schwestern wollten sterben" (The
Three Sisters Wished to Die). The poems of op. 13, all with women as their
subject, include many characteristic themes of Maeterlinck's work: the mys-
tical number "three" (three sisters), sightlessness (the girls with bandaged
eyes), women w h o are often sisters, vague, unnamed fears (the knights
looked with apprehension), unidentified characters (she went d o w n to the
stranger), and cryptic circumstances (neither said a word and hurried
away).
The symbolist movement had an enormous impact on German poets,
artists, and musicians. Poet Stefan George, arriving in Paris in 1889, was
introduced to Stephane Mallarme by French poet Albert Saint-Paul and
invited to attend Mallarme's Tuesday evenings. George's exposure to sym-
bolism was a defining experience in his intellectual and poetic develop-
ment, 6 3 and he, in turn, influenced many of his German compatriots. He
selected aspects of symbolism for his poetry as he explored the mystery of
words and undertook the creation of m o o d and impressions. 6 4 After the
publication of George's Hymnen, Mallarme wrote an admiring letter to
George: "I was delighted by the artless and proud spontaneity in the bril-
liance and reverie of those Hymns (no title is more beautiful); but also, I
was delighted that your handiwork, so fine and rare, should make you one
of us, one of the modern poets." 6 5 George would forge his own path, writ-
ing with a uniquely controlled precision and symmetry.
It is easy to understand George's appeal to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern,
and later Zemlinsky. George's role as a reformer and regenerator of
German poetry coincided with their sense of necessary change in music.
But more important for their music, the formal clarity of his poetry, his
reaction against sentimentality, his compact style, and his careful choice of
words paralleled many of the same characteristics they displayed in their
music. 6 6 Late in his career, as Zemlinsky developed a new, spare style, he
set George's poetry for the first time: "Entfiihrung" (Abduction) and "Gib
ein Lied mir wieder" (Give Me Another Song) in his op. 2 7 (nos. 1 and
10). "Entfuhrung" is reminiscent of Baudelaire's "L'invitation au voyage,"

but n o w the lovers' destination is the mythical " G e r m a n w o o d s " rather
than the mysterious, exotic land of Baudelaire's imagination. Like Baude-
laire, George has the lover address his beloved as "child." The spare beauty
of Zemlinsky's t w o illuminating settings make the listener wish for other
George/Zemlinsky lieder, perhaps on the scale of Schoenberg's Book of the
Hanging Garde ns.
George also stimulated German interest in symbolism through his trans-
lations of works by Mallarme, Verlaine, Moreas, and others for Blatter fur
die Kunst, a periodical he founded with Carl August Klein in 1892. In
1 8 9 1 , he published translations of 115 poems from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs
du mal in a collection entitled Die Blumen des Bosen, from which Alban
Berg selected three poems for the orchestral aria Der Wein (1929) and
poems for a secret program in his Lyric Suite ( 1 9 2 6 - 1 9 2 7 ) . 6 7 Oddly
enough, Zemlinsky did not use George's translation of Baudelaire's "Har-
monie du soir" ("Harmonie des Abends") but one by Anton Englert. 68
George influenced other German writers including Rilke, whose poetry
was set to music by Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith, Krenek, and
Weill. Zemlinsky's unpublished "Ernste Stunde" is his only existing setting
of Rilke's poetry. H u g o von Hofmannsthal began a troubled literary friend-
ship with George in 1 8 9 1 , and although he admired George's work, Hof-
mannsthal did not wish to be absorbed in George's elitist circle. 69
Hofmannsthal first burst into the literary world at the age of sixteen with
exquisite lyrical poems published under the pseudonym Loris Melikow.
"His particular combination of youth and virtuosity was an unparalleled
phenomenon in the history of German letters." 7 0
Hofmannsthal revered the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and sent him
a copy of his first book, Der Garten der Erkenntnis.71 But few of Hof-
mannsthal's contemporaries set his poetry to music, perhaps because of the
complexity and fragility of his images. His perception of "preexistence"
that we exist before we are born and then return to that existence after we
diehis contemplations on the brevity of mortal life, and his "life as a
dream motif" 7 2 all require time for reflection that is usually not possible
within the musical and time constraints of a song. 7 3 Yet in 1916, Zemlinsky
wrote three of his most exceptional songs on lyric poems by Hofmannsthal,
songs that magically tap into the listener's subconscious and illuminate the
mystery of these elusive words: " N o c h spur ich ihren Atem," "Hortest du
denn nicht hinein," and "Die Beiden."
The flowering of the nineteenth-century German lied had been rooted in
German Romantic poetry, but with new influences such as the symbolist
movement, the lied began to move away from its native literary roots to
become a more international genre. Nearly a quarter of Zemlinsky's songs
for piano and voice and all of his orchestral lieder use German translations
of non-German poetryBelgian, French, Indian, African American, Italian,
and Turkish poetry. The internationalism, so feared and condemned by the

Nazis in the 1930s, was fundamental to Zemlinsky's poetic taste and mul-
ticultural background. M a n y of his early, unpublished songs had been set-
tings of traditional German poetry, but his preferences eventually became
quite catholic. 7 4 Since Zemlinsky used German translations of poetry (with
the exception of the three American popular songs in English), he was
composing music for his own language while exploring the humanity of a
larger community. The songs of his nationalistic contemporary H a n s Pfitz-
ner, on the other hand, were focused on German poetry and only occa-
sionally included "outside influences" such as a sonnet from antiquity by
Petrarch. 7 5
The translation of a poem may duplicate the basic ideas, story, or
thoughts of the original, but it cannot duplicate the layers of meaning be-
hind the original words, the sounds, or cultural context. A new poem has
come into existence. When an artist such as Paul Heyse translated Italian
or Spanish poetry, he achieved admirable results, but the new poem cannot
be perceived as identical to the original. Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire
(1912), based on the poetry of Belgian writer Albert Giraud, was translated
into German by O t t o Erich Hartleben, and Hartleben's free translation
communicated many of Giraud's extraordinary images. But the poet/trans-
lator also added new poetic beauties of his own, sometimes moving so far
from Giraud's text that only a tenuous link is maintained with the original.
Schoenberg carried this process one step further by encouraging performers
to present his Pierrot in the language of the country in which it was per-
formed.76 Pierrot would then be twice removed from Giraud's original.
Zemlinsky was obviously surprised and challenged by the fresh ideas that
came to him from other cultures. Some of his greatest songs, such as " H a r -
monie des Abends" and the Maeterlinck lieder, were inspired by non-
German poets whose words unlocked new depths in his musical creativity.
At the same time, he persisted in setting traditional German poetry through-
out his life, ending his op. 2 7 on 4 April 1938 with one of the most famous
poems in German literature, Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied" (Wanderer's
Night Song). Zemlinsky, like many other twentieth-century composers,
continued to be inspired by poetry that had been a staple for nineteenth-
century song composers: works by Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Hoffmann
von Fallersleben, Theodor Storm, and Klopstock.
Zemlinsky was clearly aware of important literary currents of his time,
and in 1929, in the same year that works by Langston Hughes, Jean
Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank H o m e appeared in a German trans-
lation, he chose seven of their poems for the Symphonische Gesdnge, op.
20. The poems were part of a collection entitled Afrika singt: Fine Auslese
neuer Afro-Amerikanischer Lyrik, a volume of 100 works by "mostly"
black poets (one poem is by abolitionist Angelina Weld Grimke) that ap-
peared at a time when many Europeans were fascinated with jazz and black
society.77 "Jazz permeated all areas of Austro-German culture" 78 and of-

fered European musicians exciting new freedoms. Respected critics enthu-
siastically discussed the virtues of jazz, and the journals Der Auftakt and
Musikblatter des Anbruch devoted entire issues to jazz.79 After Ernst Kre-
nek's highly successful jazz-inspired opera Jonny spielt auf (Johnny Strikes
Up [the Band]) premiered in Leipzig on 10 February 1927, Zemlinsky pre-
sented it four months later in Prague.80 Krenek's opera "reached an audi-
ence estimated at a half million in nearly five hundred performances
between 1926 and 1929." 81 But reactionary voices within Germany and
Austria resisted jazz and the increasing number of black musicians within
their borders with the same vitriol they expended on everything perceived
as non-German. In 1932, as the world economic crisis deepened, the Neue
Zeitschrift fur Musik declaimed that "in the interests of unemployed native
musicians we demand the speediest elimination of the black pestilence."82
Everything about Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf proved offensive to the
Nazis, who placed Krenek high on their list of degenerate musicians.
Zemlinsky appears to have sympathized, perhaps even identified, with
humanity on the margins of society. In the Symphonische Gesdnge, he
chose poems about violence toward women ("I beats ma wife an' I beats
my girlfriend too"), drunkenness ("I takes ma meanness and ma licker
everywhere I go"), and rhythm ("The low beating of the tom-toms"). In
April 1937, a time when few German-speaking composers dared to choose
anything but conventional German literature for their musical settings,
Zemlinsky returned to Afrika singt in his op. 27 songs, again setting Lang-
ston Hughes's "Afrikanischer Tanz" as well as Hughes's "Elend," and
Claude McKay's "Harlem Tanzerin."
Zemlinsky's fascination with literary works from foreign cultures was
also reflected in his operas: Der Kreidekreis, an opera adapted by the writer
Klabund (pseudonym for Alfred Henschke) from an old Chinese drama; Es
war einmal, based on work by Danish writer Holger Drachmann; his one-
act operas Fine florentinische Tragodie and Der Zwerg, adaptations of two
Oscar Wilde works; and his uncompleted operas Der Konig Kandaules,
based on a play by French writer Andre Gide, Malwa, based on a story by
Gorki, and Raphael, based on a novel by Honore de Balzac (La peau de
chagrin). Zemlinsky, who had conducted Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta
Mikado, attempted his own version of the story.83
Zemlinsky's Lyrische Symphonie, op. 18 for orchestra and soloists (bar-
itone and soprano), was also inspired by non-German poetry, in this case,
the work of Indian poet/Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, whose
words were set to music by many of Zemlinsky's contemporaries. Tagore
visited Prague in 1921, and Zemlinsky probably became interested in Ta-
gore's writing at this time. Zemlinsky's model for the Lyric Symphony was
Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1908-1909) by Gustav
Mahler, who had also looked to the East for his textthe Chinese poetry
of Li-Tai-Po in a German version by Hans Bethge.84 Reflecting on Mahler's

influence on Zemlinsky, music critic and former Zemlinsky student Rudolf
Stefan Hoffmann wrote: "There are many songs of the earth and this is
one also. Its spiritual relationship to Mahler is undisputable as is Zemlin-
sky's own personality, which gives it [Lyric Symphony] the unmistakable
and meaningful imprint. . . . The earth is rich and . . . can offer fertile soil
for many songs." 85 Zemlinsky would continue his Eastern explorations, not
only in the opera Der Kreidekreis, but also in some of the songs of op. 27.
A love for the exotic had been incorporated into the German art song
throughout the nineteenth century, represented in Eastern themes, poetic
forms, and poets. The fourteenth-century lyric poet Hafiz had inspired Goe-
the and Marianne von Willemer's West-ostlicher Divan (1819), from which
Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Wolf selected poems for their music, while
Brahms set Georg Friedrich Daumer's translations of Hafiz's poetry. In
1928, Richard Strauss set four poems by Hafiz and one from The Chinese
Flute in Gesdnge des Orients, op. 77, by Bethge. Webern's song "Die ge-
heimnisvolle Flote" in his op. 12 (1917) is also taken from The Chinese
Flute.*6 Nineteenth-century poets Friedrich Riickert, August von Platen,
and Gottfried Keller wrote ghazals, poems based on a complex Arabian
poetic form, which were set to music by Schubert, Brahms, Louis Spohr,
and in the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg.
For Germans and for Europeans in general, the East or "Orient" repre-
sented a fantasy world, a mystical state of mind with actual place often
vaguely defined. The Orient could include Egypt, as in Verdi's Aida; Mad-
agascar as in Ravel's Chansons madecasses; or a harem in an unnamed
Islamic country, as in Zemlinsky's "Orientalisches Sonett" (Oriental Son-
net).
Zemlinsky found in poetry a source of personal expression around which
he could shape his musical vision, magically linking musical inspiration and
technique in the interpretation of the poem. His willingness to allow words
to influence the shape of his musical ideas places him squarely within the
German lied tradition. The listener can sense Zemlinsky's affinity with the
poet when words stimulated his musical imagination and reveal glimpses
of his own intimate thoughts and sensibilities. His songs typified many of
the significant movements taking place in song: his early settings of folklike
poetry, for example, can be seen as part of the nationalistic spirit that had
been developing among German-speaking people for more than a century.
Like many other composers of his generation, he began his career as a late
Romantic, choosing poetry devoted to nature, war, and love; but eventu-
ally, he became enamored with more international styles, particularly those
embodied in the works of the symbolist poets. Poetry inspired novel piano
figurations, vocal lines and phrasings, and unique harmonic juxtapositions
in Zemlinsky's songs throughout his life. His Dehmel lieder, the Maeter-
linck songs, and his unpublished Hofmannsthal and Baudelaire lieder pre-
sent superbly creative music with musical subtleties uniquely sympathetic

to each poetic voice.
Several songs of op. 22, written in 1934, reflect the thoughts of a man
chastened by life. Morgenstern's poem "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen," no.
1, ends with the words "Be tranquil, heart! The darkness can do you no
more w r o n g . " The Nazis had just forced Zemlinsky from Germany, and
he faced a disquieting future. Yet, t w o years later, he also set Goethe's
defiant "Feiger Gedanken bangliches Schwanken," no. 3, which proclaims:
"Never submit!" M u c h of the poetry Zemlinsky chose for op. 2 7 is sur-
prisingly serene, although these song settings were written between 1937
and 1938, frightening years for those w h o were in danger and contem-
plating flight from their homelands. Zemlinsky ends this collection with
Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied," no. 12. Perhaps the message is in the title.
Certainly its conclusion must have reflected Zemlinsky's sorrows:
Ah, I am tired of striving,

What is all the pain and joy about?
Sweet peace, come, ah,
Come into my breast!
Chapter 11
Introduction to the Songs
He deserves the highest title: he is a singer.

Franz Werfel1
Zemlinsky's early music differentiates itself from the Jugendstil in one
particular, which then became a basic characteristic of the new music:
the intentional simplicity of the theme. Despite all his harmonic variety,
he renounces any elaborate, luxuriously dressy piano accompaniment.
. . . The voice does not declaim, is not interpreted by motivic play in
the piano that attracts attention to itself, but on the contrary, the actual
music isagain in the Brahmsian sense but even more socrammed
into the vocal line.
Theodor Adorno 2
Would all those who are transported into ecstasy by [Tristan und
Isolde] explain their state of mind as the effect on their nervous system
of the altered diminished seventh?
Alban Berg3
Song is the core from which many German composers of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries found their "voice." Richard Strauss recalled that
he wrote his first composition when he was six years old, "a Christmas
carol, for which I 'painted' the notes myself, but my mother wrote the
words below the notes since I could not then write small enough." 4 Song
was at the very heart of the grand orchestral concepts of Gustav Mahler,
w h o permeated his symphonic works with song themes and singing. M a n y
of Zemlinsky's earliest and last compositions were lieder, and they often
reflected changes in his ideas about composition, illustrating the continual
Introduction to the Songs 137
metamorphosis of his style. His conservatory education connected him with

the masters of the past, and at first, his songs were carefully grounded in
a traditional tonal language and style.5 As he developed independence, his
harmonic vocabulary became more colorful, flexible, and unique with his
increasing use of chromaticism, nonfunctional harmonies, pedal point,
vaguely implied tonal centers, polytonality, and whole tone scales.
Zemlinsky's songs represent a bridge between the romanticism of the
nineteenth century and the aggressive modern worlda synthesis of such
disparate styles as those of Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, Berg, and early Stravin-
sky. Adorno argued that "on closer observation, one must correct the su-
perficial impression of Zemlinsky's eclecticism: one discovers how much
stylistic divergence adapts itself as a meaningful nuance to the continuity
of the composition." 6 Zemlinsky's musical language was never rigid or
static, and he continued to change throughout his professional life in re-
sponse to his musical experiences.
Over half of Zemlinsky's published and unpublished compositions are
for voice. This includes operas, choral works, works for voice and piano,
and works for voice and orchestra. Adorno and other supporters believed
Zemlinsky's talent was most fully expressed in opera, and even Louise
Zemlinsky, who witnessed a renewed interest in her husband's work during
the last years of her life, seemed resigned to this focus: "The Zemlinsky
renaissance is based no doubt on his stage works, not so much on the
performance of his orchestral works; nevertheless it is good, in spite of
that." 7 Adorno maintained, "The opera conductor perceived himself to be
the opera composer; most of what he wrote belongs to the stage." 8 Between
1894 and 1932, Zemlinsky completed seven operas: Sarema, Es war ein-
mal, Der Traumgorge, Kleider machen Leute, Fine florentinische Tragodie,
Der Zwerg, and Der Kreidekreis, all of which were performed during his
lifetime with the exception of Der Traumgorge. He also wor ked on several
other operas that he did not finish: Die Folkunger, Der Meister von Prag,
Malwa, Der heilige Vitalis, Herrn Ames Schatz, Raphael, Der Konig Kan-
daules, and Circe. (Der Konig Kandaules was completed by Antony Beau-
mont and premiered at the Hamburg State Opera in 1996. The Library of
Congress also houses fragments of several unidentified dramatic works.)
His experiences as an opera conductor contributed to the lyricism of his
writing for the voice and to the sophisticated orchestration of his operas,
songs for voice and orchestra, and orchestral works.
But one might also say that song contributed to the lyricism of Zemlin-
sky's operas, especially since he prominently incorporated song material
into works such as 5 war einmal, Traumgorge, and Kleider machen Leute.
Transferring an intimate genre like song to a grand medium such as opera,
however, is not always dramatically convincing, as, for example, Hugo
Wolf's insertion of "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" in Der Corregidor.
But Zemlinsky often paralleled the emotions of the song with the dramatic
situation of the opera, such as Nettchen's "Lehn' deine W a n g ' an meine

Wang' " in Kleider machen Leute or, in the case of the dwarf's operatic
song " M a d c h e n , nimm die blutende O r a n g e , " symbolizing coming events
in Der Zwerg.9
Zemlinsky, like Richard Strauss, was adept at writing both lieder and
opera, unlike most of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Composers
such as Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf were k n o w n for their great lieder,
but their operas were unsuccessful; Brahms, a composer of excellent songs,
wrote no operas at all. In 1 9 2 1 , writer Robert Konta called Zemlinsky's
songs "pure poetry" and stated that every stage of Zemlinsky's musical
development was revealed in his songs. 1 0
Zemlinsky's former student Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann, writing about
Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in 1924, commented that "as in everything
Zemlinsky writes for the voice, the entire composition is grounded in song,
engendered from the singing melody. One thinks of the Maeterlinck songs
. . . in which the melody has the first and last and . . . most decisive w o r d
to sayno, to sing." 1 1
Zemlinsky's melodic gift was ideal for songwriting, and in the words of
Franz Werfel, "[H]e doesn't hesitate to sing and must sing." 1 2 Zemlinsky
composed a wealth of song for piano and voice, fifty-four of which were
published during his life:
Op. 2 (thirteen songs, published by Hansen, 1897)

Op. 5 (eight songs, Hansen, 1898)
Op. 6 (six songs, Simrock, 1899)
"Nordisches Volkslied," published as a musical supplement to Neue Musikalische
Presse, no. 3 (1900)
Op. 7 (five songs, Hansen, 1901)
Op. 8 (four songs, Hansen, 1901)
Op. 10 (six songs, no date; Doblinger, about 1901)
"Uber eine Wiege" or "Schmetterlinge," published as a musical supplement to the
music periodical Der Merker (1910)
"Schlummerlied," published in Bohemia, no. 96 (1912)
Op. 13 (six songs, UE, 1914)
Three songs, published by Chappell, 1940: "Chinese Serenade," "My Ship and I,"
and "Love, I Must Say Goodbye"
O p p . 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 13 are available in the United States from Recital

Publications of Huntsville, Texas. The Universal Edition of op. 13 is avail-
able worldwide.
Since the 1970s, many of Zemlinsky's unpublished works have finally
been issued, the most important being op. 22 (six songs written in 1934
and premiered in 1935), as well as two additional songs without opus

numbers, and op. 27 (written between 1937 and 1938), which were pub-
lished in 1977 and 1978, respectively, by Mobart Publishing Co.
A treasure trove of Zemlinsky's published and unpublished lieder, in-
cluding the manuscript copies of op. 22 and op. 27, is housed in the Al-
exander von Zemlinsky Collection at the Library of Congress. Since
Zemlinsky's most intense period of songwriting occurred early in his career,
the many fragments, sketches, and unpublished songs in the Zemlinsky
archive provide an important view of his developing compositional tech-
nique. The quality of the early unpublished songs, written between 1888
and 1898, is uneventhis is also true of the early published songsand
several of the unpublished songs are actually more interesting than some
Zemlinsky chose for publication. Thirty-six unpublished songs mostly from
the Library of Congress Collection, written between 1889 and 1924, l3 plus
three additional songs14 are now available in a Recordi Edition of 1995,
transcribed, edited, and sometimes partially reconstructed by Antony Beau-
mont in Alexander Zemlinsky: Lieder aus dem Nachlass/Posthumous
Songs.
Many of Zemlinsky's unpublished songs were obviously exercises in
which he worked on compositional problems. Others may have been in-
tended for publication but fell by the wayside because of Zemlinsky's busy
schedule. And perhaps, he, like so many other composers, neglected to
publish some of these songs because he believed his reputation would be
enhanced by publishing more prestigious works such as his operas. 15 With-
out Zemlinsky's words to guide us, we can only guess his intentions. His
unpublished songs written for competitions, such as the Zusner Lieder, or
songs presented in public performance, such as the Hofmannsthal and
Baudelaire songs that were performed for the Society for Private Musical
Performances, he clearly considered to be finished products at the time of
performance and can be discussed from that standpoint. The songs of op.
22 and op. 27, written during the turmoil of the 1930s, were prepared for
publication but were perhaps not published because of a shrinking market
for older composers whose works no longer commanded a large following.
Of course, the Nazis also coupled Zemlinsky's name with those of his "de-
generate" colleagues; his only Austrian publication after 1933 was the Sin-
fonietta, op. 23, issued by Universal Edition in 1935.
His early songs, however, present a different set of considerations. Zem-
linsky seems to have been fairly casual about the first works he chose for
publication, perhaps because he was trying to appeal to a diverse audience
or because he was focusing his collections around a particular theme. "O
Sterne, goldene Sterne . . . " (Oh, Star, Golden Star), published in his op. 5
collection, is blandly pleasant but shows little inspiration in comparison to
the lovely but unpublished "Siisse, siisse Sommernacht" (Sweet, Sweet Sum-
mer Night), also an early song. Many of the unpublished lieder are beau-
tiful, and of course, all of the songs provide important information about
his developing style. This study will focus on those songs that appear to be
mostly complete and are currently available to the reader; only occasionally
will song fragments or song sketches be mentioned.
Zemlinsky's fluctuating interest in songwriting reflected changes in the
social function of the German lied itself, a vibrant musical genre at the
beginning of his career that had lost much of its audience by the time of
his death. Between 1888 and 1 9 0 1 , Zemlinsky produced more than half of
all his songs, partly mirroring his youthful enthusiasm for the genre as well
as the importance of song at the end of the century. The decade of the
1890s was a rich era in the history of the German art song, with composers
such as Strauss writing sixty-one songs, H u g o Wolf eighty-five, Schoenberg
forty-one, and M a x Reger about seventy. Audiences were equally zealous
about song. Edward Kravitt points to society's enthusiastic reception for
both public and private lieder recitals between 1880 and 1914: "In Berlin
alone the outstanding accompanist Michael Raucheisen reckons that an
average of twenty were offered weekly, and these were generally sold out.
Raucheisen estimates that he accompanied at eight Liederabende each
week. The lied became one of the principal musical expressions of the pe-
riod."16 Zemlinsky contributed to this phenomenon as both a composer
and accompanist.
Perhaps there is another reason why so many of Zemlinsky's earliest
compositions were songs: He, like Schumann in his song year of 1840,
wrote at a time when his passions were dominant. But after his love affairs
with Melanie G u t t m a n n and Alma Schindler soured, Zemlinsky's song-
writing became more sporadic. During 1907, the year of his marriage to
Ida G u t t m a n n , for example, he wrote at least seven songs, then appears to
have written none in the next t w o years. Nevertheless, he created his
greatest lieder in the years that followedhis Maeterlinck songs, written
in 1910 and 1 9 1 3 , and the unpublished songs of 1916 are some of the
finest songs of the twentieth century. T h r o u g h o u t the 1920s his interest in
song for voice and piano languished, and he appears to have composed
only the incomplete "Ernste Stunde" (1928) during this decade. Instead,
he focused his attention on opera and orchestral song, completing the Lyric
Symphony (Lyrische Symphonie), op. 18, in 1922 and the Symphonic Songs
(Symphonische Gesange), op. 20, in 1929. N o t until 1933, after he had
returned to Vienna, would he again concentrate on song for voice and
piano.
Horst Weber notes a general loss of interest in song composition among
most composers, with the exception of Webern, around the time of World
W a r I. 17 For Richard Strauss, this disengagement from songwriting began
even earlier. After the retirement of his wife Pauline de Ahne from the
concert stage in 1906, Strauss turned his attention to opera and other stage
works and did not write any new songs until 1918. 1 8 Schoenberg appears
to have believed he had exhausted this medium after his groundbreaking

Das Buch der hdngenden Garten (1908-1909) and did not return to lieder
until 1933 with Three Songs, op. 48. After 1910, Alban Berg, whose ear-
liest works had consisted almost entirely of songs, revisited this genre only
once, yet it is significant that this song, his 1925 setting of Theodor Storm's
"Schliesse mir die Augen beide," was, as he told Webern, his "first attempt
at a strict twelve-note composition." 19 Here again is an example of a com-
poser using song as a vehicle for musical exploration on a small scale.
The standard for songwriting at the end of the nineteenth century was a
gold standard, embodied in hundreds of preeminent works from a century
of amazing talents that included Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann,
Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wolf, and Richard Strauss. Zem-
linsky linked himself to this great tradition, at first experimenting with the
styles of his predecessors, then gradually developing his own voice. Living
in an era in which Brahms and Wagner were considered to be diametrically
opposed, he spoke of them in the same breath, calling them both geniuses.
He absorbed and reconciled their writing styles, integrating Brahms's prin-
ciples of motivic organization with Wagner's chromaticism and unfettered,
opulent harmonic vocabulary. Also, Zemlinsky's personal associations with
Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg, and his ability to understand their highly
individual voices, were transformed in his writing, illuminating the inter-
connectedness of his entire period. Until now, his unique voice and impor-
tant contribution to the development of the art song have been missing
from studies of this genre.
Zemlinsky's understanding of the singing voice and his brilliant pianistic
skills combined to make him, in the words of one critic, "the ideal accom-
panist," 20 excellent assets for a composer of song. Paul Nettl, in a letter of
reference for Louise Zemlinsky, referred to Zemlinsky as "one of the best
experts in voice and coaching of his time," 21 and his excellence as an ac-
companist was continually mentioned by critics and friends. After a 28
January 1899 recital that included some of his songs, for example, he was
praised for both his music and his accompanying skills. "In the tastefully
arranged program, especially interesting were three new, extraordinary
songs by the gifted, young composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who ac-
companied the performance beautifully at the piano with the sensitivity of
an experienced musician." 22 He was also thoroughly schooled in the tra-
ditional lieder repertoire, accompanying and touring with singers such as
baritone Max Klein, who sang Schubert's Schwanengesang with Zemlinsky
at the piano on 8 April 1920 and Die Winterreise on 20 November 1921
in Prague. Critic Felix Adler commented in the periodical Bohemia that
"when Zemlinsky sits at the piano, accompanying cannot be discussed in
a conventional sense. He is not an accompanist but a master of the com-
poser. He takes command and illuminates the work. When he performs
Winterreise and the smallest interlude receives unsuspected significance,
then there is bound together with that an experience which is no less intense
than that of his Figaro or Tristan interpretations." 23 Although his role as
an accompanist has yet to be chronicled, programs for his performance in
May 1921 at the Produktenborse in Prague when Zemlinsky accompanied
bass Arthur Fleischer in songs by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Hugo Wolf and
his recital with the famous Lotte Lehmann in a Lieder-Matinee for the
Academic Society of German Doctors two years later are tantalizing hints
about this portion of his musical career. He continued to accompany until
at least 1935, when he performed the songs of his op. 22 with Julia Nessy
in a Liederabend in the small concert hall of the Musikverein. His intimate
knowledge of the lied tradition contributed to his fine sense of phrasing,
expressiveness, musicianship, and magnificent ability to write for the
voice.24
Throughout his career as a song composer, Zemlinsky wrote with an
elegant sense of formal clarity. His excellent craftsmanship can be seen in
the shaping of every lied, in its overall formal unity, and in its internal
organic design. His early use of strophic forms and variants of ABA form
often included motivic structuring that continually relate and integrate the
text with voice and piano parts. His through-composed songs, also care-
fully organized, are often generated from a single motivic cell that is pre-
sented in the first measure of the song and then evolves into a myriad of
related shapes. Like Brahms, Zemlinsky used this technique, often called
developing variation, throughout all of his compositions. 25 (An early song
sketch in the Library of Congress Alexander von Zemlinsky Collection, "O
war mein Lieb," reveals Zemlinsky's fascination with the possibilities of
motivic interplay between the voice and pianoand his loss of interest in
this particular song, as he "doodles" in the margins and fails to underlay
all of the text.)
His songwriting style focused attention on the voice, not as a virtuosic
instrument of display or even simply as a vehicle for text declamation but
as an instrument of expression, beauty, and warmth. His melodic gift, ev-
ident in all of his music, finds its finest realization in his songs. Although
Zemlinsky subordinated the piano to the voice, he granted each an equal
role in presenting musical motives, while focusing the listener's attention
on the voice's many beautiful melodies. Like Brahms, Zemlinsky harnessed
the power and color potential of the piano to highlight the vocal line and
to express the mood and meaning of the texts.
The question of a composer's attitude toward transposition is always an
interesting one, and since Zemlinsky published op. 2 and op. 5 in both
high and low voice, one may assume he did not object to the transposition
of his songs. Certainly he may have felt some pressure from his publisher
to make this music available to a large audience by offering key choices,
and Beaumont makes a case for Zemlinsky's own preference for the high
version of op. 2 because of key relationships in that version that are not
maintained in the low voice edition. 2 6 But Zemlinsky's dedication of op. 2

to Anton Sistermans, a baritone, also could have meant he hoped the fa-
mous singer would perform these songs from the low voice edition. The
Library of Congress has a copy of Zemlinsky's score for Irmelin Rose und
andere Gesdnge, op. 7, with various performance marks including a note
to play "Sonntag" a minor third lower than the printed pages. 2 7 A hand-
written note on "Turmwachterlied" from op. 8 also indicates this was per-
formed down a minor second 2 8 from the printed version. Here again is
evidence of Zemlinsky the practical musician. But he obviously preferred
certain keys, and it is interesting to note his vacillating on one occasion
between two of his favorite keys: a holograph of the voice part for "Voglein
Schwermut" in D minor, written in bass clef in the Library of Congress
Zemlinsky collection, 29 was ultimately published in E-flat minor for high
voice.
Most of Zemlinsky's songs are relatively brief, with none approaching
Schubert's sprawling epics such as " G a n y m e d " or Schoenberg's weighty
"Abschied" (Departure), op. 1, no. 2. N o r do we find in Zemlinsky's songs
the density of texture exhibited in some of Brahms's lieder. But like Schu-
bert in his "Heidenroslein" or "An die Musik," Zemlinsky often wrote
with a simplicity and elegant purity that defies analysis. In "Tiefe Sehn-
sucht," op. 5, II: 2, a song of only sixteen measures, he achieves such an
intimate, delicate connection with Liliencron's fragile text. His songs pro-
ject an austere logic in which all ideasharmonic, rhythmic, melodic
unfold from a simple nucleus, fulfilling the later instructions of Schoenberg
to his student Karl Linke: "Look at the Schubert song Auf dem Flusse
the way one movement generates another! . . . [Njothing should ever seem
difficult. . . . The simpler your things seem to you, the better they'll be. . . .
I can only start from things of that kind, things that are organic to you,
that's to say self-evident." 30
Chapter 12
Apprenticeship:
Early Unpublished Songs
Zemlinsky's unpublished songs written between 1889 and 1892 reveal a

young artist who is exploring and assimilating the great nineteenth-century
art song tradition. He carefully studied the music of his predecessors and
the poetic tradition that inspired them. At first, Zemlinsky often chose po-
etry by famous writers whose works were associated with the Romantic
lied, poetry by Heine, Eichendorff, Klopstock, and Hoffmann von Fallers-
leben. Zemlinsky's manuscript copy of "Die schlanke Wasserlilie" (The
Slender Waterlily) on a poem by Heinrich Heine in the Library of Congress,
dated 15 November 1889, reveals a talented eighteen-year-old, writing in
the conservative Romantic style of Robert Franz and Clara Schumann, both
of whom were still alive. Christopher Hailey, biographer of Franz Schreker,
notes that students of composition, as part of their training at the Conser-
vatory of Vienna, were taught to imitate famous works. 1 Imitation could
be dangerous to young composers who lacked the conviction of their own
ideas, but the exercise of using another composer's work as a model is, of
course, not unique to the Vienna Conservatory or even to music itself
painters have often developed their technique by actually copying the works
of the "masters." Alban Berg, in his Seven Early Songs, written between
1905 and 1908 under the guidance of Schoenberg, was obviously experi-
menting with an array of musical techniques used by Debussy, Brahms,
Wolf, and Schoenberg, but Berg's wonderful individuality shines through,
despite those obvious influences on his work.
"Die schlanke Wasserlilie" and six other songs are part of an incomplete
collection of twelve songs in the Library of Congress collection.2 This poem,
set to music by other composers including Robert Franz, Carl Loewe, and
Hans Pfitzner, describes the moon's longing for a lovely waterlily, a bios-
Apprenticeship: Early Unpublished Songs 145
som that bears a strong resemblance to the lotus flower of Heine's "Die
Lotosblume." 3 The lotus flower, an exotic waterlily, symbolized female
beauty and was a religious symbol of the cosmos in ancient Indian poetry. 4
It became a popular flower for many nineteenth-century poets such as
Emanuel Geibel, whose poem "Die stille Lotosblume" (The Silent Lotus
Flower) was set to music by Clara Schumann. Zemlinsky's "Die schlanke
Wasserlilie" and Clara Schumann's "Die stille Lotosblume" share a number
of stylistic similarities that illustrate typical techniques of the period: Both
use steady chordal repetitions to create an atmosphere of tranquility; the
voice line is frequently doubled in the piano; and both employ chromati-
cism as an embellishment to melody and harmony, lending a somewhat
saccharin quality to the music. (Robert Franz also often doubled the voice
line in the accompaniment, sometimes in an inner or bass voice of the piano
part.) The piano anticipates the vocal melody in the prelude and elsewhere
(mm. 7-8), even subordinating the voice part to the more interesting piano
melody. The slightly comic twist of the poem's final line probably appealed
to the young Zemlinsky, w h o was k n o w n for his wit and caustic humor.
Joseph von Eichendorff and August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben,
favorite poets for nineteenth-century song composers, represent another of
Zemlinsky's links to the lied tradition as he strove for mastery of his craft.
In 1889, Zemlinsky selected two poems already set by Robert Franz: Ei-
chendorff's "Gute N a c h t " (Good Nightin Franz's Zwolf Gesdnge, op.
5) and Hoffmann von Fallersleben's "Liebe und Friihling" (Love and
Springin Franz's Sechs Gesdnge, op. 3). "Gute Nacht," copied on the
back of "Die schlanke Wasserlilie," imitates the style of Robert Franz, with
its chordal syncopations against a melodic line in the bass of the piano
part, which moves in counterpoint to the melody of the voice part. "Liebe
und Friihling," with its dramatic accompaniment of arpeggiated chords,
doubling of the voice part in the piano, and its chromatic melody, also
exhibits techniques found in Clara Schumann's "Er ist g e k o m m e n " (He
Has Come). Zemlinsky organized the lengthy "Liebe und Friihling" in ABA
form, one of Brahms's favorite structures.
In January 1890, Zemlinsky chose texts by three less famous poets, Theo-
dor Vulpinus (pseudonym for Theodor Renauld), 5 Carl Pfleger, and Robert
Prutz (Prutz's poem "Wohl viele tausend Vogelein" was set to music by
Franz). Vulpinus's "Ich sah mein eigen Angesicht" (I Saw M y O w n Face)
resembles Heine's poem "Ich h a b ' im T r a u m geweinet" (I Cried in My
Dream), and the teenager Zemlinsky was already skillful enough to capture
the pathos of the poem without drawing attention to its weaknesses. Like
Robert Franz, he used the dark colors of the piano's low range while also
anticipating parts of the vocal melody in the tenor or bass of the piano
part. This is coupled with carefully chosen dissonant harmonies and a
darkly colored voice part that begins on a b-flat and climbs as the emotion
of the text increases, for example, in mm. 1 5 - 1 6 to express the words "I
dreamed I didn't love you." Zemlinsky inserts rests in the voice part of
m m . 3 and 4 to parallel the breathless emotionalism of the words "fur-
rowed from bitter grief" and gives the voice a dramatic appoggiatura with
a melodic leap of a fifth to emphasize the word "loved" in m. 16. Like
Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky exploits large melodic leaps in the voice line to
highlight important words such as " h e a r t " (Herzm. 6) and "miserable"
(elendm. 18). Techniques of the mature Zemlinsky are already present
in the repetition of the opening vocal part in the bass line of the piano in
mm. 7 - 9 , the anticipation of the voice in the piano part of m. 10, and the
piano's answer to the vocal line in m. 15 and m. 19. "Ich sah mein eigen
Angesicht" is an attractive addition to concert repertoire and equal in qual-
ity to many of Robert Franz's best songs.
Carl Pfleger's "Lieben und Leben" (Love and Life) and Robert Prutz's
"In der F e m e " (In the Distance) express longing, desolation, and misery
typical romantic fare. Although the manuscript for "Lieben und Leben"
appears to be incomplete, the song is musically interesting, although lacking
in Zemlinsky's usual organizational care. Zemlinsky toys with triplet
repeated-note figurations against duples, minor second dissonances, and the
wavering of major and minor tonality (m. 28) to reflect the deteriorating
love of the narrator; the minor sonority triumphs as the speaker confides
that nature mirrors his desolation. Zemlinsky ends with recitativelike
chords and a static vocal line to portray loss of hope (or the composer's
loss of interest). The more successful "In der F e m e , " reminiscent of
Strauss's song "Ach, Lieb, ich muss nun scheiden" (Ah, Love, I M u s t N o w
Depart), op. 21 ( 1 8 8 7 - 1 8 8 8 ) , tells of a lover w h o is leaving his beloved
for reasons never stated. The departing lover, overcome with emotion, con-
cludes with short, broken phrases and wide melodic skips. "In der F e m e "
employs many of the same musical techniques used in "Ich sah mein eigen
Angesicht" but is more carefully organized around a motive, presented in
the piano introduction, that recurs throughout in both the voice and piano
parts.
Examining Zemlinsky's early songs is an education in the history of the
German lied. In February 1890, for example, he tackled another popular
genre of the nineteenth century, the ballade. Obviously challenged by the
examples of predecessors such as Schubert, Schumann, and Carl Loewe,
Zemlinsky selected Eichendorff's "Waldgesprach" (Conversation in the
Woods), a dramatic tale of the Lorelei. Zemlinsky appears to have followed
Schumann's version of the poem's first line from his Liederkreis, op. 39,
setting: 6 "es ist schon spat, es ist schon kalt"rather than Eichen-
dorff's"es ist schon spat, es wird schon kalt"again indicating that
Zemlinsky was studying masters of the lied tradition. Brahms also fre-
quently borrowed variations of poetic texts from other composers rather
than consulting the poet's original version. (His "Die M a i n a c h t , " for ex-
ample, uses the same alterations found in Schubert's 1816 setting of the
poem, changes that do not appear to be motivated by musical demands.)

Eichendorff's poem tells of a young man who meets a beautiful w o m a n
late at night in the forest and offers to escort her home. But she implores
him to flee before he is harmed, and he realizes he is doomed, for she is
the Lorelei. The story may be simply about a man w h o is in the wrong
place at the wrong time; but perhaps Eichendorff is presenting a more
complex interaction between the man and the Lorelei. His male character
first observes that the strange w o m a n is alone and beautiful, and although
he offers to take her home, we really do not know if he is trustworthy. 7
Her response is surreal and appears unrelated to him: "The deceit and
trickery of men is great, my heart is broken by pain, the [sound of] the
w o o d h o r n surrounds us." Then, as if she is suddenly conscious of his pres-
ence, she compassionately tells him, " O h , flee! You do not k n o w w h o I
a m . " But perhaps he is one of those deceitful men, for he then remarks on
her beautiful body, a strange comment from one w h o has just offered her
safe conduct; but he is never given the opportunity of revealing whether
his intentions are honorable.
The Lorelei's dramatic theme is trumpeted (or "Waldhorned") in the first
measures of the introduction (mm. 1-2), then followed by an agitato fig-
uration of sixteenth notes (m. 3); both figures provide important rhythmic
and melodic material for the song. A rhythmic motive derived from the
first four notes of the voice part (mm. 4-5) also permeates the song. The
Lorelei material constantly returns (e.g., mm. 20, 2 1 - 2 2 , 2 7 - 2 8 , 3 2 - 3 3 ,
47, 50) to propel the story forward, occurring as a dramatic warning in
the soprano range of the piano and, to emphasize the brooding words of
the Lorelei, in the piano's middle range (m. 20). Zemlinsky chose E-flat
minor as the governing key, something of an unusual key but one he uses
in a surprising number of songs, many of them songs of passion (e.g., "Ich
sah mein eigen Angesicht," "Das verlassene M a d c h e n , " "Klopfet, so wird
euch aufgethan"). Zemlinsky's music is perfectly in tune with the meaning
of the text; for example, when the beautiful young w o m a n is described (m.
31), the music moves from E-flat minor to G-flat major; the Lorelei's short
ejaculation in the upper range of the voice for the words " O h , flee" is
followed by an ominous lowering of pitch and dynamics for "You do not
k n o w w h o I a m " (mm. 2 1 - 2 3 ) ; the descending tremolo chords of mm. 4 5 -
46 graphically portraying the man's deadly fate. (Liszt, in his "Es war ein
Konig in Thule" [There Was a King of Thule], has a similar passage when
the king throws his goblet into the sea.) Zemlinsky uses tremolo to heighten
dramatic tension, a device much in fashion with his nineteenth-century
predecessors, such as Schubert in "Der Z w e r g , " Wolf in " M i g n o n "
("Kennst du das Land"), and Loewe in "Erlkonig" and " E d w a r d . " Dimin-
ished seventh chords, pedal points, and chromatically ascending bass lines
also contribute to the dramatic musical vocabulary of Zemlinsky and his
models.
He again set "Waldesgesprach" between 23 December 1895 and 3 Jan-

uary 1896, this time for soprano, strings, harp, and two horns. In this new
version, Zemlinsky is in full control of his resources, conjuring up rich, late
Romantic harmonies from the vocabularies of Wagner and Bruckner, en-
hanced with his elegant instrumentation. The Lorelei's character is intro-
duced with warm solo strings and harp, while horns are used to suggest
the forest setting and to warn the hapless traveler to beware. Zemlinsky's
sympathies are clearly with the Lorelei, who is surrounded with alluring,
lyrical melodies. (Perhaps he is suggesting that the fate of the traveler was
better than death.) This version of "Waldesgesprach" was performed on 2
March 1896 by Polyhymnia with Melanie Guttmann as the soloist, on the
same program with Schoenberg's Notturno in A-flat major for solo violin
and strings. The Neue Musikalische Presse of 15 March 1896 commented
that Zemlinsky's composition "made a great impression through its origi-
nal, fresh ideas, and pure, noble, youthful fire." Melanie Guttmann was
praised for her "beautiful, well-trained voice and musical performance."
This superb chamber work deserves to be a standard part of today's concert
repertoire.
Zemlinsky wrote three other songs in 1890, which are grouped together
on the same manuscript sheets:8 "Das Rosenband," "Abendstern," and
"Lerchengesang." Each illustrates Zemlinsky's continuing experiments with
motivic organization as well as his careful attention in setting text. Friedrich
Klopstock's "Das Rosenband" (The Ribbon of Roses) had earlier been set
to music by Schubert (and by Richard Strauss in 1897), and Zemlinsky
seems to have followed Schubert's alteration of Klopstock's first line,
changing the word "Im Friihlingsschatten" to "Im Fruhlingsgarten." Ma-
terial from the piano part (m. 1) recurs throughout Zemlinsky's tender
presentation of a young couple's discovery of earthly paradise. Brahms's
exquisitely Schumannesque "Lerchengesang" (Song of the Larks), op. 70,
no. 2, on a poem by Carl Candidus, seems to have suggested the arpeg-
giated figurations of the accompaniment, ABA' form, and appoggiatura
chords of Zemlinsky's setting, but Zemlinsky also adds his own word-
painting, mimicking the larks' song in a motive (m. 1) that leaps up a major
sixth, then diatonically descends with a trill on the first note of the descent
(in both A sections and in the postlude),9 and in a trill of three beats in the
right hand piano part of m. 6 that conveys "the larks' heavenly greetings."
The third song, "Abendstern" (Evening Star), a conversation between the
poet and the evening star, is based on a poem by Johann Mayrhofer, a
close friend of Franz Schubert, who set forty-seven of Mayrhofer's poems
including this one. In 1890, Zemlinsky, now a composition student of Jo-
hann Nepomuk Fuchs, was probably assigned the task of setting "Abend-
stern" with Schubert's version as his model. Zemlinsky not only copied
most of Schubert's choices of key but even changes key at the same points
in the text; the vocal range in both songs is almost identical: Schuberte1
to g 2 ; Zemlinskye 1 to f-sharp 2 ; Zemlinsky also uses the Schubertian tech-

nique of shifting between major and minor to reflect joy or melancholy.
His piano figurations also bear a close resemblance to Schubert's, although
Zemlinsky throws in a few surprising dissonances of his own (m. 16, mm.
3 5 - 3 6 ) . Schubert partially differentiates the music for poet and star but
maintains a similar mood for each; Zemlinsky creates a greater distinction
between the two, making the star's music more sorrowful and plaintive.
In 1 8 9 1 , Zemlinsky's song "Des Madchens Klage" (The Girl's Lament)
w o n first prize in the Vienna Conservatory's Vincenz Zusner lieder com-
petition, a yearly contest in which competitors were required to set the
poetry of an obscure Austrian poet, Vincenz Zusner, founder of the com-
petition. Over the years, many young composers tried their hand at setting
Zusner's words: H u g o Wolf wrote a setting of "Abendglocklein, op. 9, no.
4, in the spring of 1876; during his year of study at the Vienna Conser-
vatory, Leos Janacek wrote a song cycle, Fruhlingslieder, on Zusner's po-
etry; Franz Schreker set three Zusner poems in 1899 and w o n the Zusner
prize with his version of "Des Madchens Klage." In Zusner's sentimental
"Des Madchens Klage," a young w o m a n tells her sweetheart that she can-
not marry him because of her father's opposition, and she is n o w prepared
to die of grief. Her passion is revealed in the first two beats of Zemlinsky's
setting, which introduce the primary motive, an appoggiatura figure that
descends either a half-step or whole step throughout. The dramatic entrance
of the voice with an octave leap to the song's highest pitch on the word
"vernichtet" (destroyed) continues the distraught emotionalism of the in-
troduction. Zemlinsky's freely shaped ABA'B' structure complements Zus-
ner's four poetic stanzas: stanzas one and three contain most of the
dramatic information, while stanzas two and four describe the girl's flower
garden, the symbol of her mental state, at first thriving with blossoms, then
withered with only the funereal rosemary left. (The entire song is governed
by the key C-sharp minor with the first B section in the relative majorE
major; the B' section is in the parallel majorC-sharp majorand then
concludes in C-sharp minor.) The vitality of the A sections and the piano
interludes that surround them is partly maintained with varying triplet fig-
urations in the accompaniment, while the reflective, doleful m o o d of the B
sections is controlled with simple, slow-moving quarter notes that double
the voice part, sometimes in octaves.
Zemlinsky again entered the Zusner competition in the following year
and w o n second place with his song "Der Morgenstern" (The Morning
Star); no first prize was awarded that year. In "Der Morgenstern," a young
girl gazes at the morning star, whimsically wishing it were a stone in her
ring lighting the way for her lover. Boldly chromatic chord substitutions
throughout, a la Liszt, lend this song its distinctive colors. M o s t of the
harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic unifying materials are presented in the
first measure, and although Zemlinsky uses a variety of figurations in the
piano part, he continually manipulates his motivic material on varying

pitches (i.e., mm. 7-9) with rhythmic variations (mm. 3 1 - 3 4 ) . The song is
effectively concluded with a repetition of the text from the beginning of
stanza 2, " O h , if I could hold you in my hand, you most beautiful star on
the edge of the heavens," coupled with augmentation of the vocal line and
a variation of the earlier harmonies and piano figuration.
Between 1889 and 1892, Zemlinsky set at least three poems by Heinrich
Heine for voice and piano including the earlier mentioned "Die schlanke
Wasserlilie," all of which remained unpublished during Zemlinsky's life.
M a n y years later, he wrote a song to Heine's poem "Lehn' deine W a n g '
an meine W a n g ' " (Lay Your Cheek on My Cheek) for the beginning of
act II of his opera Kleider machen LeuteHausmusik sung by Nettchen to
entertain her father, Strapinski, and other guests. 1 0
Heine's usual formula of fragile love images coupled with biting reality
would seem ideal for the acerbic but vulnerable Zemlinsky, yet in July
1892, he chose "Friihlingslied" (Spring Song), a poem in which Heine had
temporarily abandoned cynicism. Heine describes the lovely music of Na-
ture that floats through his mind into the wider world and flows to the
house of a beautiful "rose." Zemlinsky charmingly realized this fantasy as
a simple pastorale, anchoring the entire piece in the key of E-flat major
with a drone of repeated fifths in the bass of the piano. Above the drone
floats a gently flowing melody, introduced first in the vocal line and then
repeated in the upper register of the piano, where the ethereal, bell-like
timbre offers contrast to the drone. Each new appearance of the melody is
delicately varied, that is, diminution in m. 14 and augmentation in the
piano postlude. In the final vocal line (mm. 1 6 - 1 9 ) , the poet's message is
coupled with a melisma that soars to a-flat2 before slowly descending to
the tonic, recalling Richard Strauss's "All mein Gedanken" (All M y
Thoughts), op. 21 (1889). The salutation of Strauss's lover to his beloved
is coupled with a delightful melismatic phrase that leaps up a major sixth
and then descends irregularly like the fluttering of a bird's wings. Felix
Mendelssohn also set Heine's "Friihlingslied" as "Gruss," op. 19, no. 5,
and also uses a pedal point droneperhaps the stimulus for Zemlinsky's
drone.
" W a n d l ' ich im Wald des Abends" (As I Wander in the W o o d s at Eve-
ning), another of Zemlinsky's unpublished Heine songs, 11 stylistically re-
calls the lyrical writing of Robert Schumann. Paying homage to both
Schumann and Brahms, Zemlinsky arpeggiated the piano figurations, out-
lined melodic and harmonic motion, while using the bass line as a coun-
terweight to the voice part. Chromatically descending bass lines (mm. 3 -
9, 1 5 - 1 9 , 2 6 - 3 2 ) are similar to those found in many of Schumann's songs
such as his "Das verlass'ne Magdelein" and "Stille Liebe." The voice line
also begins a chromatic descent in m. 8, overlapping with the last two
measures of the descending bass part; the two lines are rhythmically inde-
pendent of each other as the bass descends on the first and third beats of
the measure, while the voice moves on the weak beats. Zemlinsky's subtle
use of rhythm is everywhere apparent in this song as, for example, the
rhythmic displacements in mm. 7 - 1 2 and mm. 2 1 - 2 2 . Independent melodic
material in the piano part complements both the lyricism of the vocal line
and the song's rich harmonic language.
From June 1892 to June 1897, Zemlinsky was sporadically occupied
with the poetry of Paul Heyse, setting four poems in op. 2 and op. 5 as
well as several others that remained unpublished during Zemlinsky's life.
(See Chapter 10.) The often folklike subject matter of Heyse's lyrics ap-
propriately engaged the interest of both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg in the
"Brahmin" era. Schoenberg, whose "Brahmin" era occurred at about the
time Zemlinsky was writing his large choral setting of Heyse's Fruhlings-
begrabms (1896-1897), 1 2 set Heyse's "Madchenlied" and "Waldesnacht."
Of Zemlinsky's four previously unpublished Heyse settings from 1892 in
the Library of Congress Zemlinsky Collection, Beaumont considered only
"Auf die N a c h t " and "Im Lenz" to be complete, noting that key signature
errors in the autograph score of "Im Lenz" prevented a conclusive read-
ing. 13 N o n e of these works were selected by Zemlinsky for his first song
publication, op. 2, five years later, which includes a new setting of "Im
Lenz."
In "Auf die N a c h t " (At Night), the most stylistically focused of Zemlin-
sky's 1892 Heyse songs, a group of women are spinning fabric for their
trousseaux while a young girl mourns because no one loves her. A spinning
figure of moving eighth notes in the piano part captures her anguish in a
manner similar to Schubert's "Gretchen am Spinnrade," with the key of E
minor, emphasized by a pedal point on E, as the backdrop for the plaintive
lament. While cheerful girls and boys laugh and sing in anticipation of their
wedding day, the spinning wheel turns swiftly and the music shifts to the
parallel major (m. 14), then to the mediant major (m. 18). The vocal mel-
ody becomes triadic (m. 22) as the spinning motion of the piano part gives
way to a Brahms-like triadic figuration in the accompaniment (mm. 2 5 -
27). The meter changes from 3/4 to 7/4 when the speaker reveals her love-
less state (m. 37), and the irregularity of each measure becomes a contrast
of triple and duple rhythms against a broader vocal line. Eighth notes slow
to simple quarter-note motion as tears run down the face of the forlorn
young w o m a n , and when she asks why she should continue to spin, a part
of the spinning figure returns, stops, begins again, and then dwindles away.
While the text used by Brahms in his setting of "Die Spinnerin" (1886),
called "Madchenlied," op. 107, no. 5, is mostly the same as Zemlinsky's,
Brahms employed no significant word-painting. 1 4 Schumann's somewhat
a w k w a r d but haunting 1851 "Die Spinnerin," op. 107, no. 4, which also
used a spinning figure, was probably not Zemlinsky's model since their
texts differ considerably.
Another of Zemlinsky's unpublished songs on a Heyse text, "Der Tag

wird kiihl," written five years later in June 1897, could well be modeled
after Brahms's magnificent "Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen" ([I decided] Not
to Go to You Anymore). Both songs employ dark, passionate music to
explore their brooding texts of unfulfilled love. Zemlinsky begins in F-sharp
minor with a three-note motive consisting of a rising perfect fifth, followed
by a stepwise descent (either a whole or half-step) played in octaves. Both
Zemlinsky and Brahms take advantage of the somber colors of the piano's
bass register with octave doublings and the nagging repetition of another
three-note motive shaped from an upper neighboring tone figure. Brahms
creates an elegant tour de force by gradually building momentum within a
simple ABA' form and through careful manipulation of his motivic struc-
ture. Both he and Zemlinsky contrast the first section of their music with
the second by moving to a major key (Brahms moves from D minor to F
major, while Zemlinsky shifts to the parallel major of F-sharp minor), but
Zemlinsky is unable to discipline a multitude of ideas into a coherent
whole, despite his use of motivic repetitions. His presentation of the two
primary motives is often coupled with portions of a chromatic scale, which
contributes to the song's internal energy, although it fails to unite the fig-
urations of each of the song's four separate sections. In the dramatic A' of
"Der Tag wird kiihl," the primary motives are presented in diminution; a
rising chromatic vocal line doubled in the bass line of the piano is coupled
with the upper neighboring motive, then followed by a persistent pedal
point in an inner voice of the piano part, all enhancing the passionate text
"You distant heart, come to me soon before we are both old and gray, and
weeds, thorns and pain grow in my heart." The voice is given a range of
an octave and a sixth with its highest note a2 on the word "Schmerzen"
(pain). The piano part concludes almost as it began (m. 32) as the vocal
line chants in a monotone, "The night is long, the night is cold!" The piano
concludes in F-sharp minor with the second motive presented in augmen-
tation. How interesting that Zemlinsky dedicated this desperate, morose
song to his fiancee, Melanie Guttmann, with the words: "meiner Mela zum
Abschied" (to my Mela on parting). What sort of parting they faced is not
clear since Guttmann did not leave Austria for the United States until 1901.
Chapter 13
A Notorious Brahmin:
Op. 2, Op. 5, Op. 6
Brahms cast an imposing shadow over much of Vienna's musical commu-

nity at the end of the nineteenth century, and his music became a model
not only for Zemlinsky but for Schoenberg, Schreker, and Webern. One of
Webern's students recounted that "Webern loved Brahms' music. . . . [As
late as 1935, Webern continued to affirm his admiration for Brahms, saying
as he composed Das Augenlicht]: 'I am thinking of a cantata like Brahms'
Schicksalslied." 'M
Brahms's influence is clearly discernible in Zemlinsky's music written be-
tween 1894 and 1898, especially in the first published song collections, op.
2, op. 5, and op. 6. Lyrical melodies, rich bass lines, arpeggiated piano
figurations, and syncopated rhythms combined with romantic subject mat-
ter are highly reminiscent of Brahms's writing. Like his mentor Brahms,
Zemlinsky integrated the piano part into the structure of the song, keeping
the piano a supporting medium for the voice. Although both Brahms and
Zemlinsky were excellent pianists, rarely did either grant to the piano a
role equal to the voice in the manner of Schumann, with his long preludes,
interludes, or postludes. On only a few occasions would Zemlinsky write
extensive piano parts for his songs, as, for example, in "Turmwachterlied,
op. 8, no. 1, and "Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen," op. 13, no. 6.
Lieder fur eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte, Op. 2, et al.

Op. 2 is clearly tied to the Brahms tradition and carried out with per-
sonality:
[It is] true art with the first traces of pure Zemlinsky harmony that strives to subject
the harmonic structure to the laws of counterpoint. Zemlinsky's most recent works
add to the advocates of the theory that harmony and counterpoint are one.2
The thirteen songs of op. 2, written between 1894 and 1896, 3 are divided
into t w o sections: Part I, seven songs, uses a vocal range of an octave and
a fifth, and six of the seven songs have night as their setting or refer to
night, often coupled with sleeplessness; Part II for various voice types uses
a full two-octave vocal range with topics centered around nature and hu-
manity. Like Brahms and Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky chose poetry from a
wide spectrum, with less than half in op. 2 written by well-known poets.
Paul Wertheimer, the poet of "Empfangnis" (Conception), 11:6, for exam-
ple, was Zemlinsky's acquaintance and a regular at the Cafe Griensteidl
w h o achieved no lasting fame, unlike Nobel Prize winner Paul Heyse, the
immortal Goethe, or Theodor Storm. Zemlinsky dedicated op. 2 to the
well-known Dutch baritone Anton Sistermans (a student of the famous
German singer/teacher Julius Stockhausen) w h o premiered both Brahms's
Vier ernste Gesdnge (The Four Serious Songs)4 and Mahler's Fines fahren-
den Gesellen.5
Op. 2, Book I
Zemlinsky opens op. 2 with "Heilige N a c h t " (Hallowed Night) on a

poem by Russian author Afanasy Fet, 6 immediately exploring many of the
musical devices generally associated with Johannes Brahms. Zemlinsky, for
example, constructs both the song's melody and harmony from triadic fig-
urations. The tranquil music, with its slowly descending arpeggio in the
opening vocal phrase, programmatically reflects the quiet descent of night.
(Brahms occasionally suggested the meaning of the text with graphic music,
as, for example, when he depicted the rising moon with the ascending vocal
line of "Die M a i n a c h t " (May Night].) Zemlinsky's choice of night themes
for op. 2, book I, is akin to Brahms's many songs devoted to night, such
as "Die M a i n a c h t " or " D a m m r u n g senkte sich von oben." With a typical
Brahmsian gesture, Zemlinsky gently displaces the beat pattern of the 4/4
meter in the vocal line by tying the last beat of m. 2 over the bar line to
the second beat of m. 3 in the melody; he also pushes forward the motion
of the B section of "Heilige N a c h t " with syncopation in the accompaniment
(m. 10). The poem's three stanzas of text and Zemlinsky's repetition of the
penultimate line of the poem are divided into three short musical sections
in ABA' form, one of Brahms's favorite song forms. Although formal clarity
is always fundamental to both composers, their inventive minds never al-
lowed a rigid repetition of the same material, illustrated here at m m . 1 8 -
30 as the A material returns with harmonic alterations, and likewise in an
extension of the final section.
A Notorious Brahmin: Op. 2, Op. 5, Op. 6 155
Imitating another Brahmsian device, Zemlinsky constructs a melody in

the song's B section that bears a striking resemblance to his A melody,
which now ascends rather than descends and is also rhythmically similar
to its A counterpart. Throughout his "Brahmin" period, Zemlinsky displays
his own creativity and individuality with unique piano figurations, melo-
dies, and harmonic progressions. His figurations are less dense than those
of Brahms, and his vocal lines are less instrumental in breadth. Zemlinsky
writes very well for the voice, cleverly beginning with an " o o " vowel
("Ruh") on the voice's first entrance in head voice, while tailoring musical
phrase lengths to textual phrases and manageable breathing patterns. The
slowly rising scale in the bass line of the first six measures, counterbalancing
the descending motion of the vocal line, will be a device frequently em-
ployed by Zemlinsky in his songs.
Zemlinsky's early songs are already carefully organized, often around
one musical phrase that may simply be repeated on various pitches with
some variation. In "Der Himmel hat keine Sterne" (The Sky Has N o Stars),
no. 2, on a poem by Paul Heyse, for example, all of the song's basic the-
matic material is offered in the first phrase (mm. 1-4), followed by a second
phrase with the same material slightly varied (mm. 5-8); three more short
sections continue with the same music delineated at various pitch levels
(AA'A"A'") that move from the home key to the key a minor third higher,
back to the home key, then to a key a major third higher, followed by a
coda in the tonic key. (Stanza 1 of the poem is set in the AA' section;
stanza 2 is set to the music of A" A'".) 7 Robert Franz, w h o often repeated
the same melodic material on various pitches, was most likely one of Zem-
linsky's models for this song. Zemlinsky avoids the potential for monotony
inherent in this kind of writing by varying both the accompaniment and
the vocal line. Also like Robert Franz, he doubles the vocal line in various
voices of the accompaniment, which generally consists of simple chords. In
mm. 1 9 - 2 1 , however, a segment of the melody is presented in the alto
voice of the accompaniment in eighth notes against a slower-moving vari-
ation of the melody in the upper voice. This pleasing, modest song com-
plements Paul Heyse's delicate poem of love.
The wistful "Gefliister der N a c h t " (Whispering of the Night), no. 3, with
a poem by Theodor Storm (1817-1888), is one of the most beautiful songs
of op. 2. The poet, unable to sleep because of indecipherable night sounds,
wonders if these rustlings bring messages of love or adversity. The sibilants
of the poem and the song's dynamic level, ranging from " p i a n o " to triple
" p i a n o , " onomatopoetically reinforce a perception of whispering while en-
hancing the muted mood of the text. Zemlinsky writes a delicate, two-
voiced accompaniment for the piano in which the sixteenth-note figuration
of the right hand divides into two groups against a more sweeping figure
in the left hand, twice the length of the right-hand group. The lightness of
the two-voiced texture and the repetitive figuration of the right-hand part
in the soprano range of the piano contribute to the transparent texture of

the song. Additional contrast between the two parts occurs in the strange
triplet figure (eighth, dotted eighth, sixteenth) in the left-hand part against
the duple rhythm of the right hand (mm. 7-8; 20-23, 25). Zemlinsky sets
Storm's poem of two stanzas to two varied musical strophes followed by
a short coda in which the first two lines of text are repeated (AA'A"). In
mm. 33-34, Zemlinsky lowers the third of an anticipated E major chord
in the voice part that is supported by a diminished seventh chord in the
accompaniment (mm. 33-34), clearly confirming that the wind is not car-
rying words of love but an omen of future misfortune.
The anonymous poem for "Der Liebe Leid" (The Pain of Love), no. 4,
identified as Turkish, was perhaps chosen by Zemlinsky to honor his
mother, who was born in Sarajevo when it was still part of the Ottoman
Empire. But the poem actually has little regional color, presenting instead
a universal theme: disappointment in love. The protagonist lies sleepless,
weeping from despair over the frustration of love as he listens to the lament
of a turtle dove. "Der Liebe Leid" bears a pale resemblance to Brahms's
"Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer" (My Sleep Grows Ever Lighter) with
its parallel thirds and sixths in the right-hand piano part against syncopated
octave leaps in the left hand. The three poetic stanzas are treated musically
as strophic variations; in the third stanza, as the poet weeps, two different
sixteenth note figurations (mm. 17-18, m. 19) mirror the agitation of the
text. The vocal line ends poignantly on the fourth scale step, suspending
harmonic resolution on the word "tears."
Zemlinsky's unpublished "Orientalisches Sonett," completed on 15 Oc-
tober 1895 close to the time that "Liebe Leid" was written, offers a more
overtly exotic topic: the harem of a sultan. Lovely concubinesslaves, sto-
len from Greece and Circassia where Islamic tribes of the Caucasus are
noted for their physical beautystimulate the poet's curiosity and desires.
Zemlinsky captures the poem's fantasylike atmosphere with harmonic mi-
nor scales, augmented chords, and sudden shifts of key, while using the
piano as if it were a harp; its static strumming in C-sharp minor for the
first sixteen measures of the song accompanies the musing of the bard in
the style of Hugo Wolf's "Gesang Weylas." (A beautiful Circassian woman
is also the topic of Zemlinsky's opera Sarema, based on the play Die Rose
vom Kaukasus [The Rose of the Caucasus], also completed in 1895.)
"Mailied" (May Song), no. 5, a poem of 1810 that emanated from Goe-
the's fascination with folk poetry, shows the poet perplexed when he does
not find his sweetheart at home. He then searches for her in the place where
she gave him his first kiss. Zemlinsky projects a naivete similar to Mozart's
"Sehnsucht nach dem Friihlinge" (Longing for Spring), honoring the
poem's inherent simplicity with a modest vocal range of a tenth and a thin
textured, arpeggiated accompaniment. The piano introduction is an arpeg-
giated anticipation of the vocal line in diminution. Zemlinsky closely in-

terprets the text with his music, that is, matching the poet's puzzlings over
his sweetheart's absence from home with stolid, rustic chords, and bringing
the musical motion to an abrupt halt with a B-flat major chord held for
two measures as the poet looks on with amazement at the place where he
and his love first kissed; his disappointment is reflected in the triple piano
return of the opening figuration in the high register of the piano. 8
In "Urn Mitternacht" (At Midnight), no. 6, a poem by Julius Rodenberg
(Julius Levy, 1831-1914), a man lies sleepless and alone at night, thinking
of the one he loves. Zemlinsky divides his song into four sections (ABCA'),
corresponding to the four stanzas of the poem (the longest song of op. 2),
giving each section its own unique piano figuration, some with Brahmsian
characteristics: a variety of syncopated figures appear throughout the lied;
the arpeggiations of the diminished seventh chord in stanza 3 and the ap-
poggiaturas in the figuration of stanza 4 also occur in Brahms's "O wiisst
ich doch den Weg zuriick," op. 63, no. 8. In the B section of "Urn Mitter-
nacht," Zemlinsky indicates the slow passage of time and monotony of
night with pedal point in the left-hand piano part (mm. 17-34) coupled
with a repeated figuration in the right-hand piano part (mm. 17-26). In
stanza 3, the expressive vocal line soars to its highest pitch as the lover
addresses the beloved in his thoughts, "Only one is still awake in my heart,
only one: and that is you!" Zemlinsky then repeats the end of the phrase,
"only one, and that is you." Material from the first four measures of the
vocal melody unify the entire song, recurring in stanza 4 a minor third
higher (mm. 58-65), then returning to the key of its first appearance (m.
66), combined with a new accompaniment.
Eichendorff's good-humored "Vor der Stadt" (Before the Town), no. 7,
presents a whimsical vignette of two romantic minstrels who sing and play
out in the cold, hoping to glimpse a pretty girl. Although Zemlinsky's song
is little more than a minute and a half, he has lavished such subtle, charm-
ing detail on this picture. Strumming and staccato figures in the accom-
paniment imitate the plucking of stringed instruments in a serenade, while
melodic interplay between the soprano and alto voices of the piano part
represent the two musicians, who talk and walk together in harmonious
motion. As they stand together, buffeted by the cold wind, the accompa-
niment statically remains in place with a pedal point on B-flat in the bass
line (mm. 24-30). With gentle dissonances and a figuration reminiscent of
Dvorak's "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (from the Gypsy Melodies,
1880), Zemlinsky sympathetically reveals the futility of their quest, gently
poking fun with rhythmic gestures such as the static repetitions of mm. 3 7 -
41, the sixteenth-dotted-eighth figure that begins in m. 13, and the pregnant
pauses of m. 59 and m. 61. 9 Like Hugo Wolf, Zemlinsky had the rare gift
for capturing wry humor with his music.
Book II
In the lovely "Friihlingstag" (Spring Day), no. 1, on a text by Karl Siebel,
the piano takes a leading melodic role as the voice gently accompanies with
short, lightly murmured phrases confined to the range of an octave and a
third. Recitativelike, the voice moves lazily with irregular rhythms and de-
layed entrances to enhance a mood of stillness and ennui. The lyrical mel-
ody of the piano part also contributes to a sense of time suspended with a
series of appoggiaturas and passing tones, whose mild dissonances enhance
the harmonic interest. The dynamic range fluctuates between pianissimo
and triple piano, complementing the mood of delicate, sensuous languor.
Four of the six poems in Book II imitate folk style, although only the
poem "Altdeutsches Minnelied" (Old German Love Song), no. 2, is actually
derived from a folk source, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Zemlinsky's majestic
song is built upon stately diatonic octave motion in the accompaniment,
independent motivic development, and spirited vocal lines. Masculine vigor
and nobility are captured with steady rhythms within alternating meters,
stolid repetition of text at the end of each stanza, and a disjunct vocal line
often propelled forward by an anacrusis that leaps up a perfect fourth, all
sturdily reinforcing a young man's hearty declarations of adoration.
Zemlinsky's "Der Traum" (The Dream), no. 3,1() was inspired by the
folk lied tradition that glorified children's songs and stories, "Kinderlieder."
Childhood themes that had inspired nineteenth-century composers such as
Robert Schumann and Carl Loewe reappeared in both concert hall lieder
and hausmusik with composers such as Engelbert Humperdinck, Max Re-
ger, Joseph Haas, and Armin Knab. 11 Zemlinsky's song is subtitled "Ein
Kinderlied" and uses musical devices often found in Mahler's lieder, with
its variety of bird imitations in piano and voice, simple piano texture, hu-
mor, and repetitive figurations. Victor von Bluthgen's poem relates the
dream of a little finch, who imagines all night that the stars are birdseed,
and he is eating his fill; but he awakens to find, to his disgust, that he is
hungry! Zemlinsky reinforces the folk spirit of "Der Traum" with strophic
form, simple rhythmic motion, and a subordinate piano part that merely
doubles the voice line except in m. 13, where it has the primary melodic
line.
Otto von Leixner's haunting "Das verlassene Madchen" (The Forsaken
Girl), no. 4, tells an age-old story: A young girl is seduced and abandoned
by a man who had pretended to love her; after the birth of her illegitimate
child, she is cast out by her family. Although Zemlinsky's sophisticated
music (like Brahms's folk songs) could not be mistaken for genuine folk
music, he, nevertheless, creates an illusion of simplicity with a short, square
melody for the voice part that is sequentially repeated without pause,
abrupt meter changes (from 3/4 to 4/4), and repetition of the final phrase
of text at the end of each stanza. In the first two stanzas, the vocal line is
doubled in the chordal accompaniment, but in the third and fourth stanzas,
the accompaniment offers an independent variation of the previous music.
Zemlinsky not only varies the hemiola figurations of stanzas 3 and 4 but
changes meter several times in the final stanza as the music broadens to
emphasize the pathetic situation of the young w o m a n . The vocal line in
stanza 4 covers a two-octave range, its highest pitches representing the
desperate w o m a n ' s wails of grief. A holograph score of the vocal line in
the Library of Congress 1 2 has none of the alternative low notes of the
published score, nor does Arnold Schoenberg's hand-copied version, pre-
served in the Wiener Stadt und Landesbibliothek in Vienna. Perhaps the
publisher, Hansen, had convinced Zemlinsky that the lower note alterna-
tives were necessary in order to make his songs more marketable to a wider
audience. Zemlinsky himself included several simple songs, such as "Der
Himmel hat keine Sterne," in op. 2, suited to the talents of an amateur
singer and pianist, and probably represent his efforts to develop a com-
mercial base. But then he follows "Der Himmel hat keine Sterne" with
"Gefliister der N a c h t , " which requires skilled performers.
In his "Im Lenz" (In Spring), no. 5, Paul Heyse presents spring not as
the season of joy and rebirth but rather as a season that breeds future
suffering. Zemlinsky's superb setting implements subtle rhythmic freedom
to match the irregularities of Heyse's poetic lines. Using hemiola and fluid
changes of meter as well as rhythmic variety in the vocal line, Zemlinsky
enhances the text's description of fleeting love with effortless freedom. His
thin chordal figuration in the accompaniment often leans delicately on the
second beat of the 3/8 meter, thus skillfully dislocating the rhythmic pulse.
Octave doublings of the bass line in mm. 1 9 - 2 3 add weight and texture to
the music in anticipation of the ominous warning of the final stanza: "Flow-
ers and wounds break out in Spring."
Between 1895 and 1 9 0 1 , Zemlinsky set five poems by his friend Paul
Wertheimer (1874-1937), an editor of the Neue Freie Presse whose Ge-
dichte were published in 1896. Wertheimer's "Empfangnis" (Conception),
the final song of op. 2, is a mystical/religious plea for purification and grace,
cloaked in reproductive language: God's grace (conception) occurs when a
seed or embryo from God descends into the w o m b (soul). Zemlinsky or-
ganizes the entire song around a single, short, symbolic motive presented
in the song's first measure. This motive, which has been called the "Life
Motive," 1 3 occurs throughout Zemlinsky's compositions and here is used
in both the accompaniment and the voice line. In the first three measures,
a rocking figure in the bass and alto lines of the piano (dotted quarter,
eighth, melodically derived from the primary motive), coupled with the
repeated primary motive, immediately establish an introspective atmos-
phere. The motive is repeated in the first entrance of the voice, somewhat
masked by octave displacement, and is then presented in the following
phrase in retrograde. After being expanded, transposed, segmented, and
repeated, it returns (m. 23) with the last two lines of text in an enriched,
varied version; the voice soars to its highest pitch with the words "my
soul . . . " and is followed by a piano interlude constructed from a rising
sequence of the primary motive over a pedal point. The voice repeats the
first two lines of text along with the "Life Motive," while the piano repeats,
varies, and continues to repeat the motive for three more measures. (Such
intense motivic manipulation will be a characteristic of Zemlinsky's music
throughout his career.) The voice and each line of the piano part are rhyth-
mically independent of one another throughout, a characteristic of many
of Zemlinsky's works as well as Brahms's. Zemlinsky highlights significant
words of the textfor example, a diminished seventh followed by a minor
second dissonance emphasize the word "awe" ("a mute awe of the Holy"),
but like Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky also inserts wide intervallic leaps in
the vocal line simply to create musical interest and novelty.
In addition to "Empfangnis" (2 July 1896), Zemlinsky set four other
Wertheimer poems: "Sonntag," no. 5 in op. 7, "Selige Stunde," no. 2 in
op. 10, "Herbsten" (Autumn, completed 29 June 1896), and "Nun schwillt
der See so bang" (Now, the Lake Swells Disquietingly). The latter two
songs, unpublished until 1995, were written close to the time of "Emp-
fangnis" and reflect Zemlinsky's growing control over his materials.
"Herbsten," like "Empfangnis," is constructed around a single motive, this
time dramatically presented in the bass line of the piano in m. 1. For the
first five measures, this motive is repeated like a ground bass, also appearing
in the soprano line of the accompaniment in retrograde and as a segment
of the motive. Melodically and rhythmically, this single motive generates
the entire song, as it is repeated, expanded and contracted, segmented, and
inverted. Wertheimer's poem describes the drama of autumn: wind and
storm batter branches and leaves in a dance of death. Zemlinsky captures
the agitation of the text with a syncopated figure in the right-hand piano
part that pulses against the core motive, which constantly mutates into
other rhythmic and melodic shapes (i.e., hemiola in m. 9, and mm. 35-36,
sequences in mm. 18-20). The voice part circles, climbs, leaps, and swirls
like blowing leaves. It sometimes echoes the piano or is doubled by the
piano. When the drama escalates with the words "suddenly beaten by the
wild storm," Zemlinsky intensifies the mood with octaves in the bass of
the piano to create a bigger sound, which he combines with a rhythmic
shift. Contrary motion (sometimes chromatic) between the right- and left-
hand piano parts or between piano and voice also heightens the dramatic
impetus to the song. Zemlinsky's repetition of the poem's first line in the
coda, linked with a pianissimo dynamic level, brings the song to an effective
conclusion.
In the second unpublished and undated Wertheimer song from this pe-
riod, "Nun schwillt der See so bang," Zemlinsky imitates both the sound
of water and rowing, that is, suggesting the motion of water with arpeggios
and oars suspended in midair after being lifted out of the water as the
arpeggios pause at the end of almost every measure. "Nun schwillt der See
so bang" joins a multitude of "boat" or barcarole lieder from the nine-
teenth century, such as Schubert's "Auf dem Wasser zu singen," Fanny
Mendelssohn Hensel's "Gondellied," Robert Schumann's "Venetianische
Lieder," Felix Menselssohn's "Venetianische Gondellied," and Hugo
Wolf's "Als ich auf dem Euphrat schiffte." Although the traditional bar-
carole is usually in 6/8 or 12/8, Zemlinsky uses a 3/4 meter in which each
beat is subdivided into six or three. The vocal line "rides" above the re-
petitive swells of the accompaniment, floating and bobbing, rising in the
final phrase with the words "my heart rises upward." Zemlinsky's har-
monic inventiveness is impressive, as, for example, in the way he uses the
added G-sharp in the key of D minor as an appoggiatura to the A above
it in sweeping arpeggio figurations, increasing musical tension by leaning
on the G-sharp in both the vocal line and the accompaniment. 14 The par-
allel thirds of the interlude to the second stanza (m. 15) lend variety to the
return of the A material in the vocal line (mm. 16-20). How strange that
Zemlinsky failed to publish this attractive song, which deserves to be better
known.
"Siisse, siisse Sommernacht," one of Zemlinsky's most beautiful songs
from this period (dated 6 November 1896), 15 is a magnificent lullaby that
remained unpublished during Zemlinsky's life but equals in beauty
Brahms's famous "Wiegenlied," op. 49, and Richard Strauss's wonderful
"Wiegenlied," op. 41. Its atmosphere of exquisite tranquility is partly the
result of its floating melodic lyricism in a voice part buoyed up by richly
creative harmonic underpinnings in an arpeggiated accompaniment. With-
out modulating from the key of A-flat, the music gently wavers between
major and minor, with harmonies colored by unexpected tonal alterations.
Each of the song's two stanzas are formally organized as ABA' with each
A' shortened by one measure and its melody treated as a variation of A.16
Small details, such as the rhythmic change from half note (m. 11) to dotted
quarter and eighth (m. 12) to double dotted quarter and sixteen (m. 13) in
a bass line that is simultaneously moving downward chromatically, lend a
vitality to this lullaby of incomparable tenderness.
Gesdnge fiir eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung, Op. 5

In 1898, the year following Brahms's death, Zemlinsky published eight
songs in two volumes, op. 5, calling them "Gesange" rather than "Lieder."
He would call his songs "Gesange" in the five collections that followed.
Kravitt notes that many composers at the end of the nineteenth century
used "Gesange" to denote complex song, such as Brahms's Vier ernste
Gesdnge,^7 rather than so-called simple lieder, but Zemlinsky appears to
have used the term "Gesange" interchangeably with "Lieder" and included
a variety of styles in his songs published between 1898 and 1914. His
massive orchestral songs of 1929, the Symphonische Gesange, clearly de-
serve the designation "Gesange."
In op. 5, Zemlinsky set three poems by well-known poets Paul Heyse
and Detlev von Liliencron and the remaining five by poets whose works
have long been forgotten. His choice of t w o works by writer/politician
Ludwig Pfau (1821-1894) may well have been prompted by his friend
Arnold Schoenberg, w h o had set at least eleven of Pfau's poems for voice
and piano before 1897 as well as one poem in a choral setting for male
voices in June 1897. Yet even the literary H u g o Wolf, in 1876, had used
Pfau's "Frohliche Fahrt" in a choral arrangement, indicating that Pfau's
poetry was held in some repute during the last part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Perhaps the poem "Unter bliihenden Baumen" by O t t o Franz Gen-
sichen, which Zemlinsky dedicated to "Frl. M . G u t t m a n n , " was chosen for
its delicate sentiments of love rather than its literary grandeur. It had al-
ready been published in the 5 April 1896 musical supplement to the Neue
Musikalische Presse, no. 14, before Zemlinsky decided to include it in his
op. 5. Half of the op. 5 songs are in minor keys and especially melancholy
in character, but several others tell of blissful love. Zemlinsky continued to
mix duple and triple rhythms in songs such as the mournful " O Blatter,
diirre Blatter" (Oh Leaves, Shriveled Leaves) with its triadic melody and
folklike character, and both "Schlaf nur ein" (Go to Sleep) and "Im K o r n "
are also reminiscent of Brahms, with their passionate mood, alternation of
triple and duple rhythms, lush harmonies, and arpeggiated accompani-
ments. Again, Zemlinsky's piano accompaniments, like those of Brahms,
remain subordinated to the voice and often radiate a simplicity that belies
the fluent shifting of rhythmic figurations from left hand to right, metrical
changes, enharmonic spellings, and rich harmonic language. Within the
entire collection, Zemlinsky uses a moderate vocal range of no more than
an octave and a fifth, as well as tonal connection from song to song, and
all of the songs are carefully organized, with half using the strophic vari-
ation form. Several songs are surprisingly brief: "Tiefe Sehnsucht," for ex-
ample, has only sixteen measures and lasts just forty-five seconds, while
"Hiitet euch!" is slightly more than a minute in length.
Book I
"Schlaf nur ein," no. 1, on a poem by Paul Heyse is yet another song
about betrayed love. A young man awakens after dreaming that his former
sweetheart still loved him. His grief is immediately reflected in an impas-
sioned piano figuration of rising arpeggios in the right-hand piano part
against a descending partially chromatic melodic line in the left. The 3/4
meter is irregularly subdivided into t w o sets of triplets followed by a duplet,
while seventh chords in both piano and voice contribute to the instability
of mood. Each of the poem's three stanzas is followed by a refrain in which

an ethereal voice offers the young man "reality therapy": "go back to sleep
. . . your dream was false." The music of the refrain slows as the beat
pattern changes from eighth notes to quarter notes, and the music slowly
rocks the lover into a state of tranquility; a duration accent on the second
beat of each measure in the piano part lends the feeling of a ritualistic
dance. The lover's misery continues to erupt two more times until the final
refrain, when the chromatic descent of the vocal line is tentatively contin-
ued in the piano postlude (mm. 5 5 - 6 2 ) . Clearly, the lover's hopeful dream
was just an illusion.
A second Heyse poem, "Hiitet euch!" (Be Careful!), no. 2, gently warns
young people to approach love with caution, for it may vanish as quickly
as it begins. Zemlinsky matches this folk wisdom with a song of tender
sweetness, presenting a vocal line that is repeated and varied in transposi-
tion and in the minor mediant key, as a boy and girl are counseled sepa-
rately. In the first stanza, when the lovers are sitting "heart to heart," the
accompaniment moves in parallel thirds and sixths, but with the words
"love comes like the wind," the piano programmatically sweeps down the
scale. Disjunct motion in the inner voices of the accompaniment prepares
the warning for the young lovers. Seventh chords, chromatically altered
chords, and passing tones add spice to the presentation of this little aph-
orism.
In the beautiful " O Blatter, diirre Blatter," no. 3, on a poem by Pfau, a
despondent w o m a n compares her love to withered leaves that were once
succulent and green. As with four other songs in op. 5, " O Blatter, diirre
Blatter" has no introduction, yet the piano part is invested with highly
dramatic material: dissonant passing tones, chromatic chords, and grand
figurations, which are pitted against a relatively simple, diatonic vocal line
that, in Brahmsian fashion, alternates between arpeggiated and linear mo-
tion. (Zemlinsky repeated the beginning vocal line of " O Blatter, diirre
Blatter" in "Die drei Schwestern" of op. 13.) The w o m a n ' s despair is
marked by the piano's steady, plodding parallel thirds moving in quarter
notes (mm. 1-2) that give way to passionate outbursts in the first and third
stanzas, as the voice line rises and the accompaniment quickens to eighths
or triplets. Each eruption of emotion is halted with ponderous chords in
the low range of the piano. As the lover remembers when her love was new
and her sweetheart was faithful, the music shifts from the minor key to its
relative major. The same basic melodic line with only slight variations is
used in all three stanzas, heightening the illusion of folk simplicity. Irregular
phrasing allows the flexible delivery of text in the second half of each
stanza.
Ludwig Pfau's innocuous " O Sterne, goldene Sterne" (Oh Stars, Golden
Stars), no. 4, is one of the least-inspired songs of op. 5. Zemlinsky subtitled
it "Im Volkston" but then wrote a somewhat artificial exercise in which
an appoggiatura figuration coupled with the rhythm of quarter note, half

note obsessively dominates the song. Voice and piano are frequently in the
same range, resulting in a generally muddy texture.
Book II
Book II opens with Otto Franz Gensichen's poem "Unter bliihenden Bau-
men" (Under Blossoming Trees), a stately affirmation of love. Although the
piano serves in a purely accompanimental role, its three interludes and
postlude link some of the disparate musical ideas from each of the three
sections (ABA'), as it repeats melodic figures from the A section (mm. 15-
17), presents harmonic connections, that is, an illusory modulation to a
mediant key that is neutralized by an enharmonic modulation to the home
key (mm. 44-49), and provides harmonic definition for the voice part. A
surprising variety of phrase lengths also contributes to the musical interest
and momentum of the song. Syncopation, hemiola within measures as well
as alternating measures of duples and triplet illustrate Zemlinsky's contin-
ued debt to Brahms.
In Liliencron's "Tiefe Sehnsucht," no. 2, the poet places a pussy willow
in his hat, and with this simple gesture he triggers plaintive memories of
his former sweetheart. With no introduction, the simplest of chordal figu-
rations in the piano part, austere harmonies, and only sixteen measures of
music, Zemlinsky's spare setting is, nevertheless, one of his most poignant
songs of lost love, recalling the unaffected folk style of Schumann in his
delicate "Volksliedchen" (Little Folk Song). The poem's two short stanzas
are set strophically (AA') in the key of D minor, a key Zemlinsky often
used for subjects of melancholy or tragedy.18 The poet's sorrow is high-
lighted by a variety of nonharmonic tones (e.g., suspension in m. 3, ap-
poggiatura in m. 4) and a thin textured accompaniment restricted primarily
to the middle range of the piano. In keeping with the folklike mood, the
voice part is confined to an octave, with the highest note reserved for the
"Liebsten" (Beloved), where a modest burst of emotion erupts in the final
vocal phrase, supported by a sudden dynamic shift to forte and a brief
expansion of the piano range. Brahms's setting of this poem as "Maien-
katzchen," op. 107, no. 4, is not as successful as Zemlinsky's in capturing
the wistful pathos of Liliencron's nostalgic poem.
"Nach dem Gewitter" (After the Thunderstorm), no. 3, on a poem by
Franz Evers, although skillfully composed, lacks the distinctiveness that
marks so many of Zemlinsky's other songs. Perhaps he found misery and
discontent more interesting than this pleasant description of love's happi-
ness. (The now-forgotten Evers also attracted the attention of the young
Alban Berg, who set two of Evers's poems.) Nature, a major protagonist
in German Romantic poetry, provides the backdrop for Evers's personal
journey and is a unifying theme throughout op. 5 as well. Zemlinsky again
uses chromaticism in both melody and harmony, but his chromatic embel-
lishment of the vocal line seems somewhat gratuitous and antiquated.
" N a c h dem Gewitter" is through-composed, but Zemlinsky brings unity to
the music by reshaping and varying the melodic and rhythmic material of
the piano introduction throughout the song. He also repeats the opening
vocal melody (mm. 2-5) at the beginning of the second section of the song
(m. 13) before introducing new musical material.
In Franz Evers's "Im K o r n " (In the Grain Field), no. 4, Zemlinsky depicts
the passion and intoxication of the lovers with sweeping arpeggios and
mixed meters. The melodic material of mm. 1-2 delineates each new stanza
of text and is followed by variants of this music. In a stormy coda, Zem-
linsky concludes with a grand flourish, repeating and expanding upon the
opening vocal melody with octaves in the piano part stated a perfect fourth
higher than in their original appearance (mm. 3 1 - 3 2 ) ; he then repeats the
poem's fourth line, " M y soul sways s o " (like the grain), with the original
melody, also a perfect fourth higher than its first appearance.
Walzer-Gesdnge nach Toskanischen Liedern von Gregorovius,

Op. 6
In a performance for the Vienna Tonkiinstlerverein on 28 December
1899, Zemlinsky and Melanie G u t t m a n n premiered his six lovely waltzes
for voice and piano based on Tuscany folk poems. The Society's program,
devoted to Viennese dance, began with Felix Mottl's Oesterre ichischen
Tdnze for piano four hands, was followed by Zemlinsky's Waltz Songs,
and concluded with Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes in which Guttmann also
sang. The Neue Musikalische Presse commented that Guttmann "sang the
sweet melodies, whichsometimes pleasingly flirtatious, other times deeply
movingcaptured the heart and soul of the listeners; with her soft, con-
summately even voice, which sounds especially beautiful in the high range,
she combined a subtle declamation that corresponded with the intentions
of the poet as well as the composer." 1 9
Probing a wide spectrum of emotions with the aid of a vocal range of
over t w o octaves and sparkling piano accompaniments, Zemlinsky tapped
into a brilliantly effervescent vein of his creative psyche with his op. 6,
displaying his Viennese charm as well as his melodic gift, both of which he
had in abundance. While the influence of Brahms's Liebeslieder waltzes and
Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Song Book) are evid ent, in th e final
analysis, the Walzer-Gesdnge belong to Zemlinsky and to the cultural
world of fin de siecle Viennato the ease, sophistication, and grace asso-
ciated with that "mythological" era. A love of Italy so prevalent among
German-speaking artists such as Goethe, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn,
Brahms, and Zemlinsky is also reflected in these songs. Zemlinsky chose
translations of the Tuscan poetry from Wanderjahre in Italien (The Wander
Years in Italy, 1856-1877), by the German cultural historian Ferdinand

Gregorovius (1821-1891) who, after traveling to Italy in 1852, made Italy
his second home. 20
The shifting of rhythmic accents and reveling in unexpected harmonies
make these six waltzes much more sophisticated than simple dance settings.
In "Ich gehe des Nachts" and "Klagen ist der Mond gekommen," Zemlin-
sky has subtly distanced himself from the traditional, lighthearted Viennese
waltz, as he reveals elusive layers of meaning in the intriguing texts. But
this is not yet music of the modern era, such as Schoenberg's morbid, sickly
"Valse de Chopin" or the grotesquely humorous "Gemeinheit" (Meanness)
in Pierrot lunaire nor, for that matter, the danse macabre of Ravel's "La
Valse." 21 Rather, Zemlinsky's graceful waltzes still fall within the bound-
aries of the nineteenth century, offering the listener harmonic and melodic
surprises along with traditional beauties.
In the lyrical "Liebe Schwalbe" (Dear Swallow), no. 1, reminiscent of
Nedda's aria "Stridono lassu" from Pagliacci (1892), the poet asks a morn-
ing swallow to awaken sleeping lovers, "for the night will deceive those
who sleep away the day." The torpid lovers are portrayed (mm. 21-27)
with a slow-moving, static vocal line in F-sharp minor, limited in compass
to a perfect fourth and supported by a bass line that moves up and down
the scale in a continuous series of dotted-quarter/eighth note motion across
the bar line, working against the 3/4 meter. The swallow, whose part is
centered in A major, is depicted with a soaring, melismatic vocal line and
with imitation bird calls in the piano: rapid scales, grace notes, and trills.
The text's alternating lines of eight and seven syllables are musically as-
signed alternating phrases of four and three measures, balanced with an
added measure in the accompaniment. Zemlinsky varies this pattern in mm.
29-36 by compressing the phrase of eight syllables into three measures and
extending the phrase of seven syllables into four. The graceful accompa-
niment, fluidly presenting rhythmic variants of duple and triple rhythms in
scales and arpeggios, imitates the swooping and gliding of the graceful
swallow.
The second poem of op. 6, "Klagen ist der Mond gekommen" (The
Moon Has Come Complaining), was set by Wolf in his Italienisches Lied-
erbuch I, no. 7, as "Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag erhoben" (The Moon
Has Raised a Heavy Complaint), using a translation from Paul Heyse's
five-volume work Italienische Dichter seit der Mitte des 18 Jahrhunderts
(1889-1905). In both Gregorovius's and Heyse's translations, the moon
complains to the sun that she has lost two of her most beautiful stars. While
Wolf presents the moon's lament with a chantlike melody often in disso-
nance with the piano part, Zemlinsky's moon complains in a more Brahms-
ian fashion, with a sweeping, lyrical vocal line sprinkled with intervallic
leaps of sixths and fourths and frequent mixing of duple and triple rhythms.
Given no piano introduction, the moon offers her grievances in C-sharp
minor with music that is partly repeated (mm. 9-12) until a new pattern,
sequentially constructed, intervenes (mm. 13-16). Throughout the second
section of the song, the piano echoes and expands upon material in the
vocal line (mm. 2 1 - 2 2 , 2 6 - 2 9 , 3 8 - 4 0 ) . A variation of the opening melody
returns with a sublime sweetness in E major (m. 30), and as the melody
soars to a high G-sharp, the poet reveals that the stolen stars "are in your
face."
N o . 3, "Fensterlein, nachts bist du zu" (Little Window, You Are Closed
at Night), a deceptively simple waltz, is divided into three brief sections,
ABA' with an embellished accompaniment in the return of the A. Although
Gregorovius's poem is divided into two four-lined stanzas, Zemlinsky uses
the repetition of the poem's first word "Fensterlein" in the seventh line as
his cue to bring back a variation of the song's opening material. He packs
numerous musical details within this one-minute song, as altered chords in
the accompaniment embellish and enliven the diatonic vocal line and rhyth-
mic motives are repeated (m. 13, mm. 14-15), then varied (m. 16). Graceful
ritards complement this charming Viennese waltz.
The ghostly, morose "Ich geh' des N a c h t s " (I Go at Night), no. 4, seems
a remarkable poetic choice for a waltz setting, yet it is the nucleus of a
powerful, extraordinary song.
I go at night where the moon goes

I seek where they have taken my beloved
There I saw Death,
He spoke: Seek not, I have buried him.
Zemlinsky's exotic, passionate music in the key of D minor (again, the key
he associated with tragedy and also one of Schoenberg's favorite keys while
he was a tonal composer) 2 2 begins with a haunting, truly unique melody
for the voice that relies on appoggiaturas and modalism to create its strange
effect. N o n h a r m o n i c notes, a minor second below the expected harmonic
tone, are placed on the first (strong) beat of 3/4 and then resolve to the
harmonic note on a weak beat (e.g., C-sharp in a D minor chord resolving
to D, G-sharp in a D minor chord resolving to A). The second half of the
melody moves suddenly to the Dorian mode, then cadences in G minor. A
disjunct, expansive vocal line that covers an octave and a sixth in its first
appearance mirrors the anguish of the lover and contributes to the song's
disquiet. Variants of this melody recur t w o more times and are unifying
elements in the song of just fifty seconds. (The D minor chord with an
added G-sharp, which occurs prominently in Zemlinsky's other music, was
used by Schoenberg in Pelleas und Melisande to represent "Fate;"23 schol-
ars of Zemlinsky, therefore, often refer to this as the "Fate chord." Zem-
linsky incorporated the "Fate c h o r d " in his String Quartet no. 2, op. 15,
dedicated to Schoenberg.) A retrograde portion of the motive is offered in
mit grossem Ausdruck.

con espressione
Example 13.1. Zemlinsky, "Ich geh' des Nachts" (I Go at Night), mm. 2-6. Used
by permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
the upper voice of the piano in m. 1 (A, G-sharp, F) and reappears in

various shapes throughout the song. " D e a t h " speaks without inflection,
reciting his words on one pitch in the low range of the voice, following in
the tradition of Schubert's "Der Tod und das M a d c h e n . " Gregorovius's
translation of the Tuscan folk poem ends with Death's c o m m a n d , but Zem-
linsky returns to the first t w o lines: "I go at night where the m o o n goes, I
seek where they have taken my beloved" (mm. 2 4 - 3 1 ) . He also repeats the
opening melody but enriches the accompaniment with octave doublings in
the right-hand part. This repetition subtly changes the meaning of the
poem, implying that the lover, like Orpheus, will continue to pursue the
beloved, even in the face of death.
In the delicate "Blaues Sternlein" (Little Blue Star), no. 5, Zemlinsky uses
gossamer figurations, often scales and arpeggios in the treble range of the
piano, to evoke a clear, starry evening, as the right-hand piano part fluidly
delivers a filigree of sound. Gregorovius's translation tells of the silent
bonds between two people w h o do not wish to declare their love to the
world. The music of the piano introduction in G major, later repeated in
the postlude, anticipates the vocal melody in both the right- and left-
hand piano part. This same melody had appeared earlier in the final vocal
line and postlude of "Klagen ist der Mond gekommen" and now becomes
a unifying device for the entire collection while subtly recalling the beautiful
eyes (stars) of the beloved. To describe the sorrow other lovers bear when
they reveal their love to the world, the music moves from G major to E
minor in a plaintive Schumannesque "Bittendes Kind" (The Pleading Child
from Kinderszenen) manner. Zemlinsky returned to the song's lovely mel-
ody in 1914 when he composed incidental music for Shakespeare's play
Gymbeline. Superimposing words from "Horch! Die Lerche" (Hark, the
Lark) onto the melody of "Blaues Sternlein," Zemlinsky lengthened the
song slightly and created a more elaborate accompaniment for tenor and
orchestra.
"Briefchen schrieb ich" (I Wrote Little Letters), no. 6, concludes the
Walzer-Gesdnge with an expansive flourish of resonant grandeur. In the
most Brahmsian of the six songs, Zemlinsky expresses longing, melancholy,
and determination in love with a soaring vocal line and an opulent accom-
paniment covering a five-octave range of the piano. He uses a variety of
Brahmsian piano figurationsthat is, the repeated thirds from the second
half of a subdivided beat to the beat (mm. 1-4), the rapid, uneven subdi-
vision of the beat (mm. 16-17): Zemlinsky first divides the second half of
each quarter note into two sixteenths, then reverses and divides the first
eighth note into two sixteenths with rapidly descending octaves; the em-
phasis on the second eighth note of each beat in m. 40; hemiola in both
voice and piano, most dramatically on the name "Maria" and in the grand
ending. Zemlinsky's textures are more transparent than Brahms'sperhaps
more Austrian than German. The dramatic use of an octave and a sixth in
the voice and Zemlinsky's varied rhythmic accents for the four appearances
of "Maria" bring the Sechs Walzer-Gesdnge to an exciting conclusion.24
Chapter 14
A New Path: Op. 7, Op. 8,

Op. 10, Unpublished Songs
One could, in all caution, say that the infinitely rich combination of
step wise harmonization, while avoiding the crutch of the sequence
the Brahmsian inheritancewith Wagnerian chromaticism, has been
effected by Zemlinsky and Schoenberg at approximately the same time.
Both first built nonfunctional harmonic chords into their compositions,
while taking the idea of tonality most seriously.
Theodor Adorno 1
By 1898, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg had formed an intense friendship that

became the catalyst for a musical leap forward for both men. As they ex-
amined traditional ideas about music, each began to explore new direc-
tions. For the fearless Schoenberg, a life of continual battle lay ahead as he
developed ideas that were unacceptable to many listeners, musicians, and
critics. While Zemlinsky's future was less confrontational than that of his
friend, he began to move away from the comfortable, traditional writing
that had already brought him a surprising a m o u n t of success. Perhaps the
death of Brahms was also liberating to his musical spirit, freeing him to
search for his own direction. Remarkable change in Zemlinsky's writing
first manifested itself most notably in his songs. Several songs in Irmelin
Rose und andere Gesdnge, op. 7 " D a waren zwei Kinder" (There Were
T w o Children), no. 1, "Entbietung" (Summons), no. 2, and " M e e r a u g e n "
(Sea Eyes) no. 3are clearly exploring new harmonic and melodic terri-
tory. Zemlinsky now expanded his use of chromaticism, devised unique
piano figurations such as the repetitive, hypnotic patterns of "Meeraugen,"
and refined his development of complex motivic organization. The t w o
A New Path: Op. 7, Op. 8, Op. 10, Unpublished Songs 171
Dehmel settings in op. 7 (no. 2 and no. 3) rely on melodic and harmonic
chromaticism, diminished fifths, and augmented fourths to explore the
highly charged eroticism of Dehmel's poetry. In the songs of op. 8, Zem-
linsky brings the piano to the fore, giving it a more dominant role, with
long preludes, interludes, and postludes and exploring its orchestrallike
richness.
Irmelin Rose und andere Gesdnge, Op. 7

10 March 1900
All of a sudden he said earnestly: Fraulein . . . I would like to dedicate
a song to youor noI would do moreI now have a whole collec-
tion of songs coming out. May I dedicate them all to you? . . . I was
transfixed with joy! With one of such shyness to speak out with such
a request. . . . It pleased me profoundly.
Diary of Alma Schindler2
My dear, dear Alma, [1901]
During the past few days, I have made corrections for our songs; they
will appear soon. . . . I am terribly happy that your beloved, beautiful
name will appear on them. . . .
I kiss you with my entire longing.
Your True One^
In his later works . . . [Zemlinsky] shows that he was himself influenced
by Schoenberg as the old Haydn was by Mozart.
Theodor Adorno 4
Since the original manuscript for op. 7 is lost, an exact date for its com-
pletion has not been determined, 5 but the Library of Congress contains
holograph scores in ink of "Meeraugen" and an incomplete copy of "Ent-
bietung" with " 1 6 / 1 1 / 9 8 " at the end of the manuscript. Clearly, the entire
collection had been completed by 10 March 1900 when Zemlinsky offered
to dedicate it to Alma Schindler.
M u c h about the first song of op. 7, "Da waren zwei Kinder," anticipates
Zemlinsky's op. 13: a generous use of parallel octaves in the piano part,
an increasingly chromatic harmonic vocabulary that results in less func-
tional harmony than earlier works, a shift to a major tonality in the final
chords, and the refinement of motivic organization that was such a prom-
inent features of his earlier songs. Even Christian Morgenstern's poem of
youthful love and death projects the same strange unreality found in the
poetry of op. 13 by Maeterlinck.
Several rhythmic and melodic motives permeate "Da waren zwei Kinder"
and are presented in m. 1 of the piano part in a restricted middle range of
the piano. Zemlinsky's tight integration of minimal musical material offers
Massig bewegt.
Example 14.1. Zemlinsky, uDa waren zwei Kinder" (There Were Two Children),
mm. 1-6. Used by permission of Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen. Copy-
right 1900 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen.
an amazing game for the ear and eye of the listener as motives expand,
contract, and mutate. Melody A anticipates the vocal line of m. 3, already
a modification of melody A. The chromatic motive B occurs simultaneously
in the soprano and alto voices of the piano in a descending and ascending
(inverted) pattern in m. 6 against a modified version of motive A in the
tenor line of the piano. The melodic motives A and B are given more weight
with their octave doublings in mm. 1 0 - 1 1 . The circular, static motives and
their frequent reappearance and transformations project an atmosphere of
impending doom. Although there are actually no clear cadences throughout
the song, the vaguely implied overall key of D minor bolster's Hoffmann's
association of this key with tragedy and melancholy. In fact, Zemlinsky
appears to have abandoned traditional harmonic progressions altogether,
relying instead on a series of nonfunctional progressions with no clear har-
monic anchors.
By the end of the nineteenth century, composers such as Wolf, Zemlin-
sky, Schoenberg, and Strauss were moving away from the depiction of ide-
alistic, mystical, romantic love, choosing instead a view of love with strong
sexual overtones. Reger and Wolf, for example, each set Morike's "Begeg-
n u n g " (Meeting), a poem that describes the meeting of a young girl and
her boyfriend on the street: "He seems to ask whether his sweetheart has
straightened her braids which, last night in her bedroom, were disordered
by a storm." The language of the Dehmel poem "Entbietung" (Summons),
op. 7, no. 2, for example, paints the sensuality of the lover with images of
light, fire, and vivid color: the red of poppies and blood, the woman's black
hair and gray/green eyes. The intensity of the lover's nervous, impatient
desire is matched by the raw urgency of the Tristanesque music. Zemlinsky
relies on a piano figuration of throbbing chords to portray the soon-to-be-
fulfilled passion of the speaker. The hypnotic quality of continuous, syn-
copated chords against a vocal line of rising triads, crudely transposed a
third higher in its second appearance (mm. 6-9), communicates primitive
expectation. Dissonances resulting from linear chord shifts often circle back
to their original position, while other nonfunctional harmonies, moving in
unexpected harmonic directions, and unresolved nonharmonic tones,
heighten the song's disquiet. Text chanted on the same pitch followed by
awkward melodic movement in the vocal line, sometimes the result of se-
quential patterns (mm. 2-4 transposed up a minor third in mm. 6-8; m.
18 transposed up an augmented fifth in m. 19), contribute to the impression
of an incantation. The lover is being summoned, much in the fashion that
Russian composer Nicolay Medtner would later (1913) ecstatically evoke
the dead beloved in his setting of Pushkin's "The Call," op. 29, no. 7.
Dehmel concludes with a variant of the first line of his poem, adding "for
me" to the phrase "Adorn your hair with wild poppies." Zemlinsky also
uses this repetition as a unifying device, but instead of restating the music
that appeared with the original text, he takes music from the end of stanza
1, as the voice magnetically chants the lover's command, "Adorn your hair
with wild poppies for me." How different is the cool "anticipation" por-
trayed by Schoenberg six months later in his setting of Dehmel's poem
"Erwartung" (Expectation).6 Here Dehmel's eroticism is more subtly veiled
in symbols, and the man and woman are now spoken of in third person
"a woman's pale hand motions to him." Schoenberg responds with elegant
restraint, also using a rising vocal line that begins with a serpentine em-
bellishment of the fifth scale step in the voice, followed by motivic elabo-
ration of the material from m. 1. Despite chromaticism and nonfunctional
harmonies, "Erwartung" is clearly grounded in E-flat major.
In the second Dehmel poem, "Meeraugen" (Sea Eyes), no. 3, the poet
compares the eyes of the woman he desires to the sea, a mystical symbol
for the infinite.7 Zemlinsky again squeezes every musical drop from the first
five beats of the song, confirming Alma Mahler's claim, "He was one of
the finest musicians. . . . He took a small theme into his hands, kneaded it,
and formed it into countless variations." 8 The beginning hypnotic, circular
figuration in the accompaniment perhaps represents the ocean lapping
against the shore. The rhythmic and pitch relationshi ps from e^c1 in the
top line of the example represent motive 1; the anacrusis c1 leading to the
Massig bewegt.
Example 14.2. Zemlinsky, "Meeraugen" (Sea Eyes), mm. 1-3. Used by permission
of Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen. Copyright 1900 Edition Wilhelm
Hansen AS, Copenhagen.
alto voice e-flat b-flat a g is a second rhythmic/melodic motive that also

anticipates the opening vocal line; variants of the rising tenor line of the
accompaniment, a motive derived from the inversion of the alto voice, are
developed throughout the song; and the pedal point on F in the bass line
stabilizes the undulating, circular movements of the upper voices and af-
firms the key of F m i n o r a n important task given the chromaticism, en-
harmonic key shifts, and dissonant, nonfunctional chords occurring
throughout the song. The first note of motive 1, e, forms an appoggiatura
against the F of the bass line and leans t o w a r d the melodic f that follows
it. Zemlinsky uses the inherent motion of this motive as an important dra-
matic device, first to embody the longing expressed in the poem, and in
mm. 2 5 - 2 6 to depict the lover's passion when the text declares " d a n n
brechen die Sturme los" (then let the storms break forth) as the piano bursts
into Scriabinesque-like ecstasy. The musical thrust toward the impending
storm begins earlier with a subdivision of the steady quarter-note pulse into
eighth notes (m. 23), then into a broad triplet in the bass line (m. 25); as
the storm breaks, the bass line is divided into five, then six notes per beat.
The frenzy continues as the piano part shifts to sixteenth notes, then broad-
ens again to eighths as the voice part rises to its highest note, a 2 , on the
word "bliss" ("raging, laughing bliss"). The piano finally returns to its
original, static figuration, reflecting the words "Bis tief und sehr die Herzen
wieder ruhen, ruhen von Sturm und Streit" (Until our hearts again rest,
rest from storm and strife).
The title song of the collection, "Irmelin Rose," no. 4, is the story of a
coldhearted, beautiful princess w h o shrewishly rejects every suitor; her
name, "Irmelin," is used as a musical and textual refrain. Zemlinsky relates
her tale in a balladlike setting in modified strophic form (ARA'R'BRA"R')
with B material very closely related to the A section; the melody of the
second and fourth refrains are rhythmically similar to the first and third
refrains but differ melodically and harmonically. The irony of the refrain
becomes clear in its final appearancethe princess has only superficial
beauty. Zemlinsky's publication of op. 7 in 1901 coincided with his love
for Alma Maria Schindler, and although these songs were written before
they became romantically involved, "Irmelin Rose" was an apt description
of Schindler: "Irmelin, everything that is beautiful, but the steel-hearted
princess . . . found in everyone a blemish."9
"Sonntag" (Sunday), no. 5, on a text by Paul Wertheimer, is a lovely
song in the romantic style of Zemlinsky's earlier works. Slightly over a
minute in length, it is designed to sound flexible and improvised. Its soaring
melody, presented in short, expressive fragments in accord with the rhap-
sodic character of the poem, floats over a graceful, arpeggiated accompa-
niment of surprising rhythmic complexity, requiring an attentive pianist
who can feel the graceful rhythmic shifts from three to four, five, or six
notes per beat in one hand of the piano part, often juxtaposed to a separate
rhythmic motion in the other hand. Octave displacements on the third and
fourth beats of the vocal melody in m. 1 and m. 2 contribute to the lilting,
Viennese-flavored music, as do the appoggiatura embellishments in voice
and piano. Although the song is centered around G major, Zemlinsky col-
ors his harmonic vocabulary by substituting chromatic harmonies for the
expected diatonic ones. The linear movement of the bass line from mm. 8-
12 also lends a dynamic energy to the conclusion of the song.
Turmwdchterlied und andere Gesdnge fur eine tiefere Stimme,

Op. 8
The four songs of op. 8 for low voice and piano, written around 1898
and 1899 and published in 1901, 1() are unified by Zemlinsky's choice of
poetry. The poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen (translations by Robert Arnold)
and Detlev von Liliencron are reflections on human existence and place in
the design of the universe: Jacobsen considers humanity's relationship with
God, while Liliencron focuses on the earthly plagues of war and death. Op.
8 was written at the time of Zemlinsky's conversion to Christianity, prob-
ably inspiring his choice of text. "Turmwachterlied," for example, refers
to "the holy symbol of the cross" and concludes with the words "allow
them Christian prayer"; Liliencron's "Tod in Ahren" links the death of a
young soldier with the crucifixion of Jesus by ending with words from the
New Testament: John 19:30, "He bows his head and dies." The tempi for
all of the songs in op. 8 are slow and dignified, and the vocal range is an
octave and a fifth, extending from b-flat to f2suitable for warm, resonant
voices. The low range of this collection may be partly explained by Zem-
linsky's dedication of op. 8 to the highly respected Dutch bass-baritone
Johannes Messchaert. Alfred Clayton points out that Zemlinsky, still under
Brahms's spell at this time, might have honored both Sistermans, to whom
op. 2 was dedicated, and Messchaert, because they were celebrated inter-
preters of Brahms's songs." In op. 8, Zemlinsky is again exploring a new
stylistic avenue as he gives the piano a dominant role, with substantial
introductions, interludes, and postludes. Yet, throughout, a unity of mood,
style, and connective material prevail, perhaps confirming Robert Konta's
assertion that Zemlinsky's songs form "small cycles."12
Sprawling in its organization and the longest of Zemlinsky's lieder,
"Turmwachterlied" (The Song of the Tower Watchman), no. 1, begins with
grand, wide-spaced chords and octave doublings in a stately piano intro-
duction of sixteen measures, reminiscent of the "Promenade" in Mussorg-
sky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (1874), establishing an atmosphere of awe
and contemplation. (The first chords of the A material reappear in the
second and third movements of Die Seejungfrau.) The voice part is at first
subdued and merely murmurs on one pitch as a night watchman reflects
and prays. But when he contemplates the universe, God, and humankind,
the vocal line expands to mirror the grandeur of his thoughts. Each of the
song's three stanzas is preceded by a piano interlude that either incorpo-
rates previously stated material or includes new material that is then inter-
mingled with the old. Zemlinsky occasionally word-paints, a minor third
for the word "darkness" and a major third for "sun." He hints at Wagner's
"Pilgrim Chorus" in mm. 34-35 and also uses material in the voice part
of mm. 44-45 that will later return in the vocal line of the final song of
op. 8, "Tod in Ahren" (Death in the Field, mm. 46-47), no. 4. "Turm-
wachterlied" is tonally conservative, for despite its chromaticism (see mm.
80-81) and nonfunctional harmonies, it is clearly tonal, its outer two stan-
zas governed by E-flat major, while the middle section, beginning in B-flat
major, moves to G major and stays there. Zemlinsky links one of his
recurring noble melodies with the text, "turn your thoughts from house
and home, and let your hearts draw heavenward" (m. 49). This theme
returns in the postlude and is followed by the song's dignified first theme.
In "Und hat der Tag all seine Qual" (And Has the Day All Its Pain), no.
2, Jacobsen's mystical text is elucidated with the crystalline sounds of the
piano's soprano range, skillfully manipulated to produce an ethereal mood,
much in the style of Wolf's "Wie glanzt der helle Mond" (How Brilliantly
the Moon Shines). The syncopated figurations that permeate this lied until
the final three measures are no longer the passionate, driving syncopations
of "Entbietung" of op. 7 but now represent the steady movement of a
procession, serenely ordered in its heavenly progress. Harmonically unre-
lated chords are juxtaposed, while harmonic progressions shift to distant,
unexpected keys (i.e., mm. 39-40, appears to be modulating to A but goes
to A-flat) or continue in harmonic flux. Tight motivic organization is most
notably centered around a three-note upper neighboring tone motive intro-
duced in m. 3, often combined with a rhythmic/melodic motive presented
in the voice line of m. 7 (descending, then ascending perfect fourth in
dotted-eighth-, sixteenth-, quarter-note rhythms); these two motives are

varied, sometimes overlap (m. 34), or appear sequentially (mm. 33-40; see
mm. 28-29 for an upper neighboring tone sequence of the first motive).
Sudden changes of register, continuous syncopation, and the upper neigh-
boring motive again recall the style of Hugo Wolf, particularly his "Mig-
non" or "Kennst du das Land" (Do You Know the Land), which is also
based on a half-step upper neighboring tone motive. Zemlinsky's tonal or-
ganization is tenuously centered around A-flat (E-flat)/E/A-flat major in an
ABA form, but it is clear from the song's first measure that nonfunctional
harmonies are used as coloration devices and to enhance harmonic insta-
bility. Zemlinsky uses melodic leaps in the vocal line to highlight the text
for example, in the phrase "then the night opens the room of the heavens,"
the word "night" is accentuated with an octave leap upward in the vocal
line and with a shift of register into the low range of the piano and an
arpeggiation of an E-flat major chord. The emphasis of tonality with the
clear presentation of the E-flat major chord, the E-flat pedal point, the
stately pace of the accompaniment as it also doubles the voice part in the
bass line, all contribute to the sublime mood of the music.
Throughout "Mit Trommeln und Pfeifen" (With Drums and Fifes), no.
3, Zemlinsky imitates military music, with drone figurations and marching
rhythms, much in the style of Mahler's "Der Tamboursg'sell" (The Drum-
mer Boy). The drone or pedal point also reinforces the constant repetition
of the words "Trommeln und Pfeifen." When the ex-soldier bemoans his
past life as a soldier, dissonances of a minor second in the voice line against
the piano part (mm. 3, 5, 6, 11, 13) highlight his complaints; as he drags
his wooden leg, his halting walk is imitated with the change of figuration
in mm. 15-18. Zemlinsky imitates the "nontonal" drum beats at the be-
ginning of stanza 3 with a stationary vocal line and accompaniment (mm.
19-22), its monotony symbolic of mindless marching and military routine.
Hartmut Krones points to Zemlinsky's use of F minor as a key both he
and Brahms associated with resignation or tragic passion.13
Zemlinsky closes op. 8 with a second poem about soldiering and war,
"Tod in Ahren," by Liliencron, who, as a member of the Prussian army in
the wars 1866 and 1870, knew the ugly realities of war. He tells of a young
soldier, dying unnoticed in a field of wheat and poppies close to his peaceful
village. His painful death throes are depicted in the introduction's disjointed
rhythmic pattern and dissonances in the low register of the piano, coupled
with a falling melodic motion in the bass line. The second stanza of text is
accompanied by a convulsive, rising scale in the piano part, portraying the
agony of the dying soldier, who is racked with thirst and fever. After several
repetitions, this scale pattern is broadened into octaves in both hands of
the piano part (mm. 17-18). Zemlinsky connects "Tod in Ahren" to the
first song of op. 8, "Turmwachterlied," with several musical gestures, in-
cluding a dramatic leap of a ninth in the vocal line (mm. 24-25 and mm.
4 6 - 4 7 in no. 4; mm. 4 3 - 4 4 in no. 1). (The leap of a ninth also occurs

prominently in "Lied der Jungfrau" of op. 13.) In the first half of the song,
a nonmelodious voice line is coupled with the description of the young
soldier's losing battle with death, but when he ceases to resist, drifting in
and out of consciousness, a sweet, poignant melody begins, supported by
a simple chordal accompaniment and a shift from E-flat minor to E-flat
major with the words "a last dream, a last image, he turns his clouded eyes
u p w a r d . " The melody is repeated in a figuration of triple rhythms, suitable
for a harp, in a tranquil, Mahler-like interlude, calming the soldier and
rocking him to sleep. As he bids farewell to his home (mm. 4 4 - 4 8 ) , the
soldier's melody recurs in the vocal line and is then echoed by the piano.
Material from the introduction (m. 49) returns as the soldier dies, followed
by the second theme (m. 5 3 - 5 4 ) , which unites with the peaceful farewell
melody of the soldier.
Ehetanzlied und andere Gesdnge, Op. 10, et al.
During the time Zemlinsky was deciding which songs to include in his
op. 10, he was passionately in love with Alma Schindler. He chose themes
of love, desire, melancholy, and marriage. In letters to Schindler during the
summer of 1 9 0 1 , he mentions his song "Selige Stunde" (The Blessed Hour)
several times, referring to it as "the song with your beloved chord." It was
also a song that expressed the enchantment and happiness of his own love.
Since he planned to dedicate "Selige Stunde" to their mutual acquaintance
Dr. Friedrich Victor Spitzer, he continued: "But I can write you a song with
the same chord." 1 4 When the songs of op. 10 were written is not clear.
Among Zemlinsky's miscellaneous documents in the Library of Congress 1 5
is a paper on which Zemlinsky listed several possible ways of ordering his
opp. 7, 8, and 10.16 Since none of the three collections was yet published,
this implies that the songs considered for each group had already been
composed. The songs in op. 7 were probably written between 1898 and
1899 (a holograph of the incomplete "Entbietung" in the Library of Con-
gress is dated 16.11.98), and op. 8 was already in the hands of the publisher
by January 1898, 1 7 so that some of op. 10 could have been written as early
as 1898. Beaumont notes that the melody for "Klopfet, so wird euch auf-
gethan," used in act I of Es war einmal, was written between 1897 and
1899. 1 8
O n this same handwritten paper, Zemlinsky tried two different groupings
for op. 10, neither of which was followed in publication. His first plan,
with "Ehetanzlied" as the final song for the collection, did not include
"Voglein Schwermut," the only song that did not share themes of love
leading to marriage. But his desire to publish the excellent "Voglein
Schwermut," despite its conflicting subject matter and mood, appears to
have led him to include it in his next plan; "Ehetanzlied" was n o w the
second song of the group but also the title of the entire collection. Beside
the name of each song in this second list, Zemlinsky wrote the name of a
person to w h o m the song would be dedicated, with "Kirchweih" dedicated
to Schoenberg, and the most passionate song of the collection, "Klopfet,
so wird euch aufgethan," dedicated to " M e l a " M e l a n i e G u t t m a n n . When
the contract for Ehetanzlied und andere Gesdnge was finalized with Dob-
linger in M a y 1 9 0 1 1 9 (now with "Ehetanzlied" as the first song), only the
dedication to Dr. Spitzer was included, G u t t m a n n was emigrating to Amer-
ica, and Zemlinsky was in love with Schindler.
"Ehetanzlied" (Song of the Marriage Dance), no. 1, a setting of Otto
Julius Bierbaum's famous cabaret poem, is the song of a happy bridegroom
dancing with his new wife. Zemlinsky's music is playful and folklike, with
wide intervallic leaps in the voice part, a wide vocal range (c1 to a-flat 2 ),
and a leisurely waltz rhythm in the style of Gustav Mahler's song " H a n s
und Grete" (Lieder und Gesange). The nonsense nursery rhyme syllables
"Ringelringelrosenkranz," known in American children's verse as "Ring-
around-the-rosy," would be used twenty years later in the tragic final scene
of Alban Berg's Wozzeck as a group of children, including the murdered
Marie's little boy, chant "Ringelringelrosenkranz." Like the final song of
op. 10, "Kirchweih" (Parish Fair), no. 6, "Ehetanzlied" is in triple meter,
but the metric pulse in both is sometimes displaced with quarter notes tied
over the bar line, making the songs more complex than a traditional waltz.
In "Ehetanzlied," with the words "I dance with my wife," a sixteenth/
dotted-eighth-note pattern echoes in duet between the vocal line and the
piano (mm. 8-12), acting as a unifying device while reinforcing the song's
sprightly, carefree mood. Another play on words occurs with a melismatic
circular figuration in the voice (mm. 2 1 - 2 2 ) with the words "I turn around
like a peacock." When the A text and music return in m. 62, Zemlinsky
playfully widens the melodic leap in this figuration for the voice (mm. 7 8 -
79), then repeats it in a descending sequential pattern in the piano (mm.
8 0 - 8 4 ) . Amiable Viennese charm is gracefully epitomized in this chromat-
ically embellished line. The thin texture of the accompaniment enhances
the song's delicate, leisurely exuberance.
In two unpublished cabaret songs of January 1901,20 "In der Sonnen-
gasse" (In Sun Street, on a poem by Arno Holz) and "Herr Bombardil"
(Mr. Bombardil, on a poem by Rudolf Alexander Schroder), Zemlinsky
emphasizes the simple rhymes and impudence of the irreverent texts. Each
song is appropriately given a tonal setting, lively accompaniment, and well-
defined square phrases that permit the words to be heard and the punch
lines accentuated. In "In der Sonnengasse," for example, the poet Holz
chose symbols from two different religions, Catholicism and Judaism, to
show the incongruity of behavior in the face of presumed beliefs. With a
trill on "crucifix" and "Pentateuch," Zemlinsky jestingly "pokes the au-
dience in the ribs" to highlight the less than "holy" behavior of a man and
woman, despite the religious tokens that surround them. Grace-notes in the
introductions of both songs emphasize the levity of the situations about to
be described.
The delicate, tender "Selige Stunde," the second song in op. 10, expresses
a serene satisfaction in fulfilled love. Like "Entbietung" of op. 7, synco-
pation in the piano part is coupled with a disjunct vocal line but here
conveys a sensuous intimacy, for the beloved brings peace and contentment
from the freedom and turmoil of life. Oddly enough, Zemlinsky success-
fully defines this romantic sweetness with a highly complex tonal language
of harmonic surprises, nonfunctional harmonies, chromaticism, sudden and
distant key changes, as well as Schindler's "beloved" seventh chord. One
of the boldest harmonic gestures occurs with the return of the A material
(ABA') as the song abruptly moves from A major to G-flat major via the
enharmonic spelling of G-flat/F-sharp. The drooping voice part and the
descending bass of the piano (mm. 1-6) complement the lover's affirma-
tions of tranquility. The melodic line wavers around b-flat1 as the poet's
anxieties are dispelled, then hovers around a1 over a pedal point c1 as the
lover nestles against his sweetheart. When the poet is away from his be-
loved and out in the world, the melodic line climbs to its highest pitch,
f-sharp2; his return to the safe harbor of his love is marked with a return
to the opening music (m. 26). The slow tempi, quiet dynamic levels, and
intimate text work together to make this song a murmur of love.
Christian Morgenstern's interest in theosophy may have precipitated this
fantastic little poem, the delicate, mysterious "Voglein Schwermut" (The
Little Melancholy Bird), no. 3, which tells of a tiny black bird whose song,
like that of the Lorelei, is so potent that those who hear it must die. Every
night at midnight, the little bird rests on the fingers of Death before re-
turning to find new victims. Zemlinsky captures the bird's flightgliding,
fluttering, and hoveringwith a shimmer of darkly colored, arpeggiated
chords of thirty-second and sixty-fourth notes, sometimes in irregular
groups of six or seven notes per beat with a quarter note pause on the
second beat of each measure. The voice is given a curious, atonal melodic
line that floats over the undulating accompaniment. At midnight, when the
bird returns to its master, the motion of the accompaniment slows to
chordal motion and descends to the lowest range of the piano, preparing
for the appearance of Death, who affectionately strokes the little bird. As
the dynamic level wavers between triple piano and pianissimo, Death whis-
pers: "fly my little bird." The bird resumes his flight, and the arpeggiated
figuration of the beginning returns. Although "Voglein Schwermut" is writ-
ten in the strange key of E-flat minor, Zemlinsky used this key for some
of his most beautiful songs, including the passionate "Klopfet, so wird euch
aufgethan." (Richard Hennig discusses the psychological associations of
key and points to Brahms's use of E-flat minor to express unspeakable
sadness, unfulfilled passion, and wild jealousy.)21 As was mentioned earlier,
among Zemlinsky's papers in the Library of Congress is a holograph of

the voice part for "Voglein Schwermut" in bass clef and in the key of D
minor, 2 2 another highly meaningful key for Zemlinsky.
In "Mein Braut fiihr ich heim" (I Will Take My Bride H o m e ) , no. 4, a
triumphal song of exuberant love, the poet Jacobsen, a Naturalist appro-
priately enough for this poem, declares he will marry in the month of May,
when all of Nature's lavish beauties burst forth. Zemlinsky records the
lover's joy with numerous changes of figuration in the accompaniment,
generous octave doublings, and a masculine vocal line punctuated with
wide intervallic leaps and a substantial range of an octave and a fifth. The
chordal progressions of the introduction are interrupted by an arpeggiated
diminished seventh chord, anticipating the words of the final line of the
first and third stanzas, "Play musicians, play!" Stanza 2 begins with a meter
change from 2/4 to 3/4 (m. 15) and lilting, rapid arpeggios to illustrate the
profusion of buds and birds in springtime. The calling of the cuckoo is
depicted with a series of staccato thirds in the accompaniment (mm. 2 3 -
27) as the vocal line rises above a rhythmically complex but melodically
static figuration in the left-hand piano part, like the galloping of a horse
through the forest, somewhat reminiscent of Mahler's "Scheiden und Mei-
den." With the words "sorrow remains at home!" the accompaniment re-
turns to chordal motion, while the voice is given an ecstatic high a 2 . The
song concludes with a variation of the exultant music and text of the A
section.
In "Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan" (Knock, and It Shall Be Opened
to You), no. 5, the restless energy and tortured melodic lines of piano and
voice exude unfulfilled passion, suffering, and pleading. (The beginning of
this lied is quoted in act I of Es war einmal.) Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann
called Zemlinsky's unusual melodic figurea descent from the third scale
step to the leading tonethe " W o r l d " motive, which later reappears as a
primary motive in Eine florentinische TragodieP In "Klopfet, so wird euch
aufgethan," Zemlinsky reveals his most vulnerable self, the fervent lover
w h o begs to be loved. The piano begins in the contained range of a seventh
and is quietly joined by the voice one measure later, then both grow louder
and more insistent. Each new appearance of the initial vocal melody is
varied rhythmically and/or melodically and is followed by the refrains "lass
mich ein!" (let me in) or "sie ist dein!" ([my soul] is yours), delivered by
the voice in a high range and at a rising dynamic level. E-flat minor governs
this song of wild passion; the urgency of the music is heightened as each
phrase moves to the next without pause. (Such tight phrasing was also used
for dramatic effect in "Das verlassene Madchen.") The rising vocal line and
chromatically descending bass of the piano (mm. 6-9) result in brilliant
linear dissonances that resolve to a luminous E-flat major chord on the
words "It [my soul] is yours" (m. 9). Reminiscent of H u g o Wolf's "Kennst
du das Land," the chromatic, twisted melody of the voice and the pulsing,
Example 14.3. Zemlinsky, "Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan" (Knock, and It Shall
Be Opened to You), mm. 10-12, from Ehetanzlied (Marriage Dance) und Andere
Gesdnge op. 10. Reprinted by kind permission of the copyright owner. 1913 by
Ludwig Doblinger (B. Herzmansky) KG., Vienna-Munich.
syncopated octaves in the piano part reveal the poet's anguish. As the mel-
odies of piano and voice overlap in mm. 1 0 - 1 4 , the dramatic tension in-
creases until the words of stanza 4, "Give my soul rest in your a r m s , "
when the music suddenly becomes tender and brightens with a C major 6/4
chord as the tempo slows and the dynamic level drops to a pianissimo; the
lover's pleas are now subdued, murmured above a pedal point G in the
piano. But then the lover's passion again engulfs him, the tempo accelerates,
the dynamic level rises, and the key of E-flat minor returns. With the words
"You will stand before the judge for this; my soul is yours," the music
suddenly shifts to E-flat major, the vocal line becomes diatonic, and the
syncopation of the accompaniment, used throughout to express disquiet,
gives way to steady quarter-eighth note motion. With the words "[my soul]
is yours," the voice ends on an ecstatic b-flat 2 supported by a B-flat major
chord of five and a half octaves in the piano, suggesting that love may
triumph after all. Although Zemlinsky had originally intended to dedicate
"Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan" to Melanie Guttmann, the sentiments
expressed here would seem equally applicable to Alma Schindler.
As it began, op. 10 concludes with a dance song"Kirchweih," no. 6,
a jubilant but complex rhythmic handling of triple meter. In 1 9 2 1 , Rudolf
Stefan Hoffmann observed that the subliminal influence of the waltz is
present in the works of most early-twentieth-century Viennese composers
and noted Zemlinsky's special love of the dance. He points to its irrepres-
sible emergence in Traumgorge and the appearance of the "Kirchweih" lied
in Kleider machen Leute.14 This exuberant, elaborate version of "Kirch-
weih" at the end of scene I, act II is yet another example of Zemlinsky's
intertwining of song into his other works. (Schoenberg also shared a love
of the waltz and on 2 7 M a y 1921 sponsored a "Waltz Evening" at the
Schwarzwald School in Vienna to raise funds for the Society for Private
Musical Performances. He, Berg, and Webern made chamber orchestra ar-
rangements of four waltzes by Johann Strauss, which were performed and

then were auctioned off at the end of the concert.)
In "Kirchweih," a young man is intoxicated with the joyful atmosphere
of a country fair and his lovely dancing partner. 2 5 A three-note motive in
m. 1 of the introduction is sequentially repeated by the piano and then
taken up by the voice on its entrance. In m. 6, the piano now offers a
Chopinesque variant of the motive in a series of running eighth notes, an
elegant, flowing, often chromatic figuration that is at times interrupted by
a simple " u m - p a h - p a h " set of chords to imitate rustic folk dancing. Zem-
linsky playfully incorporates other word-painting figurations in the piano
part such as the squawks of wild geese in mm. 9 5 - 9 7 . An expansive vocal
line is, nevertheless, often subordinate to the piano, while the piano offers
a jubilant variety of figurations. Although "Kirchweih" is in triple meter,
the metric pulse is immediately deemphasized in m. 1 with notes tied over
the bar line in a bass line of the piano, which is moving in half notes against
the three of the upper voice of the piano and vocal lines (mm. 1-4). In mm.
7 8 - 9 3 , all parts are phrased in two beat patterns (somewhat in the style of
H u g o Wolf's "Nachtzauber") as the fatigued revelers quietly return home.
During the last half of 1902, Zemlinsky returned to the poetry of Hein-
rich Heine with the plan of writing an opera on the theme of Heine's Der
arme Peter (Poor Peter). He and librettist Leo Feld combined ideas from
Der arme Peter and several other sources that eventually became the opera
Der Traumgorge.1^ In June 1903, Zemlinsky also set Heine's "Es war ein
alter Konig," 2 7 a song he would revisit in 1921 when he was fifty years old
and in love with the twenty-one-year-old Louise Sachsel. (He dedicated his
revised, unpublished version to "meiner Luise.") Heine's poem tells of an
old king whose beautiful young wife falls in love with a young page. The
poet concludes that the young lovers must die because they loved each other
too much (an unreasonable sentiment also expressed in Morgenstern's "Da
waren zwei Kinder." Zemlinsky's age and Sachsel's youth appear to be the
only attributes they shared with the characters in Heine's poem, as far as
we know.) Each scene of the story is staged by the piano, which presents
about one-third of the song's material in preludes, interludes, and post-
ludes. A melancholy introduction states the primary melodic and rhythmic
material while anticipating the opening vocal line, which begins the story,
supported by simple chords in the style of a traditional ballad. When the
young page enters in stanza 2, his youthful spirit is depicted by the piano
with buoyant sixteenth notes, staccato eighths, and triplets that, neverthe-
less, fail to overcome an underlying mood of gloom. The final stanza is
dominated by an appoggiatura motive in the piano part and includes a
musical reference to the doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde (m. 27). A similar
appoggiatura figuration occurs in op. 13's "Als ihr Geliebter schied," a
song in which Death itself comes for the lovers. 28
Zemlinsky's work on Der Traumgorge inspired another song during this
period, "Madel, kommst du mit zum Tanz?" (Girl, Are You Coming with
Me to the Dance?), sung in act I of the opera. Since a separate copy of this
song exists by an unknown hand in a somewhat altered version and was
perhaps intended for publication, Beaumont has treated "Madel, kommst
du mit zum Tanz?" as an independent song.29 (In act II of Es war einmal,
Zemlinsky had also included a song, "Nordisches Volkslied," which was
published separately from the opera in a supplement to the Neue Musi-
kalische Press in January 1900.) In Leo Feld's poem, a young man asks a
woman to dance, but she refuses, saying he must first bring her silk shoes,
a ribbon, and a ring. When he gives her these gifts, she then declares herself
too good for him and goes in search of someone else. The little song illus-
trates the mismatching of Gorge and his fiancee Grete and is again an
example of song used to parallel a dramatic situation in Zemlinsky's ope-
ras. After Gorge leaves Grete at the altar, she marries Hans, who was more
to her liking anyway. Rustic dance rhythms conjure up a bucolic setting
similar in style to some of Mahler's Wunderhorn songs, and Zemlinsky
even alludes to Mahler's "Wenn mein Schatz hochzeit macht" from Lieder
eines fahrenden Gesellen in mm. 7-8. The stereotypical Alpine characters,
Hans und Grete, had been the subject of a Mahler song of that name, which
he used in the second movement of his First Symphony. Mahler and Zem-
linsky not only shared the characters Hans und Grete in a song and in a
larger work, but each used the rhythm of the Landler, an Austrian country
dance, as part of their musical sketches. In Mahler's song "Hans und
Grete," a disjunct vocal melody becomes a stylized yodel at the end of each
stanza, while Zemlinsky writes a short vocalise to conclude each stanza.
Zemlinsky divides each strophe into sections of duple and triple meter, but
numerous ritards, fermatas, and tempo changes throughout make this song
difficult to dance.
In early April 1904, Zemlinsky set Liliencron's "Schmetterlinge" (But-
terflies) for 10 April performance of the Ansorge Society honoring Lilien-
cron's works, 30 but when Zemlinsky published "Schmetterlinge" six years
later in a supplement to Der Merker, he called it "U ber eine Wiege" (Over
a Cradle). Liliencron's poem describes a blue butterfly fluttering over a
baby, who tries unsuccessfully to grasp it. The butterfly returns, again hov-
ers above the baby, and then rests on the baby's closed hands . . . for the
baby is dead. Delicate and impersonal, the words of "Uber eine Wiege"
are detached and purely descriptive. Although Zemlinsky set this poem
during the same period Mahler was writing his Kindertotenlieder (1901-
1905), only superficial similarities exist between their songs. Friedrich
Riickert, the poet for Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, speaks in the first person,
and his expression of grief is overwhelming: "When your mother walks in
the door, at first I do not see her face but look at the place where your
beloved little face would be . . . my little girl. . . . oh you, your father's cell,
ah, his light of joy too quickly expired!" Mahler's five songs are a wrench-
ing lament, with melismatic wailing into the vocal lines ("Nun will die
Sonn' so hell aufgehn!") and an accompaniment that intensifies the emotion
of the words with plaintive motives and tortured chromatics. In contrast,
Zemlinsky's music for "Uber eine Wiege" is as neutral and dispassionate
as the poem. He captures the delicate, erratic fluttering of the butterfly in
the graceful piano introduction, using the thin, crystalline colors of the
piano's high register to present an odd little melody constructed from wa-
vering triplet figurations that start and stop, as if mimicking the motions
of the butterfly. The song is divided into three sections that are defined by
variants of a melody first presented in the vocal line (mm. 6-10), then
returns in the voice part of mm. 2 0 - 2 4 , and in the piano part of mm. 3 2 -
33. The dynamic levels of voice and piano hover between triple piano and
pianissimo throughout, while the steady rhythmic movement of the voice
and left-hand piano part impose an artificial calm, remote and unreal, pre-
senting a kind of "still life" in which no passion is betrayed.
"Schlummerlied," or Lullaby, based on text from Richard Beer-
Hofmann's (1866-1945) Schlaflied fur Mir jam, offers rathe r daunting
thoughts to a child w h o is about to fall asleep. Perhaps these words are
simply within the great tradition of "reality" lullabies that tell an innocent
baby that "Morgen friih, wenn Gott will, wirst du wieder geweckt" (To-
m o r r o w morning, if God wills it, you will again awake), or "If I should
die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul will take."
Sleep my child, the evening wind blows, does anyone know where it comes from
or where it is going? The paths here are baffling to you and me and everyone, my
child. We are blind and go alone, no one can be a companion to us here.
Zemlinsky matches these thoughts about the enigma of life with a strange,
poignant song. The voice begins with the first four notes of the Lydian
mode, while the piano part defines no tonal center. A pedal point on d in
the left-hand piano part for five and a half measures (mm. 6-11) does little
to clarify key, while the voice line elusively weaves about in its own path,
failing to accommodate itself to the piano part. Tritones engendered from
the Lydian mode, augmented chords, diminished fifths, and enharmonic
spellings contribute to a most unusual lullaby that offers little motivation
for sleep. Perhaps the symmetry of the repeated opening vocal line with the
return of the words "Schlafe mein Kind," the peaceful tempo, and the
generally delicate dynamics (except in m. 20) might induce calm or even
sleep. Although it was written in 1905/1 "Schlummerlied" was not pub-
lished until 1912, when it appeared in the periodical Bohemia, one year
after Zemlinsky had assumed his position at the N e w German Theater in
Prague. The tonal ambiguity of this brief lied (in step with the uncertainty
of the text) is tantalizing and reveals that Zemlinsky, like his colleagues,
was also struggling with the concept of key, confirming again that song
was often the barometer by which his musical explorations can be meas-
ured.
In the spring of 1907, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were 2 of 742 com-
petitors in a song competition sponsored by the magazine Die Woche,
which offered prizes of 3,000, 2,000, or 1,000 marks for settings of poetry
chosen from A New Treasury of German Ballads?1 Neither Zemlinsky nor
Schoenberg won with their settings of both "Jane Grey" and "Der verlorene
Haufen." Perhaps the sponsor had hoped to elicit tuneful, folksy settings
from its competitors but instead inspired complex, turgid lieder from both
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. An earlier (1903) contest in Die Woche, re-
flecting the growing chauvinism of the time, had challenged musicians to
compose simple, folklike songs as representative of true German music. 3 3
Zemlinsky's ballad "Jane Grey" tells the story of the sixteen-year-old
English queen, Lady Jane Grey, w h o , after a nine-day reign, witnesses the
execution of her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, and is then executed
herself, despite her innocence in the political plots that have elevated and
removed her from the throne. The piano harshly sets the scene with loud,
rhythmically awkward chords of unresolved dissonances. Horst Weber
notes the similarity of the vocal lines in each of the six stanzas, all of which
are derived from the melody of the first strophe. 3 4 Zemlinsky includes nu-
merous unifying devices in "Jane Grey" including a serpentine pattern in
the piano part (see, e.g., mm. 15-17) that recurs in variant forms in both
piano and voice, and musical refrains with similar rhythmic patterns that
coincide with the textual refrain at the end of stanzas 1, 3, 4, and 6 on
"Konigin Grey." 3 5 The jagged rhythms of the introduction return in the
piano part when Jane Grey is dispatched to eternity (mm. 3 3 - 4 0 ) , while
the vocal line climbs to its highest note to depict the executioner's cries as
he performs his duty. The right-hand piano part repeats the final vocal
refrain an augmented fifth higher in rhythmic augmentation (mm. 5 5 - 5 8 )
as the dotted rhythm of m. 1 returns in the final measure.
Both "Jane Grey" and "Der verlorene Haufen" (The Lost Troop) are
written for baritone and piano in the key of D minor, but in the highly
chromatic, harmonically surprising epic "Der verlorene Haufen," key is
obscured throughout. Zemlinsky's use of fourth chords, octave doublings,
and frequent melodic movement by fourths may reflect the influence of
Schoenberg and anticipates the style of their younger contemporary Paul
Hindemith. "The Lost T r o o p , " a suicide brigade that welcomes men weary
of war (life), is represented with a highly complex treatment of motives
and themes that overlap and mutate into dramatic variants. Several graphic
drum rolls (m. 1, m. 7) rumble in the bass of the piano and periodically
return as unifying elements, contributing to the rough, ominous m o o d of
the song, one-third of which is written for the low range of the piano. A
longer motive in m. 4 (x) is immediately varied in the following measure,
providing material for continued transformations throughout the song (i.e.,
mm. 35-38). The robust vocal melody of mm. 10-12 (y), supported with
marching music in the piano, becomes an important theme that is also
immediately varied in the right-hand piano part against a variant of motive
x. These two themes/motives are intertwined and varied throughout (e.g.,
mm. 25-27, mm. 63-65). With the repetition of the words "Trinkt aus"
(Drink up) at the beginning of stanza 3, Zemlinsky repeats large segments
of the melody from stanza 1, including the melismatic flourish that con-
cludes stanza 1. In fact, the music from the first twelve measures of "Der
verlorene Haufen" is constantly reshaped throughout the song. Melody x,
for example, is presented in augmentation in the left-hand piano part of
mm. 70-75, while the right hand plays the same melody at the original
speed. Word-painting and expressive dissonances highlight the text
throughout, concluding with the lowest note of the song in the phrase "we
collect our bodies."
In December 1907, Zemlinsky turned again to the work of Richard Deh-
mel, selecting five passionate poems of infidelity from Dehmel's collections
Weib und Welt (Woman and World) and Erlosungen (Redemption). This
seems an unlikely choice for a man newly married, but little is known about
Zemlinsky's marriage to Ida Guttmann. He left no trail of dedications in
her honor as he did with Ida's sister Melanie Guttmann, Alma Schindler,
or Louise Sachsel.36 None of these Dehmel songs was published or per-
formed publicly during Zemlinsky's life, and two"Letzte Bitte" and "Auf
See"exist only in rough copy in the Library of Congress Collection.37 All
of the songs from 1907, including the contest songs for Die Woche, rep-
resent attempts by Zemlinsky to find a new musical language, and it may
be that he failed to publish them because he was unsure of the results.
In all five Dehmel poems, the poet speaks in first person, and in four of
the poems, he directly addresses the married woman he desires. Only in
"Vorspiel" (Prelude) does he refer to her in the third person, as he describes
the beginning of their physical relationship and his thoughts about em-
barking on an affair with unknown, perhaps momentous consequences.
Zemlinsky's musical realization of "Vorspiel" is restrained, understated. A
modest vocal range of a tenth, the unhurried, steady movement of voice
and piano, and a predominance of descending lines often ending with an
appoggiatura figure reinforce the subdued, serious character of the music.
A series of parallel thirds in the accompaniment recall Wagner's "Im Treib-
haus" (In the Hothouse), a study for Tristan und Isolde on a poem by
Wagner's married lover Mathilde Wesendonk. A lack of clear cadences,
highly chromatic nonfunctional movement of voice and piano, and an har-
monically inconclusive ending (a diminished chord moving to an aug-
mented chord) ironically state the question: "How will it end . . . "
A lover's unrestrained passion in Dehmel's "Ansturm" is analogized with
images of the frenzied ocean"Oh, do not be angry if my desire tumul-
tuously breaks from its boundaries." "If it shall not consume me, it must
come out into the light." "Do you feel how my spirit surges!" "when the
tumult breaks out, precipitously running ashore over your peace." Zemlin-
sky matches the lover's disquiet with a pulsating, circular chordal accom-
paniment of urgent syncopations coupled with octave doublings of triads
and seventh chords. The voice continually surges upward to forte or for-
tissimo. This rapid crescendo, intensified with descending arpeggios and a
subdivided beat in mm. 10 and 12, alternating with rising chords and the
highest notes of the song, emphasize the unbridled passion of the feverish
lover who must expose his desires "to the light." "Ansturm" begins and
ends with chordal harmonies circling around D minor/major, but chordal
gestures dominate rather than key. With the suggestion of D major at the
end, the stormy lover finds a modicum of calm as he assures the object of
his passions that she will give into him.
Zemlinsky's beautiful "Letzte Bitte" (Last Request) anticipates his op.
27, written thirty years later, with its unadorned, refined style and segments
of whole tone scales (mm. 12-15) and chords (mm. 8-10). (A few months
later in the spring of 1908, whole tone scales and chords permeated Alban
Berg's beautiful song "Nacht.") In Dehmel's strange, enigmatic poem,
Death sits in a distant boat, observing and waiting. Zemlinsky sets off the
repetition of "Lay your hands on my eyes," in line 1 of each stanza in his
modified strophic setting, by repeating the melody of line 1 at the beginning
of strophe 2, but now a major second higher for two measures before
returning to the pitches of stanza 1. Each stanza concludes with part of a
whole tone scale as the narrator notes the presence of Death. Although the
bass line moves from dominant to a tonic E-flat minor chord at the end of
both sections, the penultimate chord above the a-sharp (enharmonic of
b-flat, m. 14) of the bass line in stanza 1 is a chord unrelated to the dom-
inant tonic movement. The dissonant tonal cluster at the end of stanza 2
(G-flat, A, B-flat, m. 29) highlights the black boat of Death and then slowly
resolves to a tonic E-flat minor chord. Chromaticism and nonharmonic
color chords often waiver in circular or half-step patterns, depicting Death's
sinister presence.
A nightmarish atmosphere pervades Dehmel's "Stromuber" (Over the
River) as clandestine love is again revisited. The poet is traveling across a
dark river with a group of people that includes his secret lover. Their eyes
communicate silently even as another woman is hysterically declaring her
love for the poet. Zemlinsky uses a much wider vocal range (d^a 2 ) here
than in the other four Dehmel songs of 1907, perhaps calling into question
whether these five songs are intended to be a group or even for one voice
type.38 Dehmel's poetry is the primary unifying element for the five songs,
especially because of its passionate theme and Zemlinsky's choice of poems
with water images, a favorite subject for many of the symbolist poets.
Zemlinsky uses texture as a dramatic device in "Stromuber," allowing
the accompaniment to gradually become fuller as the nightmare unfolds.
(See Debussy's "Collogue sentimental" for a masterful use of texture as an

expressive tool.) He begins starkly, with just two melodic lines in the piano
part: an augmented chord is outlined in the bass line (m. 1), and the right
hand part simultaneously presents the primary motive; a third voice enters
at the end of m. 2 as the motive is restated a minor third lower (mm. 2 -
3), now on a weak beat of the 3/8 measure, while the same motive is
simultaneously varied in the upper piano part. When the story reaches its
climax, the piano part becomes dense chords, moving mostly in parallel
motion as it doubles the voice. The voice line mimics the steady motion of
the boat at the beginning of each stanza with a mechanical, repeated note
figure and later reinforces the passionate outpourings of the sobbing
woman as it ascends to its highest note, a2 (mm. 32-33). Extreme chro-
maticism, the strange, nonfunctional harmonies, and irregular phrase
lengths contribute to the song's hallucinatory atmosphere.
"Auf See" (At Sea, dated 24 December 1907) tells of the lovers' painful
parting. Texture is again a significant expressive device, as Zemlinsky be-
gins and ends with a delicate accompaniment of just two voices, consisting
of a thin, falling figuration in the right hand of the piano with the sugges-
tion of tonic/dominant movement in the arpeggiated left-hand part (E to
A) until E becomes a pedal point (mm. 7-16), when the woman is left
standing on shore, gradually fading from the sight of the departing poet.
The lightness of the piano texture is suggestive of Erik Satie's "Gymnope-
dies." Descending sixths in the vocal line (mm. 9-10 and 27-28), a sighing
motif, expresses the profound melancholy and hopeless plight of the sep-
arated lovers.
Chapter 15
Maturity: Op. 13, Unpublished

Songs of 1916
O p . 13, The Maeterlinck Lieder

Alban Berg was especially fond of those Maeterlinck songs, Opus 13;
perhaps they really are central to his production.
Theodor Adorno 1
In the summer of 1910, Zemlinsky returned to songwriting after a three-

year hiatus, creating four haunting lieder on poetry by Maurice Maeterlinck
that represented a culmination of everything he had written up to this
point. He premiered the piano/vocal version of these songs in December
1910, but less than three years later decided to orchestrate them for a
concert that was to include works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and M a h -
ler. The premiere of the orchestral settings took place on 31 March 1913
in Vienna and was conducted by Schoenberg.
Six Orchestral Pieces, op. 6Anton von Webern

Four Orchestral Songs (Maeterlinck), op. 13 (nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5]Alexander Zem-
linsky
Chamber Symphony, op. 9Arnold Schoenberg
Two Orchesterlieder on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, op. 4 (from a
Cycle)2Alban Berg
Kindertotenlieder (Riickert)Gustav Mahler
Like the infamous premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Paris later
in the same year, this concert provoked a riot. M a n y came to the concert
Maturity: Op. 13, Unpublished Songs of 1916 191
with the idea of causing trouble and made so much noise the music could
not be heard; the performance came to a halt after the Altenberg Songs.
"Laughter, hisses and applause continued throughout a great part of the
actual performance." Then the composers appeared on stage and yelled,
"Heraus mit der Baggage" (Out with the rabble!); the orchestra left the
stage to argue with the audience; and the president of the Akademischer
Verband "boxed the ears of a man w h o had insulted him while he was
making an announcement." 3 Some of the participants in the melee, includ-
ing Erhard Buschbeck, a board member of the organization that sponsored
the concert, ended up in court. One medical doctor testified that the music
was "for a certain section of the public, so nerve-racking, and therefore so
harmful for the nervous system, that many w h o were present already
showed obvious signs of severe attacks of neurosis." 4
Tremendous hostility toward new music existed at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Violist Marcel Dick related that one of Alban Berg's
supporters, Josef Polnauer, was stabbed in the face at a performance of
Berg's songs, and Polnauer "carried the scar with great pride to the end of
his days." 5 Schoenberg's works were routinely greeted with pandemonium.
"You could not get through a Pierrot lunaire performance presentation . . .
without violent disturbances in Vienna." 6 Schoenberg later began the So-
ciety for Private Musical Performances so that new music could be offered
to selected audiences w h o would give it a fair hearing. Edward Timms, in
his biography of Karl Kraus, points out the tremendous "tensions between
the cultural avant-garde and the conservative environment." 7 The opinion-
ated Kraus was several times the recipient of physical blows and lawsuits
because of his peremptory writings.
Four months after the "scandal concert," Zemlinsky added two new
songs to his op. 13, and the piano/vocal score for all six songs was pub-
lished by Universal Edition in 1914. From Oppeln-Bronikowski's 1906
translation of Maeterlinck's Quinze Chansons (1900), Zemlinsky chose po-
etry that offers a mystical affirmation of life in the face of death: Three
sisters ("Die drei Schwestern," no. 1) begin a journey to find death but are
continually reminded of life; in "Die Madchen mit den verbundenen Au-
gen," no. 2, several unidentified young women, whose bandaged eyes sym-
bolize the world's blindness, attempt to embrace life but are unable to
escape their prison; "Lied der Jungfrau," no. 3, reminds an anguished hu-
manity of the potential for eternal life ("Keine Seele kann sterben, die wei-
nend gefleht"No soul, w h o has implored with tears, can die). Yet Death
is presentwaiting silentlyreturning to take away the lover and his
sweetheart in "Als ihr Geliebter schied," no. 4, as well as the w o m a n w h o
knows she will not see her returning lover in "Und kehrt er einst heim,"
no. 5, and the nameless queen in "Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen," no. 6. 8
As with Maeterlinck's plays, "it is not death that is tragic, but what hap-
pens, or fails to happen before it. It is a tragedy of incomprehension, mis-
communication, immobility, and inactivity, of circularity and repetition, of

abandonment, blindness and dereliction." 9
Scholars have continually noted Zemlinsky's attraction to fairy-tale top-
ics for his operas (e.g., Es war einmal, Der Kreidekreis, and Der Zwerg),
and certainly the Maeterlinck poetry also projects the mythic illusion of
the fairy tale. Here, there is no reality, time and place are never established,
characters are mere stereotypes, often romantically designated as knights,
princesses, kings, and queens ("Die drei Schwestern wollten sterben, setzten
auf die giildnen Kronen"; "Haben zur Mittagsstunde das Schloss geoffnet
im Wiesengrunde"; "Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen").
The Maeterlinck songs were especially admired by Zemlinsky's col-
leagues and friends. On 13 March 1913, Schoenberg wrote from Berlin: "I
have received the Maeterlinck-Lieder. They are splendid! There is here an
entirely original lyric sound, as perhaps only Hugo Wolff [sic] had. What
purity! I did not know this side of you. . . . It is not easy to say which I
find most beautiful. I think perhaps 'Lied der Jungfrau.' . . . The short
E-flat melody at the end is wonderful." 10 Later in 1913 when Berg returned
the Maeterlinck songs to Zemlinsky, he commented: "You notice that I
value these songs so much that I even took them with me to the country.
Now I must be separated from them!" 11 After the publication of op. 13,
Schoenberg wrote on 9 January 1915: "Hertzka has already sent me your
Lieder, and we have sung through them. They are very beautiful; entirely
original." 12 Webern complimented Zemlinsky on "these beautiful thoughts,
this wonderful expression" in May of 1919 after op. 13 and Zemlinsky's
String Quartet, no. 2, op. 15, had been performed for the Vienna Society
for Private Musical Performance.13
Op. 13 was Zemlinsky's unique response to the alien, remote world of
Maurice Maeterlinck, who probes strange recesses of the mind with his
irrational, incomprehensible happenings. The choice of a "decadent" new
kind of poetry was perfect for Zemlinsky's emerging musical style, a style
that would continually be redefined during the rest of his compositional
career. As he probes the enigmatic mysteries posed by the poet with imag-
inative repetitions, variations, and mutation of musical material, Zemlinsky
intensifies his use of chromaticism, distant key shifts, sequential patterns,
and pedal point as tools of his expanding, expressive arsenal.
"Die drei Schwestern," no. 1 of op. 13, begins with slow, plodding
chords in the bass of the piano, suggestive of a death march; the spare
right-hand piano part presents a short, circular motive, lethargically rock-
ing in place (motive 1). Despite its expressive and formal role in shaping
the song, the piano has no introduction or postlude and only two measures
without the voice part, yet it carries the dramatic weight of the song for-
ward. The appoggiaturas and parallel thirds in m. 9 suggest a cajoling
Viennese waltz (but in 4/4!) as the sisters plead with the forest to let them
die; the weeping, restless sea is portrayed with a rush of descending chro-
Etwas bewegt (Moderato)

ein/ach
Example 15.1. Zemlinsky, "Die drei Schwestern" (The Three Sisters), mm. 1-4.
Used by permission of Universal Edition A.G. 1914 by Universal Edition A.G.,
Wien/UE 5540.
matic scales in sixteenth notes (mm. 29-33); the sea becomes ominous and
brooding as the figuration changes to syncopated, thick, chromatic chords
descending in the right hand to meet ascending chromatic octaves of the
left hand, while incorporating the motive from the beginning of the song
(mm. 34-36). Although the piano part never rises above f-sharp2, Zemlin-
sky devises a great variety of expressive, colorful figurations that range
from lean to turgid and complex.
The vocal line is also tightly linked to the text, reinforcing Maeterlinck's
symbolic use of the number 3. (Zemlinsky's apparent fascination with nu-
merology may have originally led him to Maeterlinck.) With each initiative
(3) of the three sisters (3) to find death, Zemlinsky repeats a version of the
melody given in Example 15.1, beginning with a triad (3 notes) in C minor
that reappears as a D-flat major triad (m. 5) followed by an F major triad.
He organizes the song into three sections (A, A', A") and emphasizes the
three entreaties of the three sisters with the same melodic refrain. Subtle
meter changes throughout "Die drei Schwestern" serve to deliver the text
with a seemingly natural fluidity.14
The cryptic "Die Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen," no. 2, has the
confused circularity of a dream in which the characters are helplessly
caught in a maze so that even when they open the doors of their prison
(castle), they cannot find their way out. Zemlinsky again uses rhythmic and
melodic repetition to highlight Maeterlinck's verbal repetitions and oblique
images of entrapment. For each of the three appearances of the phrase "Die
Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen" (The girls with bandaged eyes; the
third occurrence was added by Zemlinsky, who also repeated the fourth
line of stanza 1, emphasizing their inability to carry out their own wishes);
for example, he uses a slightly varied version of the opening phrase (mm.
6-9, 28-31). The dotted eighth/sixteenth/eighth rhythms from this phrase
are also used for all references to blindfolds, and are coupled with a sep-
arate, related melody for the words "goldenen Binden" (gold blindfolds),
part of a verbal aside that Zemlinsky sets off from the main text with an
acceleration of the tempo. Melody and rhythm are used to unify and link
other repeated phrases, such as " H a b e n zur Mittagsstunde" (have at mid-
day).
N o . 3, "Lied der Jungfrau" (Song of the Virgin), the final poem of M a e -
terlinck's Quinze Chansons (first published in Soeur Beatrice), radiates for-
giveness, love, and hope. Although the mostly simple rhythms in the piano
part of the lied appear to support the meaning of this text, harmonic com-
plexities belie the words of comfort until the shift to E-flat major at the
conclusion of the song. The voice line is limited to the range of a major
ninth, yet it is both chromatic and disjunct, with displaced octaves masking
the static hovering between D and E-flat of the opening vocal line. Melodic
leaps of octaves, a major ninth, sevenths, sixths, fifths, and fourths coupled
with tight chromatic motion, give the voice part of "Lied der Jungfrau"
something of a Webernesque shape. Adorno notes that
[Berg] felt close to Zemlinsky and knew by memory incommensurable places in his
music, many defined by warm, wide intervals. One such place is the last stanza of
"Lied der Jungfrau," with the major ninth leading to the word "love" . . . with an
expressiveness which otherwise was allotted to well-developed expressionism, self
understood, yet still unconventional. 15
In the musically and poetically intense fourth song of op. 13, "Als ihr
Geliebter schied" (When Her Lover Left), Zemlinsky matches the simplicity
of Maeterlinck's stunning verse with short musical phrasesconversational
in their hesitant, expressive starts and stops. The German translation by
Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski maintains some of Maeterlinck's end
rhymes and repetitions of the first and third lines in each stanza, but the
second lines, repeated in each of the three French stanzas, change in the
third appearance of the German version. Also the five-syllable lines of the
French are not maintained in the German.
The piano part anticipates or echoes melodic and rhythmic material of
the vocal line. Repetition of melodies and rhythms in the vocal line also
reinforces repetitions in the poem. When the first line of the poem returns
in m. 8, for example, the melody from the first stanza is repeated, but this
time the music lingers wistfully on "Geliebter" (lover). Zemlinsky marks
the recurrence of the same text in the second and third stanzas with similar
melodies used sequentially on higher pitches, thereby increasing the musical
tension to reflect the rising tension of the text. A three-note motive in the
short piano introduction recurs prominently in the first and third sections
of the song in varied forms. Although highly chromatic, "Als ihr Geliebter
schied" is governed by the key of D minor, affirmed in the first and final
phrases and by a pedal point in the bass of the piano on d (mm. 1 2 - 1 4 ) .
The slowly syncopated pedal point figure and a quarter/half-note appog-

giatura pattern in the treble of the piano (m. 12) stop the musical thrust
of the previous stanza so that time appears suspendedas Death waits for
the lover to return. As with "Lied der Jungfrau," dramatic words are ex-
pressively highlighted with intervallic skips, such as "weinen" (weep) with
a leap of a minor ninth, and " T o d " (Death) with a leap upward to F-sharp,
the highest note of the song and sung "forte." Inexorable Death is depicted
with steady quarter-note motion in the final stanza until the previously fluid
harmonic rhythm resolves to a simple octave doubling of the tonic D in
the low register of the piano.
In "Und kehrt er einst heim" (And If He Returns One Day; also found
in Maeterlinck's play Aglavaine et Selysette), no. 5, a woman is asked by
an unidentified questioner what to tell her lover when he returns. Why she
will not be there to meet him is not clear, but the reference to an open
door and the extinguished light are typical symbolist images of death.
("Show him the open door, say the light went out." The original French
version says, "show him the extinguished lamp and the open door.") M a e -
terlinck's preoccupation with the subject of death could lead us to assume
that the w o m a n will not see her lover return because she is dying. Zemlin-
sky delicately poses each question to the w o m a n with melodies of similar
shape and rhythm, conversationally beginning on an unaccented beat with
a rising melodic line that then settles on repeated pitches. He reflects the
compassionate concern of the w o m a n for her lover with expressive ritards
and some text repetition not used by Maeterlinck in his poem. 1 6 Each
speaker is also set apart from the other with changes in piano figurations,
key changes, and rests. In March 1913, Zemlinsky confided to Schoenberg:
"That[the songs of op. 13]please you makes me extremely happy. 'Und
kehrt er einst heim' is probably my favorite." 1 7 He cryptically refers to this
favorite song in a letter to Alma Mahler in the summer of 1913: "It gave
me great joy to hear from you again! Certainly, also that a song of mine
is tormenting you. I will send you a copy of all four songs when I go back
to Prague in about ten days. It would please me if these others give you a
little bit of pleasure. Look carefully at 'und kehrt er einst heim.' I have
written two others . . . and all six will be published this year." 1 8
"Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen" (She Came to the Castle), no. 6, has
the widest vocal range (b-flat to g-flat2) and is the longest song of op. 13,
expansively presenting a highly cryptic poem of unexplained warnings
("Gib acht in dem Dammerschein!"Be careful in the twilight) and un-
answered questions ("Wohin gehst d u ? " Where are you going? " H a r r t
drunten jemand dein?" Does someone wait for you below?). Is the uniden-
tified w o m a n of the poem Death? Why does the queen embrace her? (Zem-
linsky omits Maeterlinck's final stanza.) 1 9 As with Maeterlinck's Pelleas et
Melisande, the fairy-tale atmosphere fails to establish time or place, and
the king's warnings and questions only serve to intensify the foreboding.
"Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen" also makes the most extensive use of the
piano in op. 13, with a lengthy introduction, interlude, and postlude within
a Mahler-like body of figurations and harmonies. (These Mahleresque fea-
tures are enhanced even more in Zemlinsky's orchestrated version, espe-
cially in his handling of the woodwinds.) As in "Die drei Schwestern," "Sie
kam zum Schloss gegangen" is given a steady, subdued pulse suggestive of
a death march, bringing the listener full circle. Sudden tonal shifts differ-
entiate verbal asides from the main narration (e.g., mm. 10-11, 22-23),
and syncopation in the accompaniment depicts the pacing queen (mm. 2 6 -
30). Motivic material from the introduction is woven into both voice and
piano throughout the song, chromatically altered to create exotic ara-
besques of interlaced melodic movement. These motives are first presented
above a pedal point on A (mm. 1-3), which is then incorporated into an-
other static bass line that oscillates between the tonic and dominant of D
major for nine measures, recalling Mahler's wandering protagonist in
"Ging heut' morgen liber's Feld" from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. A
motive linked to the king's question "Wohin gehst du?" (Where are you
going?) will reappear in 1934 as variations in the second movement of
Zemlinsky's Sinfonietta, op. 23. Melodic patterns constructed from appog-
giatura figurations are again reminiscent of Mahler (see, e.g., "Nun will die
Sonn' so hell aufgehn!" in the Kindertotenlieder).
Four Songs of 1916

Zemlinsky's most intense creative involvement with song occurred be-
tween the years 1890 and 1910, and after he moved to Prague in 1911 his
work as a conductor dominated his time. Although he completed at least
twenty-nine songs after 1913, only op. 13 and three songs, written as mon-
eymaking projects in 1939, were ever published. His apparent lack of in-
terest in promoting his newer songs is most clearly illustrated by the
circumstances surrounding four of his finest works, written in the summer
of 1916. Three songs were settings of texts by Hugo von Hofmannsthal:
"Noch spur' ich ihren Atem," "Hortest du denn nicht hinein," and "Die
Beiden." And the fourth, "Harmonie des Abends," was a translation of
Charles Baudelaire's "Harmonie du soir." These songs appear not to have
been performed for six years after Zemlinsky wrote them but were finally
presented on 19 and 20 November 1922 by singer Felicie Mihacsek (Hiini-
Mihacsek) and pianist Edward Steuermann in two concerts of the Prague
Society for Private Musical Performances. Despite warm words of praise
from Anton Webern, who had directed the preparations for their perform-
ance, they remained unpublished during Zemlinsky's life. Separated in dif-
ferent boxes and undated in the Library of Congress collection, copies of
the Hofmannsthal settings (12/1 and 16/13) remained unidentified until
1987, when Zemlinsky's autographed copy was discovered in the Paul
Sacher Stiftung in Switzerland among papers of Zemlinsky's former col-

league at the Neue Deutsche Theater, conductor Heinrich Jalowetz. Zem-
linsky's score is partially dated and the place of composition indicated as
"Konigswart," where Zemlinsky frequently spent his summer leave. 20 (An
early song by Schoenberg, "Gedenken," previously u n k n o w n to Schoenberg
scholars, was discovered in 1962 among Jalowetz's papers.) Whether these
four songs were conceived as a cycle and, if so, in w h a t order they should
be performed is not known, but they were performed as a group in Prague.
All were written within a period of about a month (July to August 1916),
which certainly could explain their stylistic similarities. It is also possible
to link their musical vocabulary to the Maeterlinck lieder (mm. 8-9, for
example, " N o c h spur ich ihren Atem" is certainly reminiscent of "Als ihr
Geliebter schied"), although these new works, with their own distinctive
character, reveal yet other facets of Zemlinsky's musical genius. Why they
were never published is a complete mystery.
" N o c h spur' ich ihren Atem" (I Still Feel Their Breath) is one of the great
songs of the twentieth century, and as with most of H u g o Wolf's superb
songs, the poem provides the inspiration and foundation for Zemlinsky's
music. The stark simplicity of Zemlinsky's setting underscores the haunting
melancholy of Hofmannsthal's delicate contemplation of h u m a n mortality.
I still feel their breath on my cheeks: how can it be that these recent days are gone,
forever gone, and entirely past? This is a thing no one can fully understand, and
much too terrible for one to lament: that everything glides by and flows past. And
that my own self, restrained by nothing, flowed out from a small child unrecog-
nizable to me now like a dog, silent and strange. Then: that I also existed a hundred
years ago and my ancestors, wrapped in shrouds, are as related to me as my own
hair, are one with me as my own hair.
In the opening vocal melody of " N o c h spur' ich ihren Atem," Zemlinsky
introduces the material that binds the song together: The melodic line of
mm. 1-2 reappears throughout, either in its entirety at the same pitch level
(mm. 1 4 - 1 6 ) , transposed (mm. 2 6 - 2 8 ) , transposed and modified (mm. 2 2 -
24), or in fragments that mutate into new melodies. The chromaticism of
m. 4 is derived from part of the opening vocal line, as are the frequent
dramatic melodic skips that expand and contractvariants of the major
sixth at the end of the opening phrase. Zemlinsky uses these large melodic
intervals to interrupt the more linear movements of the melody and,
thereby, highlight the meaning or inflection of a phrase, such as "wie kann
das sein" (how can it be?), m. 3., or "und dass mein eignes Ich" (and that
my own self; self is also the highest note of the phrase).
The exchange of musical material from voice to piano is not always
obvious since the piano is slowly moving in quarter-note and half-note
rhythms against a more rapid vocal line of eighth notes: for example, the
melodic line of m. 9+ is echoed a major second higher in the piano part

of mm. 10-11; the octaves in the right-hand piano part in mm. 12-13 are
a modified version of the opening melody against an ascending chromatic
melody in the left hand (mm. 11-13) also derived from the opening vocal
line.
The accompaniment, beginning with octave doublings, slowly descends
an octave and a sixth in the first ten measures and acts as an harmonic
stabilizer for the more rapidly moving voice, often coinciding with, antic-
ipating, or echoing the pitches of the voice part. The piano has no inde-
pendent role and is given neither a prelude nor postlude. The simple
descending octaves of the piano part gradually expand into chords, but the
absence of distinct rhythmic energy in the accompaniment subordinates it
to the the vocal line, which is itself dominated by the text. Throughout the
song, the voice enters after an eighth-note rest and then proceeds in eighth
notes with little metric definition, resulting in a fluid, unaccented presen-
tation of text, reminiscent of French song. This recitativelike delivery of the
words, set against a rhythmically undifferentiated accompaniment, allows
the haunting expressiveness of the poem to dominate its musical setting, as
the singer muses upon the puzzling, ephemeral nature of existence. At the
risk of repeating Pfitzner's "Oh, how beautiful," the dissecting of Zemlin-
sky's magnificent setting somehow fails to explain how he was able to
provide the ideal sounding board for Hofmannsthal's delicate, elusive
thoughts.
"Hortest du denn nicht hinein" (Didn't You Hear Then) is the shortest
and most overtly passionate of the four songs from 1916. Less than a
minute and a half in duration, it has a one-measure piano prelude of driving
eighth notes that immediately radiates agitation and feverish emotion. With
the left hand noted in duplets and the right hand in triplets, this brief,
undulating prelude not only anticipates the vocal line but also provides the
material for the postlude. The voice part reflects the tumult of the poem in
its rapid delivery of text and sweeping vocal line. Its dramatic descents,
covering the range of an octave and a fifth or an octave and a third, high-
light the ardent text, for example, "mein Alles du!" (You, my all!). Zem-
linsky's superb music complements the elusive ambience of Hofmannsthal's
cryptic, mysterious love poem.
Hofmannsthal's sonnet21 "Die Beiden" (The Two; also set by Schoenberg
in an unpublished song of 1899) tells of a young woman who, while car-
rying a beaker of wine, encounters a young man who rides up on a spirited
horse; their meeting reduces both of them to weakness and trembling, and
when he tries to take the wine from her hand, it spills onto the ground.
Zemlinsky defines the characters by using a heavier piano accompaniment
for the man, with more octave doublings in the left-hand piano part and
a more repetitive, static figuration (perhaps also suggesting his firm control
of the horse), often in the lower half of the piano; the lighter accompani-
ment of the young w o m a n falls within a higher, more contained range of

the piano. Her graceful, sure footsteps are accompanied by a fluid figura-
tion in the right-hand piano part, and her harmonious features are mirrored
in a vocal line of even eighth notes. A strong rhythmic motive in m. 1 of
the piano is immediately imitated by the voice part when it enters in m. 3
and is coupled with a melodic motive that recurs in various permutations
in both the vocal line and the accompaniment. The meeting of the lovers
is anticipated in a lengthy piano interlude (the actual figuration begins in
m. 28 before the interlude) that projects a growing urgency by means of a
series of eighth-note octaves on the weak part of each beat in the left-hand
piano part, moving in contrary motion beneath the primary rhythmic mo-
tive in the right hand, then broadening to an F major chord in m. 32 and
followed by variants of the original melodic/rhythmic motive in both the
left- and right-hand piano parts. The accompaniment's loss of rhythmic
focus in mm. 4 3 - 4 7 , as the rhythmic pulse and meter are suppressed, co-
incides with the lovers' meeting. A pedal point continues for nine measures
(mm. 52-60) as the paralyzed lovers gaze at each other, incapable of per-
forming the simple task of passing a wine glass from one to the other.
Hofmannsthal wrote: "It seems to me that it is not the embrace but the
meeting that [is] the actual crucial erotic pantomime. There is in no moment
the sensuality so soulful, the soulfulness so sensual as in the meeting." 2 2
The elegant "Die Beiden" shares a spiritual bond with the French melodie:
its parallel octaves, augmented chords, whole tone scales used as chords
and melodic lines (mm. 3 8 - 3 9 , m. 4 8 , m. 50), pedal point, and nonfunc-
tional chords are musical tools commonly found in Debussy's music.
One of Zemlinsky's most complex and wonderful songs, " H a r m o n i e des
Abends" (Harmony of the Evening), is based on a translation of Baude-
laire's " H a r m o n i e du soir," which uses the form of the p a n t o u m , a M a -
layan verse pattern. In a p a n t o u m , the second rhyme or line of the quatrain
becomes the first line of the following stanza, and the fourth line or rhyme
becomes the third line of the following stanza. A few of Baudelaire's lines
are reordered in the German translation, and Zemlinsky repeats line 4, " O
schmerzlicher Walzer . . . " in his final musical phase. The poem's pattern
of repetition is indicated in the left-hand margin:
Es naht sich der Abend mit diisterem Schweigen,

2 Den zitternden Bliiten ein Weihrauch entquillt;
Die Luft ist mit kreisenden Diiften erfiillt.
4 O schmerzlicher Walzer, o schmachtender Reigen!
2 Den zitternden Bliiten ein Weihrauch entquillt.
6 Wie ein Herz, das gekrankt ward, erzittern die Geigen.
Ernst prangt wie ein Altar des Athers Gefild.

6 Wie ein Herz, das gekrankt ward, erzittern die Geigen,
10 Wie ein Herz, dem es bangt, wenn der Tag sich verhiillt;
11 Die Sonne, sie scheint sich verblutend zu neigen.
10 Ein Herz, dem es bangt, wenn der Tag sich verhiillt,
Sucht Strahlen, die aus der Vergangenheit steigen.
11 Die Sonne, sie scheint sich verblutend zu neigen.
Gleich einer Monstranz in mir leuchtet dein Bild.
(The evening approaches with melancholy silence, an incense pours out

from the trembling blossoms, the air is filled with enveloping fragrance.
O h painful waltz, oh feeble dance! An incense pours out from the trembling
blossoms. Like a sick heart, the violins shudder. O h painful waltz, oh dance
of yearning! Solemnly resplendent, like an altar in an ethereal field. Like a
heart that is sick, the violins shudder, like a heart that is afraid when the
day is veiled; the sun appears to be collapsing, bleeding to death. A heart
that is afraid when the day is veiled seeks rays that rise from the past. The
sun appears to be collapsing, bleeding to death. Like a monstrance, your
image shines within me. O h painful waltz, oh feeble dance!)
Baudelaire's images of smell and sound, part of his notion of correspon-
dence among the senses, and his religious allusion to nature as a cathedral
(incense, altar, monstrance, blood) are elegantly highlighted in Zemlinsky's
delicate music. Zemlinsky parallels each of the line repetitions with a rep-
etition of the same melody in the voice (with the exception of line 10), but
he does not repeat the same harmonic structure or piano figuration, thus
simultaneously creating new variations against the stable text and melody.
The line " O schmerzlicher Walzer, o schmachtender Reigen!" (Oh painful
waltz, oh feeble dance!) is repeated three times and acts as a musical and
textual refrain, while enhancing the emotional quality of the song with its
expressive leaps of a major sixth on "schmerzlicher" (painful) and a major
seventh on "schmachtender" (languishing, feeble). A plaintive minor third
rhythmic/melodic motive introduced in m. 1 of the accompaniment per-
meates the texture of the entire lied and is the most prominent motivic cell
of the song. Its hesitant return in the final portion of the song (mm. 9 1 -
95) at the pitch level of its first appearance along with variants of the first
five measures brings the song full circle. Another melodic motive, the first
three notes of the voice part (the beginning of a minor scale), also appears
throughout, often in combination with the minor third motive, for exam-
ple, mm. 53 and 54. Hemiola, one of Zemlinsky's and Brahms's basic tools,
occurs in the bass line of mm. 9 - 1 1 where the minor third motive (here
spelled as a minor tenth or displaced octave figure) proceeds in two note

units against the triple meter pattern. Beginning in m. 39, the minor third
motive, like a nagging refrain, is used as an ostinato, again setting up a
counterrhythm to the triple meter of the song. In fact, ostinato patterns,
either melodic or rhythmic, are important features of the song. The ostinato
figurations, the generally subdued dynamics, and frequent use of a static
bass line in the last half of the songacting as a pedal point against the
more active upper voices of the pianocontribute to the very tender, ex-
quisite French sensibility of this song.23 "La Grotte" from Debussy's Trois
Chansons de France is close in spirit to Zemlinsky's "Harmonie des
Abends," with its ostinato figurations and muted delicacy. Traces of French
influence continue to appear in many of Zemlinsky's songs from this point
on, but they are transformed into a distinctively Viennese language. In
"Harmonie des Abends," for example, Zemlinsky incorporates the rhythm
of the Viennese waltz not only to illustrate the text "O schmerzlicher Wal-
zer" but as a foil for the amazing motivic development of the accompani-
ment and to highlight the lyricism of the vocal line.
After 1916, Zemlinsky abandoned songwriting for many years. In 1928,
during his time in Berlin, he composed a setting of Rainer Maria Rilke's
"Ernste Stunde" (Solemn Hour), a lied of subdued austerity that currently
exists only as a rough sketch in the Library of Congress Collection. Written
mostly in pencil with some portions in purple ink on the second page of
the holograph sketch, this seems to be Zemlinsky's only setting of Rilke's
poetry.
Chapter 16
Symphonic Songs
Although the focus of this book has been upon that most intimate and
verbal of musical genres, the German lied, it would be remiss to totally
bypass Zemlinsky's symphonic songs. During the 1920s, a period in which
he almost completely abandoned lied composition, Zemlinsky wrote two
massive works for voice and orchestra, his op. 18 and op. 20, which, like
his songs, exemplify word/tone unity but, because of their grand scale, are
more detailed and complex than the songs. Symphonic song, in the tradi-
tion of Berlioz's Les nuits d'ete (Summer Nights), would seem a logical
pursuit for a gifted conductor and composer of opera, and as early as 1901,
Zemlinsky began but did not finish several songs for middle voice and
orchestra: "Die Riesen," "Der alte Garten," and "Erdeinsamkeit." 1 He later
orchestrated four of his op. 13 songs for the infamous scandal concert of
1913 but did not complete the orchestration of the entire Maeterlinck col-
lection until sometime in 1921, shortly before he began his Lyric Sym-
phony. Perhaps returning to the orchestration of his Maeterlinck songs
inspired Zemlinsky to continue his exploration of voice and orchestra.2
The orchestral lied was so well established at the end of the nineteenth
century that even the great songwriter Hugo Wolf, seeking to reach a wider
audience for his music, made orchestral arrangements of more than twenty
of his lieder. Composers such as Strauss, Mahler, Zemlinsky, and Schreker3
continued the practice of arranging some of their lieder for voice and or-
chestra and also wrote songs specifically for voice and orchestra. Alban
Berg, like Zemlinsky, composed orchestral songs and also arranged some
of his piano/vocal songs for orchestra: His Fiinf Orchesterlieder nach An-
sichtskartentexten von Peter Altenberg were written in 1912 for voice and
Symphonic Songs 203
orchestra, and in 1928, he orchestrated the Seven Early Songs, lieder writ-
ten for voice and piano between 1905 and 1908.
Sechs Gesdnge nach Texten von Maurice Maeterlinck

Zemlinsky's decision to orchestrate his four Maeterlinck songs of 1910
may well have been precipitated by an invitation to participate in a concert
for the Akademischer Verband fur Literatur und Musik that also included
the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Mahler. The Maeterlinck
songs appear to have been well received during this infamous scandal con-
cert and, in fact, "calmed down those who were heated and eager for
battle." 4 Whether Zemlinsky's positive reception at the concert caused any
hard feelings with Schoenberg is not clear, but Zemlinsky was confident
enough about his work, despite the shocking events of the evening, to com-
pose two additional songs for op. 13 several months later. Berg, on the
other hand, whose two Altenberg lieder sent the unruly audience over the
edge, was later criticized by Schoenberg about these songs, which were
never again performed during Berg's life.5
The excellence of both the piano/vocal and orchestral/vocal scores of
Zemlinsky's op. 13 gives singers a real choice as to the accompaniment
medium and, therefore, venue. These songs can be performed in the inti-
mate context of a lieder recital or in a large concert hall in the company
of symphonies and concerti. The stark, mysterious poetry of op. 13 is per-
haps better served in its piano/vocal setting, for Zemlinsky's sensitive, idi-
omatic piano writing forms an intimate partnership with voice and poetry
that is totally within the tradition of the lied, unlike many of Mahler's song
accompaniments with figurations that seem incomplete when performed on
the piano rather than with orchestra. Zemlinsky discovers the inherent clar-
ity, warmth, and tonal beauty of the piano, even in relatively simple ac-
companiments such as "Als ihr Geliebter schied." But his orchestration of
op. 13 recreates each song so that instrumental colors accentuate the con-
tinual mutation of motives and highlight the dialogue between the voice
and accompaniment (e.g., "Als ihr Geliebter schied" in mm. 1-7).
The orchestral version of op. 13 is a splendid tour de force by a sophis-
ticated orchestrator, but this transference required a more complex reali-
zation of the original songs, including more detailed motivic development
and some new material. Zemlinsky generally uses the dramatic resources
of the orchestra to create a more operatic atmosphere than in the piano/
vocal version, which included adding introductions to several songs: "Die
Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen," "Und kehrt er einst heim," "Lied
der Jungfrau," and "Die drei Schwestern"; postludes were also added for
these last two songs. A comparison of several recordings of piano and
orchestral versions shows that the orchestral realization takes about five
minutes longer (ca. twenty-one minutes) than its piano/vocal counterpart

(ca. sixteen minutes), not only because of the added material but because
of some slower tempo markings and the often weighty orchestrations. Zem-
linsky also makes a number of structural changes in his orchestral adap-
tations, for example, raising the last six notes of the vocal line an octave
higher in "Die drei Schwestern" and stretching the penultimate note of the
voice from a quarter note to a half note so that the voice will soar over
the massive forces of the orchestra.
He immediately establishes an eerie atmosphere in the added introduc-
tion of "Die drei Schwestern" by outlining diminished seventh chords with
strings, flutes, and piano, muting the brass instruments (muted horns are
given a prominent role throughout), and exploiting the ghostly sound of
harmonics in the strings. Only in this first song does Zemlinsky include the
piano (perhaps a kind of mental transition from the piano/vocal version to
the orchestra). The slow, laborious chords of the piano part, suggestive of
a death march, are played triple piano and provide a steady pulse that is
taken up and accented by the constant thud of the kettle drum. A bizarre,
seemingly irrational melody in the flute and violin parts (not in the piano/
vocal version) in m. 8 occurs as the sisters begin their search for Death. As
the music moves to D major, flutes and strings imitate the sound of laughter
in mm. 1 8 - 1 9 with the words "Then the woods began to laugh." When
the poem describes the weeping sea, the piccolo part descends by half steps
for an octave and a sixth, while the other woodwinds and trumpet repeat
a shorter descending figuration at twice the speed of the piccolo. Whole
tone scales against chromatic scales in m. 14 contribute to the tonal unrest. 6
Although a unity of mood prevails in both orchestral and piano/vocal
versions, cyclic features are more strongly emphasized in the orchestral
score because of key progressions that gravitate to and around D minor/
major.7 The piano/vocal and orchestral scores can be seen to represent sub-
tly different interpretations of Maeterlinck's poems, especially when com-
paring the changes in tempo designations between the t w o . In "Die
Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen," for example, the added orchestral
introduction is designated "langsam" and, coupled with a beginning meter
of 4/4, muted strings, and somber woodwinds, lends a nostalgia and solem-
nity to the music that is not so obvious in the skittish "allegretto" of the
piano/vocal score, which begins immediately in 6/8. Since the basic tempo
at the beginning of each version is not the same, any return to T e m p o I or
any tempo reference to the opening tempo results in quite a different effect.
T h r o u g h o u t most of the orchestral arrangement of "Die M a d c h e n mit den
verbundenen Augen," the vocal line is doubled by another instrument,
which might restrict the mobility and control given to the voice in its piano
version. The voice part also seems less mercurial in its orchestral setting
because it has fewer tempo changes. Dissonances, such as the half-step clash
between voice and piano in m. 1 on the w o r d "mit" (with), resulting from
Symphonic Songs 205
descending octaves in the right-hand piano part, is more subdued in the

muted strings of the orchestral version.
Zemlinsky uses instrumental colors to highlight melodic material as it
moves between instruments (e.g., mm. 3-8 in "Die Madchen mit den ver-
bundenen Augen") and as mentioned earlier, to and from the voice part
(e.g., also in "Die Madchen," three bars after letter 5, the completion of
the melodic idea as it moves from the voice to the violas). His colorful
choices of sonority, which includes harp, harmonium, celesta, and glock-
enspiel, show his kinship with Mahler, particularly in his exotic exploration
of woodwind colors in "Und kehrt er einst heim" and "Sie kam zum
Schloss gegangen."
To match the compassionate text of "Lied der Jungfrau," Zemlinsky
reduces his orchestral forces to harmonium, celesta, and solo strings and
keeps the dynamic level at "piano" and "pianissimo" until the final phrase.
He gives the orchestra time to create its dramatic effects by adding a slow
introduction of eight bars while constantly including expressive markings
of "dolce," "zart," "espressivo," "warm," and "sehr weich und leise"
throughout. The orchestral realization of "Lied der Jungfrau" is rhythmi-
cally and melodically more complex than its piano counterpart, as, for
example, in mm. 12-13, where the piano simply plays one chord of three
beats in each of the two measures, while in the orchestral version, the violas
have a syncopated figuration (letter 3) as solo cellos and contrabasses state
the melodic motive from m. 1. The orchestration also is able to emphasize
interesting features of the music that are less noticeable in the piano score;
for example, the rhythmic variant of the voice line in the second violin (6
m. after letter 3).
Although op. 13 is orchestrated for a substantial array of instruments,
Zemlinsky uses this power sparingly. In "Als ihr Geliebter schied," for
example, the trombones are muted and played "pianissimo" as they omi-
nously reinforce the departure of the lover; the tympani, cymbals, tambou-
rine, harp, and celesta are used unobtrusively to punctuate and color
throughout; woodwinds, brass, and strings are played softly through most
of the song, yielding an amazingly chamberlike sound. Even at the song's
climax as the voice rises to its highest pitch on beat one with the word
"Death" (letter 3, m. 6), brass and the tympani are delayed to the second
beat, supporting the voice without covering it. Zemlinsky achieves an in-
teresting effect in the final measures with staggered, pianissimo glissandi in
the strings. As the voice sings its final note, the trombones join the strings,
flutes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and harmonium in a grand "forte" that
quickly fades to "piano." (Zemlinsky does not exercise such restraint in his
Lyric Symphony.)
The figuration, harmonic language, and instrumentation of the introduc-
tion added to "Und kehrt er einst heim" in the orchestral version reinforce
the Mahleresque character of the song. Yet, at the same time, Zemlinsky's
choice of text, lack of sentimentality, and compressed handling of musical

materials find few parallels in Mahler's writing. The poet Maeterlinck's
elusive words seem subliminally illuminated in Zemlinsky's sensitive or-
chestral realization, with only horns representing the brass section, joined
by glockenspiel, celesta, harp, strings, and woodwinds. Splendid instru-
mental combinations enhance important moments in the text; for example,
when the questioner wants to know what to say if the returning lover "asks
where you are," flutes, clarinets, and bassoon simultaneously play a three-
note chromatic motive in duet with the voice (letter 3, mm. 3-8); or when
the woman answers, "Give him my gold ring and look at him silently,"
she is delicately accompanied by glockenspiel, celesta, and harp. Expanding
from the piano to orchestra necessitated an increase in rhythmic motion,
as, for example, in the added syncopated figuration in the celesta part (6:
mm. 6-9), triplets in the flutes (7: mm. 5-6), and tremolo in the strings
brilliantly opulent at the song's climax: "Say, for fear that he will weep,
that I smiled."
Zemlinsky varies the instrumentation of each movement of op. 13, find-
ing unique color combinations to elucidate the text. This is especially sig-
nificant in the final song, "Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen." The
interweaving of motivic material, differentiated by the voices of diverse
combinations of instrumental timbres throughout, creates an exotic dance
in which characters briefly interact and then vanish as new combinations
materializeintertwining, anticipating, echoing, mutating. The vocal line
and its cryptic text become the constant around which this contrapuntal
dance takes place. Just as op. 13 began with a journey as three sisters went
in search of Death, this final song announces a new journey as the queen
and her mysterious companion depart: "Where are you going?"
Lyric Symphony, Op. 18

In 1922, Zemlinsky offered an epic vision of song with his Lyrische
Symphonie (Lyric Symphony) for soprano, baritone, and orchestra, op. 18.
Like his contemporaries Mahler and Strauss, Zemlinsky was a superbly
gifted conductor of opera and symphony, which, along with his excellent
early education, provided him with the tools to tap into the orchestra's
infinite resources. Coming on the heels of his opera Der Zwerg, premiered
in May 1922, the vocal writing for the Lyric Symphony is conceived in a
grand, operatic style, with dense orchestral parts that must be matched with
large operatic voices and a sensitive conductor who is able to keep the large
orchestra from overpowering the voices.
In a letter of 19 September 1922 to his publisher Emil Hertzka, Zemlin-
sky described his new work. "This summer, I have written something in
the style of Lied von der Erde. I still have no title for it. There are 7
continuous songs without break for baritone, soprano, and orchestra." 8
Symphonic Songs 207
Critics have frequently noted this comparison with Mahler's work and have
called Zemlinsky's originality into question. Yet orchestral song did not
begin with Mahler, and it seems quite natural that Zemlinsky, a champion
and follower of Mahler, would eventually try his hand at this medium. The
editor of Mahler's orchestral score to Das Lied von der Erde states in the
introduction that Mahler's "orchestral songs . . . opened up completely new
and wonderful paths in songwriting," 9 paths that Zemlinsky chose to ex-
plore. More important, as Monika Lichtenfeld emphasizes in her compar-
ison of the two works, Zemlinsky's symphony not only complemented Das
Lied von der Erde but was intended as an homage to Mahler, 10 whose
work is specifically recalled in the final movement of the Lyric Symphony.
And perhaps, the fifty-year-old Zemlinsky, who had conducted so many of
Mahler's masterpieces, was now ready to challenge his mentor in a medium
he knew he could control. In any case, the Lyric Symphony has become
one of Zemlinsky's most performed works.
Just as Mahler had looked to the East for the text of Das Lied von der
Erde, so Zemlinsky found inspiration with the poetry of Indian poet/Nobel
Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), whose works, popular in
the first part of the twentieth century, were set by such composers as Mil-
haud, Szymanowski, Janacek, Eisler, Frank Bridge, Richard Hageman, and
Pavel Haas. 11 From Hans Effenberger's German translation of The Gar-
dener, which was Tagore's free English version of his Bengali poetry, Zem-
linsky chose seven poems of longing, sensuousness, and self-realization.12
He arranged them almost as a dialogue between a man and a woman whose
hopes and yearnings are alternately presented as movements of a sym-
phony, linked by recurrent motives, several of which are given in the in-
troduction like the overture to an opera. The musical reprise of the primary
material begins in the sixth movement and continues into the final move-
ment.
Repetition in Tagore's poetry often becomes a unifying element in the
Lyric Symphony: In song no. 4, for example, with the repetition of the
poetic line "Sprich zu mir, Geliebter" at the song's conclusion, Zemlinsky
repeats the beginning melodic line of the soprano (he does not use Tagore's
entire opening phrase). Other poetic repetitions are not always coordinated
with music repetition, so that the text itself becomes an important linking
device, despite the musical variation that accompanies it, as, for example,
when Tagore suggests the seductive call of the unknown in the refrain "O
ungestumes Rufen deiner Flote" (O the keen call of thy flute!). Zemlinsky
also added a repetition of the textual refrain at the song's conclusion.
Brilliantly exploring the ranges and colors of both baritone and soprano
voices, Zemlinsky skillfully coordinates the poetic text with a wide variety
of orchestral sounds, using instrumental color as a means of recall along
with motivic devices such as melody and rhythm. Word-painting continues
to be one of his techniques, for example, in song 4, when he pairs the
murky sounds of the contrabassoon and bass tuba to anticipate the words
"The night is dark, the stars are lost in the clouds." The songs extend from
the richly masculine and dramaticsuch as "Ich bin friedlos" (I am rest-
less), no. 1, with its luxurious orchestral colors in the grand manner of
Ravel's "Asie" from Sheherazadeto the very tender, such as "Sprich zu
mir, Geliebter" (Speak to M e , Beloved), no. 4, with the delicacy of "II est
doux" from Ravel's Chansons madecasses. The seemingly atonal vocal line
of "Sprich zu mir, Geliebter" has much in common with Ravel's Mallarme
songs.
Zemlinsky spoke about his songs in an article in Pult und Taktstock
shortly before its premiere.
The title of this work, "Symphony," which consists of seven songs with orchestra,
can be the conductor's guide for the performance and the interpretation.
The internal organization of the seven songs with their prelude and interludes,
all of which have one and the same deeply sincere, passionate fundamental tone,
must receive the correct conception and faultlessly clear execution to attain its ef-
fect. In the prelude and first song, the essential spirit of the entire symphony is
given. All of the other sections, as varied as they are in character, differing in time
from one another and so forth, are to be shaded in an ambience corresponding to
the first. So, for example, the second song, which holds the position of the
"scherzo" in a symphony, should not be conceived as playfully fleeting or insincere;
the third songthe adagio of the symphonymust, under no circumstance, become
a weak, languishing love song. The deeply earnest yearning yet innocent tone of
the first song, for example, must be maintained in this song.
Through the layout of the seven poems, which, with the ordering and composi-
tion, are brought together through a kind of leit motif treatment of several themes,
the unity of this work is to be clearly emphasized and reproduced in this spirit by
the conductor.
The symphony is to be played without pause. Even there, where the musical
conclusion of a song could give the opportunity of a pause, only a very short pause
in the mood is meant. [The music is continuous between movement's II, III, and IV
and between V, VI, and VII. Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is not continuous.
Each of the six songs comes to a complete stop.]
Conducting problems of a technical nature are scarcely present in the work.
Insofar as this is possible, the tempos are precisely indicated.
I dispensed with metronomic markings because I learned recently, with the per-
formance of two of my operas, that they were scarcely used. [Current recordings
vary as much as nine minutes in total performance time.]
From a practical standpoint, it could be suggested that the second and third
sections not be directed "alia breve" throughout as indicated. Namely, with the
third song (adagio), it is too difficult to direct the entire piece in "two" without
sacrificing precision and clarity. The tempo marking, "very moderate," for no. 6,
is also the basic tempo for the following song.
For the casting of both voice parts, I am thinking somewhat of the voice types
Symphonic Songs 209
that are right for the theater: a helden baritone and a young, dramatic soprano.
The length of the symphony: between 40-45 minutes.13
In the Lyric Symphony, a man describes his yearning for the unknown
"I am restless. I am athirst for far-away things"and like the nineteenth-
century romantics before him, he feels himself a stranger in a strange land.
He finds love, which he intimately declares in the third song: "You are my
own, my o w n . " But his love is a myth of his own creation, fashioned from
his dreams of love. The reality of love is too stifling for him, and he de-
mands freedom in song 5. In his final song (no. 7), he asks that he be left
with only the sweet memory of love and not its pain. The w o m a n ' s songs
are also expressions of yearning, but a yearning that expects little or noth-
ing in return. In song 2, she offers her most precious possessionsymbol-
ized by a ruby necklaceto a young prince w h o is not only unaware of
her existence but inadvertently destroys her gift. As she gives her love in
song 4, she asks only that her lover speak words of love to her before they
go their separate ways. She, unlike the man, does not w a n t to remember
their encounter"Vergiss diese N a c h t " (Forget this night, in song 6)for
she is left with nothing: " M y hungry hands press emptiness to my heart." 1 4
Now considered one of Zemlinsky's finest works, the Lyric Symphony
was almost lost before it reached the public. Scheduled for performance on
5 June 1923 in Berlin for Austrian Music Week, l s Zemlinsky's handwritten
manuscript disappeared in the mail after he sent it from Berlin to Prague.
Then in December 1923, it suddenly reappeared and was immediately sent
to a copyist. 16 After its premiere in Prague for the International Society for
N e w Music on 4 June 1924, Berg drafted a letter (perhaps not sent) to
Zemlinsky in which he expressed his admiration for Zemlinsky's new work.
" M y deep, deep enthusiasm for your lyric symphony . . . must be acknowl-
edged even though I n o w possess only a glimmer of the immeasurable beau-
ties of the score. Yes, I would like to say, my decades-old love for your
music has, in this work, received its fulfillment."17 Berg paid tribute to the
Lyric Symphony by quoting from its third song, "Du bist mein Eigen, mein
Eigen," in his Lyric Suite (1925-1926), which he dedicated to Zemlinsky,
w h o was happily surprised and honored by the dedication. 1 8
The frantic pace of Zemlinsky's professional life following completion of
the Lyric Symphony appears to have given him little time or perhaps focus
for his composing. It also appears that he was n o w searching for a new
musical language that required a period of incubation before he could dis-
cover w h a t this new voice might be. He wrote a third string quartet in
1924 and made several attempts at writing a new opera in the years that
followed. In July 1927, he began but did not complete another string quar-
tet, 19 and during this same time, he also abandoned a nearly completed
short score of an opera, Der heilige Vitalis, based on a novella by Gottfried

Keller.20
Symphonic Songs, Op. 20

Many European musicians of the 1920s were experimenting with jazz
rhythms, musical textures, and unusual harmonies at a time when jazz was
being denounced by Nazi sympathizers as a decadent medium created by
American blacks. Zemlinsky, who had conducted the Prague premiere of
Krenek's jazz-inspired opera Jonny spielt auf in 1927, two years later fur-
ther allied himself with other modernist composers, most younger than
himself, when he set seven poems by African American poets in his dra-
matic Symphonic Songs for bass-baritone (or alto) and orchestra. Jazz el-
ements would continue to appear in his music for the next decade.
Coupled with numerous meter changes and dissonant harmonies, per-
cussion, brass, and woodwinds play an aggressive role in the boldly or-
chestrated songs of op. 20. Although his exotic orchestration includes jazz
drums, birch twigs (used by both Mahler and Strauss), and mandolin, at
the same time, Zemlinsky generally keeps his large orchestral forces in
check. In "Totes braunes Madel" (Dead Brown Girl), no. 3, for example,
the subdued orchestral part never rises above a mezzo piano, and in "Lied
aus Dixieland" (Song from Dixieland), he exploits the voice's more brilliant
high register when he increases orchestral forces; if he requires a large in-
strumental sound, he gives the orchestra its own interludes without the
voice, as, for example, in "Lied der Baumwollpacker" (Song of the Cotton
Packer).
He chose powerful poetry, often with clear racial messages: lynching
("They Hung My Black Young Lover to a Cross Roads Tree"), other poems
of death ("Dark Madonna of the Grave She Rests"), violence ("I Beats Ma
Wife an' I Beats My Side Gal Too"), drunkenness ("I Takes Ma Meanness
and Ma Licker Everywhere I Go"), 21 and pulsing dance rhythms ("The Low
Beating of the Tom-toms"). He would again set Langston Hughes's "Af-
rikanischer Tanz" (no. 6 in the Symphonic Songs) in his op. 27.
Zemlinsky uncompromisingly begins op. 20 with the tragic "Lied aus
Dixieland," as a young black girl mourns the death of her lover, whose
mutilated body dangles from a tree. Langston Hughes's refrain "Way down
South in Dixie," a play on the American song "Dixie," is ponderous in its
German translation, "Weit unten, im Siiden, in Dixieland," yet Zemlinsky
minimizes this awkwardness in his slow-moving dirge. With a static whole-
step/half-step motive that becomes the kernel from which the song grows,
he exploits the low range of his orchestral instruments, coloring the music
with the hollow, cavernous sounds of the bass clarinet, the whining laments
of the English horn and oboe, which are joined by muted violas, cellos,
double bass, and trombones. An aimless, atonal vocal line reinforces the
Symphonic Songs 211
despondent words of the poem. The song concludes with a single glissando
in the violas, perhaps implying that the w o m a n has fainted or the body of
her lover has been cut down from the tree.
Although Zemlinsky's interest in numerology may have led him to divide
both the Symphonic Songs and the Lyric Symphony into seven move-
mentsseven being a mystical numberthe seven-movement form be-
comes a logical framework for his ideas. (Mahler was not constricted by a
four-movement structure and could have been Zemlinsky's example.) While
op. 20 is not united by recurring motives, it can be considered a cycle
because of its focused subject matter and shared musical vocabulary, much
like Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. The overall tonal scheme is anchored
around D, the tonal focus of the first and last songs, although keys are
never clearly stated but rather implied as music gravitates to a particular
tonal center within each song. In "Lied aus Dixieland," for example, cellos
and double basses emphasize D with ostinato patterns (mm. 2 1 - 2 5 ) and
pedal point in the double bass part for the final stanza, supporting the tragic
lament, "Way down South in Dixie: I live, I can scarcely breathe, oh love,
a naked shadow in a naked tree!"
Zemlinsky continues his earlier practice of fashioning musical ideas that
illuminate the text, occasionally even illustrating specific wordsfor ex-
ample, descending sixths in the vocal line for the word "tears" in "Er-
kenntnis" (Perception, mm. 2 4 - 2 5 ) . He may comment on a situation or
character: the braying of a donkey in the orchestra throughout "Ubler
Bursche" (Bad Man) lets the audience know the composer's opinion of the
song's protagonist as he both mocks and admires the bad man. (See Wolf's
"Schweig' einmal still" [Be Quiet!] or Mahler's "Lob des hohen Ver-
standes" [Praise of Superior Wit] for similar uses of this figure.)
"Lied der Baumwollpacker," no. 2 (A minor), is dominated by a heavy,
darkly orchestrated motive, suggestive of rolling bales of cotton coupled
with a lumbering, irregular vocal line that grunts and groans with the ef-
forts of the cotton packer. This is followed by the lovely "Totes braunes
Madel," 2 2 whose haunting melody, stated three times by the bassoon
against a relatively austere orchestral background, is set within a brief
twenty-eight measures. The steady, subdued motion of the vocal line is only
disturbed for the words "dancing and singing," as the vocal line abruptly
leaps about to express the anomalous idea that the beautiful dead girl
would be proud of her appearance in the coffin. "Erkenntnis," no. 5, like
"Totes braunes M a d e l , " is quite brief but with lovely elegiac melodies of-
fered by solo woodwinds. In the final phrase "I will not return to you
again," the vocal line waivers between the pitches a1 and b 1 , anticipating
the reflective conclusion of "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen," of op. 22 writ-
ten five years later.
Songs nos. 4 and 6 of op. 20 are noisy and tumultuous, with aggressive
orchestral parts that could easily overwhelm the voice line. For the blues
poem "Ubler Bursche," no. 4, Zemlinsky dispenses with violins and violas
and exploits raucous, boisterous sounds of the brass section, especially the
trumpets, while giving the woodwinds frantic scurrying material. As the
"bad man" brags that he beats his wife and mistress, the percussion section
(tympani, tambourine, snare drum, birch switch, and cymbals) all join in
to punctuate his blows.
The orgiastic vigor of Zemlinsky's "Afrikanischer Tanz," no. 6, is per-
fectly suited to Langston Hughes's hypnotic dance poem. Hughes's descrip-
tion of beating drums that stir the blood and incite dance elicits from
Zemlinsky music sometimes reminiscent of Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances"
and anticipates moments from Orff's Carmina burana. Percussion naturally
plays a prominent role in creating a Dionysian frenzy as Zemlinsky strives
for the elemental, using no metric changes, no violins, and many staccato
or marcato passages in woodwinds and trumpets. As with his setting of
"Afrikanischer Tanz" eight years later in op. 27 for voice and piano, Zem-
linsky reins in the aggressive sound levels of the middle section, here by
reducing the number of instruments and the dynamic level and by giving
the voice slower-moving, more lyrical material as the poem describes a
young girl softly whirling around the fire. (The line "dreht sich leis im
Lichterkreis" is used only once in the op. 20 version of the poem and twice
in op. 27.) After a short pause, the wild gyration of the A music returns
with the growling rolling tom-toms.
Zemlinsky concludes op. 20 with Frank Home's "Arabeske" (Ara-
besque), a poem that depicts two little girlsone white and one black
as they play together under a tree beneath the body of a lynched black
man. Malcolm Cole maintains that the German translation of "danglin' "
into "schaukeln," meaning "to rock," completely changes the raw brutality
of Home's image of a dead man hanging by his neck to "an idyllic picture
of happy children and a benign gentleman" rocking above in the tree. 23
Zemlinsky apparently did not see this as a mistake when he wrote "Ara-
beske," for his ironical setting belies any sweet representation of racial
harmony. The shrill sixteenth notes of the piccolo and flutes against steadily
pulsing drums, the large percussion section, the nervous energy of the
strings, and the metallic intrusions of the trumpets are primordial in their
message, almost a continuation of "Afrikanischer Tanz," and designed to
provide a mocking, brilliant conclusion to the cycleno idyllic picture
here.
Zemlinsky tried on several occasions to interest Universal Edition in the
Symphonic Songs. Eventually they acquired the publishing rights but did
little at that time to promote it.24 Cole, in his article on Afrika singt, the
poetic source for Zemlinsky's Symphonic Songs, notes that Universal Edition
published other song settings from this poetry by younger Viennese-trained
composers, such as Edmund Nick, Wilhelm Grosz, and Kurt Pahlen.25
Zemlinsky's op. 20 received a radio premiere in 1935 but was not per-
Symphonic Songs 213
formed again until 1964, when it was brought back to the public by the
Baltimore Symphony with former Zemlinsky student Peter Hermann Adler
conducting and William Warfield as soloist.26 Its New York premiere was
given in 1996 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with baritone Simon
Estes and conductor Dennis Russell Davies.27
Chapter 17
Abendlieder: Op. 22, Two Songs,

Op. 27, the American Songs
Alas, those verses one writes in youth aren't much. One should wait
and gather sweetness and light all his life, a long one if possible, and
then maybe at the end he might write ten good lines.
Rainer Maria Rilke1
After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Zemlinsky, w h o had

been living in Berlin since 1927, returned to Vienna but found no regular
employment. He was now released from the hectic pace he had pursued
for most of his life, and his interest in songwriting reignited in July 1933
with August Eigner's poem "Und einmal gehst d u " (And All at Once You
Go). 2 During the last nine years of his life, he would compose at least
twenty-four songspensive and restrained, reflecting the sensitivities of a
man disillusioned by a disintegrating world and by his inability to achieve
international recognition. Between January 1934 and January 1935, Zem-
linsky composed eight more songs, six of which he performed with singer
Julia Nessy on 13 February 1935 at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in
Vienna. 3 Dedicated to " M y dear friend, Eva Freund," wife of the Prague
banker O t t o Freund, w h o later died in the "custody" of the Gestapo, 4
Zemlinsky designated the six premiered songs as his op. 22. He appears to
have considered publishing all eight songs as a group, for at the top of his
holograph score titled "6 Lieder mit Klavier" written in ink, he had pen-
ciled in the words "8 Lieder."' N o n e were published during his life, but
all eight lieder were finally issued in the United States by M o b a r t Music
Publications in 1977 as "Six Songs O p . 22 (1934) and T w o Songs (without
opus number) (1934)." In fact, Zemlinsky's only published works during
Abendlieder: Op. 22, Two Songs, Op. 27, the American Songs 215
the last years of his life were the Sinfonietta, op. 23, written in 1934 and
published by Universal Edition the following year, and his three popular
songs written in the United States. The tumult of the times, Zemlinsky's
association with the avant-garde, his " d u b i o u s " ethnic status, and perhaps
his waning reputation prevented the publication of several other important
works to which he had given opus numbers: his Psalm 13 for chorus and
orchestra, op. 24 (written in April 1935), the String Quartet no. 4 (dated
1936 in a holograph score in LC), op. 2 5 , and the twelve songs of op. 27,
written between 1937 and 1938. Universal Edition probably considered
these works to be commercially unviable given the times and the difficulty
in marketing nonorchestral works. 6 The forward-looking Universal Edition,
with its main office in Austria, was not under Nazi control until after the
Anschluss in March 1938, but its German-language market was radically
reduced in 1933 when the Nazis achieved power in Germany. Since the
1920s, UE's championship of contemporary music had attracted Nazi an-
tagonism, and two of UE's most successful publications, Jonny spielt auf
by Krenek and Kurt Weill's Dreigroschenoper, earned the wrath of Nazi
critics. 7 After their invasion of Austria, the Nazis expropriated UE in 1938
and fired its Jewish directors, w h o were replaced by Robert Geutebriick, a
Nazi supporter. 8
Songs from 1933 to 1935
Still tentatively tonal, the nine songs from 1933 to 1935 exhibit an ex-
pansion of the progressive characteristics that had become Zemlinsky's
musical language, with even bolder harmonies, nonfunctional chord pro-
gressions, free-ranging dissonances, and angular vocal lines. Except for the
first song of op. 22, "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen" (In brown Velvet
Shoes), Zemlinsky eliminates key signatures entirely. Several of the songs
are character pieces with notable word-painting, reminiscent of H u g o
Wolf's style. In "Das bucklichte Mannlein," from Two Songs, for example,
a m o n o t o n o u s half-step sixteenth-note figuration in the piano mimics a
spinning wheel, and in "Elfenlied" (Elf's Song), op. 22, no. 4, Zemlinsky
uses the sparkling, luminescent upper register of the piano in the manner
of Wolf's "Elfenlied" to depict the tiny elves playing in the moonlight.
Zemlinsky's return to song composition also heralds his musical recog-
nition of life's finitude. The pale light of an autumn landscape, the bare
fields, and dried leaves of "Und einmal gehst d u " signal Zemlinsky's own
journey into autumn. He presents this subdued message with spare, slow-
moving octaves in the lower half of the piano (reminiscent of Hindemith's
style) and with a diminished triad (spelled D F G-sharp, a unifying motive
throughout) in the rhythmically bland voice part. The hesitant steps of the
traveler are marked with rests and meter elongation (mm. 2 6 - 2 8 ) and pedal
point (mm. 1 3 - 1 6 , 2 1 - 2 5 , 2 8 - 3 2 ) . Parallel minor sixths and decreasing
activity in the piano part in the last half of the song reinforce the traveler's
reluctant acceptance of his inevitable destination.
Op. 22 begins with two evening songs, the first of which, Christian Mor-
genstern's "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen," personifies night (the evening
of life), describing its approach in brown velvet shoes. The steady pulse of
the piano part, at first moving outward in contrary motion with plodding
chords, imitates night's footsteps as it walks through the countryside. 9
Zemlinsky's subdued setting supports Morgenstern's delicate images with
a narrow vocal range of an octave, irregular phrasing, pedal point, a slow
tempo ("langsam"), and a limited dynamic range extending only from "pi-
anissimo" to "piano." The somewhat fluid voice part, anticipated in the
piano introduction, begins disjunctly, then becomes linear as it slowly de-
scends in the second half of the phrase, drooping to paint an image of a
weary land. With the words "Sei ruhig, Herz" (Be calm, heart), the quarter-
note motion of the piano slows, then returns to its continuous pace with
the reappearance of the slightly varied A material. At the song's conclusion,
the voice slowly wavers between D-flat and E-flat and is echoed by the
piano, whose rhythmic motion has also slowed to portray the words "the
darkness can do you no more wrong."
"Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht" (Evening Goblet Full of Sunlight), no. 2,
is a companion piece in mood and style to "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen."
Both use the poetry of Christian Morgenstern and are muted, slow-moving
night songs of melancholy. The dynamic range of "Abendkelch voll Son-
nenlicht" is even softer than "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen," ranging from
"piano" to "pppp," and although it is harmonically bolder and more dis-
sonant than its predecessor, its extremely soft dynamics veil the inventive-
ness of its dissonances. Although some dissonance is designed to aid text
expression, as on the word "Tod" (Death, m. 11), it often is used for its
own sake (m. 5). Audacious, nonfunctional chords alternate with conso-
nant chords that imply tonality, thereby shifting the music between atonal
progressions and more traditional territory. The vocal lines are mostly lin-
ear with interesting exceptions, such as the jagged presentation of the text
"let your gold glow within me!" and "gold" as the song's highest note
(mm. 20-21).
With "Feiger Gedanken bangliches Schwanken" (Timid Thoughts, Anx-
ious Indecision), no. 3, Zemlinsky attempts to rouse himself from the blows
and vicissitudes life has dealt him. The shortest song in his oeuvrea mere
thirty-three seconds or fifteen measures in length, "Feiger Gedanken ban-
gliches Schwanken," almost equals the conciseness of Webern's "Christus
factus est," which lasts twenty-five seconds. Goethe's poem urges defiance
rather than weakness in the face of misfortune, and the first half of the
song feverishly represents human cowardliness with short note values in
voice and piano within a frequently dissonant accompaniment. As the text
urges resoluteness, the vocal line broadens into longer note values with one
measure of 4/4 inserted within the 3/4 meter that governs the rest of the
song. Becoming more harmonically consonant, the music concludes with a
triumphant flourish of E-flat major in the piano as the voice sustains a high
G.
"Elfenlied" (Elves' Song), no. 4, seems a companion piece to "Das buck-
lichte Mannlein" (The Tiny Hunchback), a song that eventually replaced
"Auf dem Meere meiner Seele" (On the Sea of M y Soul) as no. 6 of op.
22. Both are rhythmically quite varied, both have tiny people as their sub-
jects, each makes extensive use of the upper half of the piano to portray
mysterious, imaginary subjects like elves and gnomes, and each is playful
and charming. "Elfenlied" is also similar in some ways to the songs that
precede it, for its dynamics range from piano to pppp. 1 0 Like "Auf braunen
Sammetschuhen" and "Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht," "Elfenlied" takes
place at night but varies from them in its lighthearted, childlike images.
Again, Zemlinsky uses no key signature, this time exploring polytonality
by juxtaposing chords of different keys while playfully emphasizing a va-
riety of rhythmic possibilities of 6/8 meter (at least eight figurations are
clearly different, and he also adds one measure of 9/8), several of which
are drolly fitted to the text. He also plays with the shape of the melodic
figures; for example, mm. 1 8 - 1 9 . Continuity is maintained by a vocal re-
frain, repeated three times, "Urn Mitternacht, wenn die Menschen erst
schlafen" (At midnight, when people have gone to sleepZemlinsky added
the third statement of this line to Goethe's poem), and with the slightly
varied repetition of another melody that coincides with lines 4 and 5 of
each poetic stanza.
In "Volkslied," no. 5, poet Christian Morgenstern tells a story of un-
realized happiness in love. Using the folk song as his guide, Zemlinsky
responds with simple rhythms and a modest piano figuration while direct-
ing his ingenuity to the harmonic material, with portions of pentatonic
scales (reminiscent of his opera Der Kreidekreis), parallel chord motion,
and chromaticism. Although the voice line begins in the key of F major
and is centered around the pitch a 1 , the accompaniment offers no clear key,
beginning with alternating chords of D major (also the final chord of the
song) and F major. Dissonance forecasts the fate of the lovers, contradicting
the words of the speaker, w h o claims, "[W]e were entirely in love" (mm.
7-9) and that he and his true love shared "a world full of happiness" (mm.
2 3 - 2 5 ) . With the words "I wore [your necklace] over my heart together
with your heart" (mm. 13-17), the voice ominously jolts to D major, a
musical phrase repeated in the final stanza with the words " O h world, your
sweet things are not for me!"
In "Auf dem Meere meiner Seele" (On the Sea of M y Soul), no. 6, the
fourth Morgenstern poem in op. 22, the first line of text is repeated in the
following t w o stanzas, acting as a unifying device, although Zemlinsky does
not emphasize the return of the words with anything more than very gen-
eral musical gestures. As with so many of his works, the primary musical
motives are presented in the first two measures of "Auf dem Meere meiner
Seele," and yet Zemlinsky appears to be searching for something new.
Much of the piano writing is for two independent voices, each at times
implying separate keys and often moving in contrary motion or answering
one another with chromatic scales or unusual scale progressions rich in
chromaticism and tritones. The rhythmically independent voice and piano
parts are delivered at a rapid tempo in a feverish, chaotic presentation of
the text. No key signature is given, and although no key is clearly indicated
throughout, the piece ends surprisingly on an E major chord. The passion-
ate, dramatic vocal line includes several high A-flats and B-flats, supported
by a challenging piano accompaniment that concludes the song and collec-
tion with an ecstatic flourish.
The buoyant "Das bucklichte Mannlein" (1934), with text from Des
Knaben Wunderhorn, is much too cleverly constructed to be mistaken for
a true folk song. Alternating the meters 2/4 and 3/4, Zemlinsky begins with
a jaunty, irregular motive in the left hand of the piano part that expands
and contracts both rhythmically and intervallically throughout. This motive
as well as uneven phrase lengths musically represent the disruptive little
man with a limping gait who insinuates himself into every corner of a
young girl's activities. (Other pictorial representations include the sneezes
of the little man [mm. 11-16: Zemlinsky cannot resist inserting a variation
of his sneeze figure] and his sabotaging of the spinning wheel's motion
[mm. 53-60].) Segments of the motive, such as the half-step pattern in mm.
19-21, fall on varying parts of the beat pattern or are echoed in reverse,
mm. 28-30. Rhythmic and melodic variants of the A material from the
vocal line return at the beginning of each new stanza of text, although in
stanza 4, only its rhythmic shape is repeated. This becomes the foil against
which each clever variation in the piano part occurs. The harmonic lan-
guage of "Das bucklichte Mannlein" is similar to that of "Auf dem Meere
meiner Seele," with its polytonality, tritones with whole tone scales implied
(e.g., mm. 11-12), and chromaticism that finally resolves to D minor/major.
Here, every nuance of the curious text is masterfully illuminated.
"Ahnung Beatricens" (Beatrice's Presentiment, 1935) is an "other
worldly" sonnet by Franz Werfel, a respected writer and the third husband
of Alma Schindler/Mahler. The narrator of Werfel's poem is in love with
a fantasy, the ghost of a woman who constantly occupies his thoughts.
This illusion or idealization of love is more powerful than the reality of
any corporeal love. Capturing the mystic longing of the poem, Zemlinsky
uses no key signature, employs extensive chromaticism as well as polyto-
nality, and avoids clearly stating the tonic of the key he implies. Neverthe-
less, a sense of tonality pervades the song, due partly to Zemlinsky's use
of triads and tonal motives such as the minor third figure in mm. 2-4
(extracted from a longer figure in m. 1) that is repeated eight times. Zem-
linsky sets the stage for the unfolding of his strange story with a sinuous,
haunting melodic line presented in the upper range of the piano, accentu-
ated with a harmonically unrelated C-sharp major chord in the left-hand
piano part. The plaintive entrance of the voice (m. 3) in a ghostly duet (the
conversing of the lovers) with the piano echoes (an augmented fourth away)
the repeated minor third figure of the piano. This vocal line reappears a
minor second lower in mm. 22-23, but now only the rhythmic part of the
piano motive of m. 3 answers. The longer motive of m. 1 also reappears
throughout in various guises, but only in the right-hand piano part of m.
17 does it recur as an exact repetition of m. 1, marking the entrance of the
poem's sestet and the surprising revelation that the narrator's love died in
childhood.
Op. 27
The twelve songs of op. 27, written during March and April 1937, are
centered around an intriguing choice of poems: six had been written nearly
1,500 years earlier, and nine are translations from other languages/cultures.
Op. 27 is a collection rather than a unified cycle of songs, expressing a
diversity of moodsa kind of Scbwanengesang of Zemlinsky's own choos-
ingbut spare and concentrated, much like the distilled style of Faure in
his later years. Each song radiates a somber loveliness, the result of a pu-
rifying of musical materials, a reduction of means similar to Robert Schu-
mann's last song cycle, Gedichte der Konigin Maria Stuart (Poems of Queen
Mary Stuart). The passionate ecstasies of youth are gone, replaced by an
austere beauty and the sober wisdom of age. Zemlinsky gives the delicate,
sensual poems of Stefan George and Kalidasa thin-textured accompani-
ments that focus the listener's attention on the voice and text. Despite the
reflective character of many songs in op. 27, the vocal range of several is
extensive, as, for example, in the lyrical but highly chromatic "Entfiihr-
ung," no. 1, which stretches the voice from d to b-flat2 that is sung triple
piano, or the aggressive "Afrikanischer Tanz" (African Dance), no. 9, with
a vocal range of e to b-flat2. The driving rhythms of "Afrikanischer Tanz,"
the skittish yet touching "Harlem Tanzerin" (Harlem Dance), no. 8, and
the melancholy blues of "Elend" (Misery), no. 7, on poems by Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay, collectively produce an interesting subgroup
within op. 27. In several of these songs, Zemlinsky used key signatures or
returned to a clear sense of tonality.
"Entfiihrung" appropriately begins op. 27 with an invitation to a jour-
ney, a journey that has been termed the unifying character of the collection,
as the poet travels with his beloved to exotic places.11 Yet, as with Zem-
linsky's other collections, several poems do not fit the hypothetical plan.
Perhaps, as with op. 6, Zemlinsky simply added favorite songs that did not
conform to his original theme, a definite possibility since "Entfiihrung" was
Example 17.1. Zemlinsky, "Entfiihrung" (Abduction), mm. 12-15. Used by per-

mission of Mobart Music Publications.
the earliest song of the collection, dated 31 March 1937. Although the
triadic harmonies and a diatonic melody anchor the outer two stanzas and
coda of "Entfiihrung" and are also the basis for other rhythmic and me-
lodic motives, Zemlinsky does not present any clear cadences in stanzas 1
and 4 and obfuscates the key of the two middle stanzas with whole tone
scales, polytonality, and dense chromatic figurations in both voice and ac-
companiment. Static, circular motion, recalling Webern's highly chromatic
figures of his atonal period, coupled with wandering chromatic melodies
shared by piano and voice parts throughout the B section, suspend tonal
order.
In "Sommer" (Summer), no. 2, reminiscent of Zemlinsky's "Oriental-
isches Sonett," fragrance, sight, touch, and sound are gently evoked as the
voice floats independently above static chords that fade away as they are
held for fifteen beats, their curious dissonances masked by the soft dynamic
level. No key signature is given, nor is a key implied by the segments of
whole tone scales and partial sharing of the vertical and horizontal material
in voice and piano. When the god of love awakens, the chordal figuration
becomes tonal, and the piano is strummed like a lute beneath an ecstatic,
disjunct vocal line that climbs as desire is extolled, then descends as the
poet realizes that new love brings torment.
Zemlinsky continues his search for a new voice in op. 27, although his
use of Indian and black poetry is reminiscent of his earlier symphonic
songs. "Friihling" (Spring), no. 3, has an unusual accompanimental figu-
ration that recalls "Auf See" of the Dehmel lieder, with wide leaps of ninths
and tenths in both the right and left hands of the piano part, each hand
moving in contrary motion to the other, forming dissonances with each
other against a vocal line that is rhythmically and harmonically independ-
ent of them. These leaps express the exuberance of spring, while wisps of
whole tone and diatonic scales in the voice part support descriptions of
exotic young women. As the young girls fearlessly approach the god of
love, the harmonic support becomes more consonant, and the vocal line
climbs expectantly. The voice concludes on F-sharp, the pitch that has ap-
peared as a pedal point in every measure of the piano part, and the gov-
erning key, confirmed by the accompaniment with its final F-sharp major
chord. The thin texture of the accompaniment and the drone of the pedal
throughout seem appropriate to the exotic text.
"Jetzt ist die Zeit" (Now Is the Time), no. 4, one of the loveliest songs
of this collection and just eighteen measures long, is much like a delicate
haiku. Zemlinsky again has the right and left hands of the piano part move
in contrary motion in the first measure, but then immediately begins ex-
tracting material from this seemingly simple music, allowing every interval
of the measure to assume an important motivic role in the music that fol-
lows. When the voice enters in m. 5, it is doubled in the piano as piano
and voice repeat the motive of the right-hand piano part from m. 1 a fifth
lower. The piano then varies this three-note motive, expanding it in mm.
6-8 and inverting it in m. 9. Part of the left-hand piano part of m. 1 appears
in the voice line of m. 10 and is then echoed in the piano part of the
following two measures. In mm. 11-12, Zemlinsky begins a reprise of the
introduction, but with new variations. Although "Jetzt ist die Zeit" is tonal,
bits of whole tone scales again make their appearance, first in the piano
introduction but most charmingly with a melisma on the word "Blumen"
(flowers) as flowers seemingly blossom with this simple, whimsical gesture
(see Example 17.2).
In "Die Verschmahte" (The Scorned One), no. 5, Indian poet Amaru
tells the poignant story of a woman whose love is coldly rejected. The
economy of Zemlinsky's new voice is immediately apparent in this bare
setting that begins with two simple, independent melodic strands presented
contrapuntally by the piano. The melody of the right-hand part is imitated
by the voice when it enters but with a new rhythmic figuration, while the
melody of the left hand is coupled with a halting rhythmic motive that
permeates the entire song, capturing the hesitant shyness of the woman. As
the woman gains enough confidence to express her love, the vocal line
quietly climbs disjunctly in fourths and fifths, falls back, then climbs an
octave and a fifth as her passion grows, and she guilelessly embraces her
Example 17.2. Zemlinsky, "Jetzt ist die Zeit" (Now Is the Time), mm. 8-11. Used
by permission of Mobart Music Publications.
love. He frigidly rejects her as the piano contracts to its low range, and the
primary rhythmic motive is n o w presented simultaneously in both hands.
The simple counterpoint of the piano's opening material returns as the
w o m a n , no longer engaged by life, nevertheless, continues to honor her
love. "Die Verschmahte" has no key signature and combines an interesting
mix of chromaticism, fragments of whole tone scales, and tonality. As with
many of his songs of tragedy, Zemlinsky implies the key of D minor at the
song's conclusion. The dotted rhythmic motive in the piano part of "Die
Verschmahte" recalls "Die Beiden," where this motive played a prominent
role in both the vocal line and the piano part. Robert Schumann also re-
cyled song material: "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" (Dichterliebe) returned
ten years later in " K o m m e n und Scheiden." Yet both Schumann and Zem-
linsky managed to create new songs expressive of their new texts.
Kalidasa's elegant description of nature in "Der Wind des Herbstes" (Au-
tumn Wind), no. 6, inspired Zemlinsky to " p a i n t " the windwith a fragile
thirty-second-note figuration for the piano and dynamics ranging from pi-
ano to pianissimo in both voice and piano. The accompaniment is delicately
colored with whole tone scales and unusual scale progressions and uses a
D pedal point in the bass of the piano throughout the second half of the
song. The linear vocal line, also flavored with whole tone scales and triads,
placidly floats above the piano, contributing to an ephemeral atmosphere
that is again kindred to Japanese haiku. N o key signature is given, but the
music at first is centered around F-sharp and then shifts to D for the rest
of the song. A two-note rhythmic/melodic motive introduced in m. 1 be-
comes one of the primary organizing features of this lied.
With Langston Hughes's "Elend" (Misery), the mood and style of op.
2 7 shifts to the smoky intimacy of the cabaret. "Elend," no. 7, a mournful
song of unhappy love, relies on syncopation, seventh and ninth chords, and
variation in the bass line of the piano part for its blues sound. Zemlinsky
parallels the repetition of the text with melodic repetition, variation, or
sequential gestures. To express the words "and let me weep lightly," the
vocal line plaintively descends (mm. 8-10), then later, with the words "the
one I love destroys my happiness," the density of the increasingly chromatic
accompaniment thickens as the vocal line chromatically rises. The song's
melancholy mood remains unresolved as a variant of the beginning material
returns (m. 24) in the final section, and "Misery" concludes on the domi-
nant of A minor, the governing key.
The discordant, raucous beginning of "Harlem Tanzerin" (Harlem Dan-
cer), no. 8, with its staccato, jarring rhythms and disjunct chords of open
fourths and fifths, provides the honkytonk setting for Claude McKay's vi-
gnette describing prostitutes and drunken men, laughing and applauding
the graceful movements of a beautiful, half-naked black dancer. An ethe-
real, faraway look in her eyes betrays her disassociation from the harsh re-
ality of her world. Crude, biting rhythms of off-the-beat staccato
sixteenth/eighth notes in the left-hand piano part punctuated by eighth-/
half-note marcato octaves in the right hand are linked with a more lyrical
melody that is first presented in the voice (mm. 2-3), then repeated and
modified throughout the song in both voice and piano. Although the Vi-
ennese Zemlinsky is again attracted to the subject of dance, "Harlem Tan-
zerin" only approximates dance music, deemphasizing beat patterns with
coarse figurations and alternations of 3/4, 2/4, and 4/4. Lyrical allusions to
the lovely dancer insinuate themselves into the aggressive music of the rev-
elersfor example, when her voice is compared to the sound of flutes, the
accompaniment becomes more consonant and steady (mm. 8-9); or in the
description of her graceful dance, the voice line then descends evenly in
thirds and seconds (mm. 14-15). As the wine-flushed youths throw money
at the beautiful girl, the inner voices of the piano, fixed between pedal
point D and pedal point B-flat, ascend chromatically for nearly five meas-
ures (mm. 28-32). Although the song is in the key of G-sharp minor, the
unresolved dissonances of the final chord confirm the dancer's grim exis-
tence.
In "Afrikanischer Tanz" (African Dancealso no. 6 in the Symphoni-
sche Gesange), no. 9, raw sound and rhythm dominate as repetitive, asser-
tive musical figurations complement the mesmerizing repetitions of words.
Zemlinsky begins with two distinctive motives presented in the low register
of the piano: the right hand executes a jaunty rhythmic figure, while the
left hand counters with an ostinato that rumbles in the bass of the piano
for six measures. These motives become the foundation for a rhythmic tour
de force, returning in various dissected guises as their chaotic permutations
thrust the music into a wild, frenetic dancesimultaneously complex and
elemental. The voice part, with a range from e1 to b-flat2, is mostly per-
cussive and irregular, offering linear material only in the B section (mm.
18-34) as a young girl gracefully dances in the firelight. With the return
of the A section (m. 35), variants of the two motives continue to mutate,
incorporating new ostinati figures and sequences as the music gyrates to its
flamboyant conclusion.
The next three songs of op. 27 return to a more reflective, lyrical style
with nos. 10 and 12 sharing a similar harmonic vocabulary, vocal range,
and mood. Stefan George's poem "Gib ein Lied mir wieder" (Give Me
Another Song), no. 10, is one of Zemlinsky's most poignant, beautiful
songs, recalling some of the pensive, melancholy songs of Hugo Wolf's
Italian Song Book. The exceptionally chromatic accompaniment (often
doubling the voice line) and tortured vocal line capture the mournful sad-
ness of the text, distilling the essence of George's brooding, despondent
words. The melodic skips of the vocal line expand and contract as a uni-
fying device throughout, as melody and harmony continually turn in sur-
prising directions. The simplicity of the accompanimental figuration
complements the text's resignation and world-weariness.
Indian poet Kalidasa's "Regenzeit" (Rainy Season), no. 11, offers images
of sight, sound, scent, and human longing that are echoed in the light,
staccato piano part, evoking the sound of raindrops. The shape of the open-
ing piano figuration is used at different pitch levels throughout and at the
same time delicately anticipates the vocal line. Thirty-nine seconds long,
"Regenzeit" is the shortest of the Kalidasa poems in op. 27, and although
none is longer than one minute ten seconds ("Sommer"), all five Kalidasa
songs would go well together as a recital group.
It is fitting that Zemlinsky closed his op. 27 with a poem by Goethe,
whose words provided the foundation for the flowering of the nineteenth-
century lied and who influenced so many German-speaking artists. Thomas
Mann, who returned to Goethe's works throughout his life, declared in his
diary, "I can say of myself . . . that I belong 'to Goethe's family.' " 12 Zem-
linsky's first published opus included a poem by Goethe, and he now ends
his final collection with Goethe's work. "Wandrers Nachtlied" (Wanderer's
Night SongDer du von dem Himmel bist), no. 12, one of Goethe's most
famous poems, has been set to music by a phalanx of composers, including
Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wolf, Medtner, Joseph Marx, Pfitz-
ner, and Ansorge (a fragment of Zemlinsky's 1896 setting is in the Library
of Congress). Zemlinsky's simple, stately setting is an incantation to an
illusory peace, surely a reflection of Zemlinsky's apprehensions for the fu-
ture. He creates a sober atmosphere with slow-moving chords that become
stationary for the recitation of the words: "I am tired of striving! What
does all this pain and desire mean?" With the words "Sweet peace, come,
ah come," the voice rises in supplication over a D-flat pedal in the piano,
then descends to its own D-flat as the piano signals a modicum of hope
with an unresolved final chord. The extensive vocal range of "Wandrers
Nachtlied" (c-sharp1 to a-flat2) must be negotiated with great control an d
delicacy in order to illuminate the subdued yearning of Goethe's wonderful
poem.
After he arrived in the United States, Zemlinsky attempted to break into

the lucrative popular music market with three English songs on translations
of texts by his friend Irma Stein-Firner. His early experiences with operetta
and cabaret were channeled into "Chinese Serenade," "My Ship and I,"
and "Love, I Must Say Goodbye," each of which is pleasantly tuneful and
skillfully composed to rather simplistic lyrics. For "Chinese Serenade,"
Zemlinsky provided a Hollywood-like imitation of Chinese music, with
pentatonic scales and a somewhat percussive accompaniment of parallel
sixths. "My Ship and I" has its hero express love for his loyal ship rather
than for women, who are sure to be unfaithful. Zemlinsky handles these
less-than-profound sentiments with flare, writing a Viennese operetta-styled
song with appoggiaturas and lilting waltz rhythms. 13 The third song of the
group, "Love, I Must Say Goodbye," is the most successful, with interesting
interactions between the piano and vocal line and an inspired melody for
the voice. Zemlinsky's instincts for expressive text setting led him to high-
light melodically and rhythmically important words such as "love," "true,"
"lovely," and "rose."
Der einsame Weg

Zemlinsky had little time left to compose. During the summer of 1939,
he wrote two works he hoped would be sold to American schools: a hunt-
ing piece for two French horns and piano and a rondo, 14 "Humoreske"
for flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon.15 Then he began his
final battle with ill health that continued until his death in March 1942.
In an essay in Quasi una fantasia, Adorno reminded the world of the
forgotten Zemlinsky in 1963, and then the "world" forgot again, despite
periodic efforts on the part of his widow to interest conductors and other
musicians in his work. Finally, in 1971, 100 years after Zemlinsky's birth,
a reexamination of his music began, given further impetus by a Zemlinsky
symposium in Graz, Austria, in 1974. "Eyewitness" accounts about Zem-
linskythe man and the musicianfrom a few of the still-living friends,
scholars, and musicians, such as Arnost Mahler, contributed to this revival,
as young scholars such as Horst Weber, Lawrence Oncley, Ernst Hilmar,
and Rudolph Stephan immersed themselves in studies of the forgotten mas-
ter. Horst Weber's thirty-year commitment to Zemlinsky scholarship cul-
minated in his monumental publication of Zemlinsky's correspondence
with members of the Viennese School.
This work has now been carried forward by a new generation, most
notably by Alfred Clayton, Otto Biba, Hartmut Krones, Susanne Rode-
Breymann, Werner Loll, Udo Rademacher, Carmen Ottner, Otto Koller-
itsch, Eike Rathgeber, Pamela Tancsik, Jiri Vyslouzil, and especially Antony
Beaumont, whose book about Zemlinsky, musical editions, edition of Alma
Mahler's diaries, and performances of Zemlinsky's music have catapulted
Zemlinsky into the public eye. In the United States and Europe, perform-
ances of Zemlinsky's work have also been championed by the LaSalle
String Quartet, pianist Cord Garben, and conductor James Conlon, who
has made the revival of Zemlinsky's music his personal mission. Austria
itself remembered its lost son in 1985, when it provided an honor grave
for Zemlinsky's ashes in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, not too far from
the final resting places of Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes
Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Zemlinsky's friend, Arnold Schoenberg. Zemlin-
sky's time has come at last.
And what is Alexander Zemlinsky's place in the great tradition of the
German lied? His gift for melody, his literary sensitivity, and his under-
standing of the piano provided him with those "tools of the trade" that
allowed him to create a superb body of song that is only now beginning
to be fully appreciated. In many ways he represents a missing link between
the composers of nineteenth-century song and those of the twentieth. He
began as a composer of traditional song, using a lush romantic vocabulary
of beautiful melodies and interesting, colorful harmonies. But gradually, his
expanding harmonic language included unique, expressive dissonance,
which allowed him to examine poetic ideas that had not been part of the
romantic lied. Symbolist and expressionistic poetry, works by American
blacks, and ancient Indian poets found artistic resonance in his music. His
exploration of rhythmic complexities and increasingly nonfunctional tonal
vocabulary reflected this move from the Romantic era into the astringent,
alienating twentieth century. Yet throughout his compositional life, as he
incorporated new ideas and experiences in his song, there remained a con-
tinuity within his work based on craftsmanship, structural care, and ex-
pressive connection with poetry.
Zemlinsky, like Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, and Alban
Berg, remained sensitive to the ideal of word/tone unitythe conjunctive
symbiosis of two separate arts. The radical departure by avant-garde
twentieth-century composers from the nineteenth-century aesthetic goal of
word/tone unity in song has caused some historians to conclude that the
art song came to an abrupt end with the lieder of Hugo Wolf. But actually
the aesthetic ideals of song merely expanded to include the works of such
disparate composers as Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. "Du holde Kunst, ich
danke dir dafiir."
Notes
Introduction
1. Schoenberg 1952, 518.
2. Adorno 1978, 355.
3. Adorno 1978, 357.
4. Weber 1995, 294-296. Webern is referring to Zemlinsky's three unpublished
Hofmannsthal lieder and Baudelaire's "Harmonie des Abends," which Webern
studied with Mihacsek and pianist Edward Steuermann in Vienna. The songs were
performed from manuscript on 19 and 20 November 1922 for the Prague Society
for Musical Performances, perhaps the only time they were heard in public during
Zemlinsky's lifetime.
5. Stravinsky and Craft 1966, 148.
6. Mahler-Werfel 1963, 30.
7. Newmarch 1954, 27.
8. Adorno 1978, 366.
9. Dahlhaus 1988, 4-6.
10. Botstein 1999a, 36.
11. Friedlander 1976, 221.
12. One can also note that the intellectual rigors of serialism failed to gain the
affection of the public and drew the ire of traditionalists who complained that
serialism failed to maintain a continuity with the past, despite Schoenberg's argu-
ments to the contrary.
13. Botstein 1999b, 148.
14. La Grange points out that Mahler even borrowed material from Es war
einmal. La Grange 1995, 276.
15. Hoffmann 1910, 193.
16. Stephan 1978, 8.
228 Notes
18. Clayton 1995, 313. Weigl studied musicology with Guido Adler at the Uni-
versity of Vienna and later taught at the New Vienna Conservatory. He came to
the United States in 1938 and taught theory/composition at the Hart School of
Music and the New England Conservatory.
19. Biba 1992, 47. She taught music theory at the New Conservatory of Vienna
from 1918 to 1932; among her many works are a Symphony in D minor for soloists
and orchestra, op. 27; an oratorio on a text by Walt Whitman; a Piano Quintet in
G minor, op. 31; and songs. See the 1991 issue of Osterreichische Muskizeitschrift,
46: 385.
20. UPL, handwritten letter: Berlin 6. III.
21. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 87.
22. Kravitt 1996, 31-32.
23. McWilliams 1989, 89, 114.
24. Alewyn 1960, 155.
25. Hailey 1993, 2.
26. Hailey 1993, 2.
27. Hailey 1993, 310.
28. This point was also made about Schoenberg by Alexander Ringer at the
conference "Schoenberg and His World" at Bard College, 14 August 1999. The
date of Zemlinsky's conversion to Christianity is not known, but he withdrew from
the Israelitische Kultursgemeinde on 30 March 1899. Beaumont 2000, 65. Ge-
nealogie estimates Zemlinsky's baptism to be as late as 1906. Schony 1978, 98.
Chapter 1
1. Harvey 1989, 25.
2. Szeps 1938, 22.
3. Palmer 1959, 524.
4. Palmer 1959, 527.
5. "Austria." 1988. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14: 513.
6. "Vienna." 1911. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 28: 50.
7. "Vienna." 1911. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 28: 50-52.
8. Palmer 1959, 532.
9. Teich and Porter 1990, 84.
10. Gay 1988, 19.
12. Pawel 1984, 104.
13. Schlesinger 1959, 56 fn. j .
14. Geehr 1990, 40.
15. David S. Good, quoted in Geehr 1990, 332.
16. See Schorske 1981, 129-133.
17. Schorske 1981, 129-130.
18. Hitler 1939, statement of the editor, 71. Lueger tried to prevent the "Jew"
Mahler from conducting the Vienna Philharmonic's yearly benefit concert for the
poor. Bauer-Lechner 1980, 122. Mahler was continually under attack from the anti-
Semitic press during his years in Vienna.
19. Geehr 1990, 92.
Notes 229
20. Geehr 1990, 950.

21. Hitler 1939, 72.
22. Geehr 1990, 343.
23. Geehr 1990, 89. Quoted from Funder, Friedrich. 1953. Aufbruch zur chris-
tlichen Sozialreform. Vienna: Herold.
24. One of the primary reasons Bismarck supposedly resisted incorporating the
Hapsburg Germans in his new nation was his desire to avoid a Catholic majority
in the German parliament, which would be guided by the powerful Catholic
Church.
25. Teich and Porter 1990, 85.
26. "Chamberlain." 1967. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 5: 246.
27. Nietzsche 1987, 61.
28. Schorske 1981, 7.
29. Schorske 1981, 8.
30. Schorske 1981, 296.
31. Schorske 1981, xxvii.
32. Hofmannsthal 1961, xiii.
33. Barker 1996, 169.
34. Walter 1946, 135.
35. Walter 1946, 135.
36. La Grange 1995, 702.
37. GMf Da 63.
38. Kokoschka 1974, 78.
39. Jones 1955, 2: 79-80.
41. Walter 1946, 167.
43. UPL.
44. Schorske 1981, 212-214. The term "Jugendstil," when applied to music, has
evoked much debate among scholars. See, for example, Brinkmann 1984, 19 and
Roman 1999, 111. Both use examples of Zemlinsky's music to illustrate their views.
45. Fliedl 1997, 63.
46. Fliedl 1997, 102.
47. Stuckenschmidt 1977, 277.
48. A group of artists who joined together to nurture contemporary art and
"make Brussels 'the center of a magnificent avant-garde movement which carries
our country in all fields of art.' " Canning 1993, 28.
49. Pissarro, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, and Manet exhibited their paint-
ings at the Salon des Refuses after their works had been rejected by the official
Salon.
50. Lucie-Smith 1972, 83.
51. Lucie-Smith 1972, 163.
52. Szeps 1938, 144-145.
54. Gay 1988, 10.
55. Gay 1988, 9. Tragically, Freud's sisters did not escape and were murdered
in a concentration camp.
230 Notes
57. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 170. After his death, Schoenberg's remains
were eventually returned to Vienna and buried in an "Honor Grave" in the Zen-
tralfriedh of.
58. UPL. In the September 1921 issue of Anbruch, music critic Richard Specht
failed to include Zemlinsky in a ten-page article about composers and new music
in Vienna. Zemlinsky wrote Specht, listing his publications, performances, and even
the UE advertisement for his music in the very issue of Anbruch in which Specht's
article had appeared. He then asked, "Am I not Viennese?" (Bin ich kein Wiener?).
This became the title of the 1992 Zemlinsky exhibition and catalog at the Gesell-
schaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Biba 1992, 76.
59. UPL. Zemlinsky's sharing of Mahler's version of Beethoven's Symphony no.
9 with Schoenberg, mentioned in this letter, occurred in 1915.
61. Brand, Hailey, and Hams 1987, 417.
63. Calvocoressi 1986, 18. Eight of Kokoschka's paintings were included in the
Nazis' "Degenerate Art Exhibition" in Munich in the same year.
64. Weber 1995, 2.
65. Barker 1996, 1-2.
68. Bailey 1998, 27-28.
69. "In 1900, 559 Jews converted in Vienna, 0.004 per cent of the Jewish pop-
ulation." Botstein 1999a, 21.
70. Timms 1986, 3.
71. Segel 1994, 65. The essay is translated in Segel's The Vienna Coffee House
Wits.
72. Timms 1986, 5-6.
73. Zweig 1943, 83-84.
74. Zweig 1943, 86-87.
76. Zweig 1943, 73.
77. Zweig 1943, 79.
78. Thompson 1990, 58.
79. Grun 1971, 101. Obviously Berg and Karl Krause were in agreement on this
issue.
80. Thompson 1990, 58.
81. Act 3, scene 8. Schnitzler 1962, 65. Schnitzler's novel Frau Beate und ihr
Sohn tells the oppressive story of a widow whose affair with her son's young friend
ends in a tragic double suicide. Edward Timms points to the link of death and love
in both Schnitzler's and Freud's writings. Timms 1986, 91.
82. Timms 1986, 28.
83. Timms 1986, 63.
84. Timms 1986, 203.
85. Grun 1971, 80.
86. Smith 1980, 280.
87. Webern 1963, 14.
88. Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer 1979, 276-277.
Notes 231
89. Smith 1980, 283.

90. Mahler-Werfel 1963, 24,
91. La Grange 1995, 456 n.129.
93. Hailey 1997, 19.
94. Steinweis 1993, 21.
95. Gay 1988, 448.
Chapter 2
1. Szeps 1938, 142.
2. "According to the entry col. no. 2333 in the Birth Book of 1871 of the
Israelite Cultural Community, Vienna, Alexander von Zemlinszky was born 14
October 1871 as the legitimate son of Adolf von Zemlinszky and his wife Clara
(born Semo) in Vienna on Odeon Street." Arnost Mahler received this information
in a letter of 3 July 1970 from the Israelite Cultural Community. A. Mahler 1971,
251. Zemlinsky's date of birth has often been incorrectly given as 1872, an error
evidently perpetrated by Zemlinsky himself. Carmen Ottner cites a curriculum vitae
of 1910 for Universal Edition in which Zemlinsky listed his birth year as 1872.
Ottner 1995, 223. Beaumont postulates that Zemlinsky was fabricating a numer-
ological pseudonym for himself. Beaumont 2000, 201.
3. Baedeker 1905, 64.
4. Interestingly enough, one of the witnesses listed on the marriage certificate
of Zemlinsky's paternal grandparents was a Thomas Goldstein. Could this imply
that one of Zemlinsky's grandparents was an assimilated Jew?
5. GMf Aa 13.
6. Nachod 1952, 107.
7. GMf Ac 22a.
8. GMf Aa 16.
9. Gurtelschmied 1985, 653.
10. Biba 1992, 11.
11. LC 28/14. How long he contributed to this periodical is not clear, but he is
represented in an issue of Wiener Punsch dated 189628/14, among the personal
papers of his son in the Library of Congress. According to Louise Zemlinsky, Zem-
linsky's father was the librettist for Sarema. Clayton 1982, 54.
12. GMf Ac 22a.
13. GMf Da 63. Anton Semlinsky died ca. 1881. Schony 1978, 99.
14. GMf Ac 22a.
15. "Baruch aba, mi adir" was written in 1896 for Helene Bauer, daughter of
the cantor of Zemlinsky's Sephardic congregation.
16. A. Mahler 1976, 14.
17. Stengel and Gerigk 1941, 404. "Zemlinsky, Alexander von (H) [Halbjude].
Wien 14.10. 1871, Prof, Dgt, Komp, ML, 1927/31 an der Berliner Staatsoper tatig:
Schwager Arnold Schonbergs, fur dessen Kompositionen er sich mit Nachdruck
einsetzte."
18. GMf Ac 22a.
232 Notes

20. Biba 1992, 13.
21. Ernst Hilmar dates Zemlinsky's first efforts at composition to be in 1883
(Hilmar 1976, 56), but Zemlinsky himself maintained he began composing when
he was eight years old. Beaumont 2000, 489 n.21.
22. Beaumont 2000, 19.
23. Pascall 1980, 7: 3.
24. Zemlinsky's manuscript of the Balladen (LC 2/6) lists them as opus 2.
25. La Grange 1995, 221.
26. Weber 1977, 11.
27. Stephan 1978, 8.
30. UPL.
31. Clayton 1983a, 84 n.20.
32. Biba 1992, 16.
33. No complete copy of the String Quintet has been found. The Library of
Congress has the first movement and sketches for the rest of the String Quintet in
D minor (3/14), dated 17 October to 6 November 1894. It was premiered 5 March
1896; a fourth movement to a String Quintet in D major dated January 1896 is
listed as a separate item (4/7).
34. Zemlinsky 1922, 69-70. Richard Heuberger, in his Erinnerungen an Johan-
nes Brahms, recounted that Zemlinsky's quintet had pleased Brahms, and he later
remarked, "He is reeking with talent." Heuberger 1976, 97. Hugo Wolf became
an implacable enemy of Brahms after their meeting in 1879.
35. Rychnovsky 1924, 793.
36. Stefan 1932, 127.
37. Universal Edition's director, Emil Hertzka, was an advocate for new music
and also published the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Alma Mahler/
Werfel. UE published a magazine, Musikbldtter des Anbruch, which promoted the
discussion of contemporary music.
38. Clayton 1983a, 85-86.
39. Biba 1992, 25.
40. Weber 1971, 81.
41. Clayton 1983a, 88.
42. Hilmar 1976, 71 n.20. The Fitzner Quartet gave the official premiere of
Schoenberg's work on 20 December 1898 in the Bosendorfer Hall.
43. Biba 1992, 31. Four songs from Zemlinsky's opp. 7 and 8 were performed
for the Tonkiinstlerverein on 21 February 1902 with Zemlinsky at the keyboard.
Beaumont 2000, 122.
44. Rychnovsky 1924, 793. Rychnovsky, in this article on Zemlinsky in Die
Musik in 1924, stated that these were mostly medical students.
45. Nachod 1952, 107.
46. "Zemlinszky's Preisoper 'Sarema' in Miinchen," Neue Musikalische Presse,
17 October 1897, 8.
47. La Grange 1995, 222.
Notes 233
49. La Grange 1995, 222. Critic Eduard Hanslick, while impressed with Zem-
linsky's talent and technique, criticized the Wagnerian excesses of Es war einmal.
La Grange 1995, 222.
50. UPL.
51. La Grange 1995, 703-704. Mahler's friend, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, quoted
Mahler as stating that ballet "has become utterly debased. Improving it, or wanting
to raise it to a higher level is a sheer impossibility." Bauer-Lechner 1980, 165.
52. Weber 1995, 39.
53. UPL.
54. Pawel 1984, 317.
Chapter 3
1. Stefan 1921, 227.
2. Louise Zemlinsky confirmed that Zemlinsky had orchestrated Opernball,
although Schoenberg's sister Ottilie earlier speculated that Schoenberg and Zemlin-
sky may have orchestrated Opernball together. Stuckenschmidt 1977, 31.
4. UPL.
5. Arnold Schoenberg was engaged for the evening of Yom Kippur to replace
the excused Oskar Straus. Wolzogen then hired Schoenberg as a composer/arranger
for his Berlin cabaret, a fortuitous turn of events for the Schoenbergs, who were
expecting their first child. In his autobiography, Wolzogen claimed that Schoenberg
had been so nervous he was unable to perform the simplest accompaniments. Simms
1999, 133.
6. Appignanesi 1976, 32.
7. Stuckenschmidt 1977, 48. Zemlinsky and his friends admired many of the
writers who participated in the cabaret movement: Alma Schindler set Gustav
Falke's poetry; Schoenberg wrote thirty-four measures of a string sextet, "Toter
Winkel," on a poem by Falke; two of Berg's unpublished songs are by Falke, two
are by Bierbaum, and one is by Arno Holz; Count Karl Michael von Levetzow was
the poet for Schoenberg's op. 1; Berg's libretto for Lulu was constructed from
Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Biichse der Pandora.
8. " 'BrettP is the term for the popular stage |Brettboard], and Wolzogen
added the iiber, thinking of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, to designate his desire for a
performance medium which used the elements of the variety show and transcended
or ennobled these." Appignanesi 1976, 32.
9. Appignanesi 1976, 32-34.
10. UPL. Zemlinsky's "Licht in der Nacht" on a poem by Bierbaum remains
only as a holograph sketch in the Library of Congress collection. LC 12/4.
13. UPL Letter 15. Although Zemlinsky's manuscript lists the writer for "Ein
Lichtstrahl" as Gellert, Beaumont identifies him as probably being Oskar Geller.
Beaumont 2000, 83.
14. Beaumont 1995b. The song "Licht in der Nacht" from Deutsche Chansons
was probably intended for the Uberbrettl. LC 12/4.
234 Notes
15. UPL.
16. Zemlinsky mentions the now-lost "Eine ganz neue Schelmweys" in a letter
to Alma Schindler (UPL) and "Julihexen" in a letter to his sister. Weber 1995, 2.
17. Wellesz and Wellesz 1981, 36.
19. UPL. Here Zemlinsky only mentioned one sibling, a sister. In 1978, an article
on Zemlinsky in Genealogie stated that twins, Mathilde and Matthias von Zem-
linszky, were born on 7 September, 1877. Schony 1978, 98. Another sister, Bianca,
was born on 26 March 1874 and died five weeks later. Beaumont 2000, 14.
20. UPL.
21. Rode 1992, 185.
22. UPL.
23. Weber 1995, 15.
24. Weber 1995, 18.
25. Weber 1995, 20.
26. Weber 1995, 30.
27. Rode 1992, 186. See Rode for a list of operettas performed by Zemlinsky.
28. Stefan 1913, 23.
29. Stefan 1913, 34-37.
30. Stefan 1913, 40. Stefan, in his "Aus Zemlinskys Wiener Zeit" for the special
1921 issue of Der Auftakt, remembered that Zemlinsky's setting of Liliencron's
"Tod in Ahren" was performed on the first program of the Ansorge Society and
made a very "strong impression." The Society's programs in its first year included
evenings devoted to Stefan George, to Friedrich Nietzsche, to the theater, and to
piano music. Kravitt 1996, 21.
31. See Weber 1995, 15-16. Zemlinsky made four-hand piano reductions of
Fidelio, Zauberflote, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, The Creation, The Seasons,
Elijah, St. Paul, Das Paradies und die Peri, and reductions for piano two-hands of
Zar und Zimmermann and Der Waffenschmied. Stephan 1978.
33. Kokoschka 1974, 68.
34. Carter and Klein 1980, 728.
35. A. Mahler 1976, 15.
36. Hailey 1993, 25.
37. A. Mahler 1976, 15.
38. UPL.
39. UPL.
40. Stephan 1978, 15.
41. Stefan 1913, 38.
42. Pass 1976, 83.
43. La Grange 1995, 688.
44. Biba 1992, 54. By 1904, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were part of Mahler's
inner circle of admirers and were present for rehearsals of Mahler's Symphony no.
5 and no. 3 in Vienna. La Grange 1999, 15, 75.
45. La Grange 1995, 710.
46. Biba 1992, 103. The program was repeated on 3 February 1905 with three
additional Wunderhorn Lieder. La Grange 1999, 110.
47. Hailey 1997, 260 n.16.
Notes 235
48. Pass 1976, 82-83.

50. See Meibach 1984, 24-30.
51. LC 14/9.
52. LC 26/23.
53. Korngold 1921, 231.
54. In 1918, Korngold's father asked for the return of a piano that he had "put
at Zemlinsky's disposal." Zemlinsky, who thought this piano was a gift, had al-
ready sold his own Bosendorfer for a cheap price and now had no piano. Fortu-
nately, a benefactor came to his rescue and presented him with an excellent piano.
Weber 1995, 200, 221.
55. Hoffmann 1910, 194.
56. Ottner 1995, 222. Webern, after studying the score of Der Traumgorge in
the summer of 1919, wrote Zemlinsky to express his admiration for the work and
dismay that it had not yet been performed. Weber 1995, 291.
57. G. Mahler 1924, 445.
58. Ottner 1995, 222-223.
59. A. Mahler 1971, 252. In 1907, Zemlinsky gave the Vienna premiere of Puc-
cini's Tosca.
60. Stuckenschmidt 1977, 241. Pappenheim's libretto for a proposed opera by
Zemlinsky was called Der Graf von Gleim.
61. See Hilmar 1990, 111, and Hilmar 1995, 279-283.
62. Weber 1995, 327.
63. UPL.
64. UPL.
66. Levi 1994, 89.
67. Rode-Breymann 1995, 274.
68. Weber 1995, 60-61.
70. Between 1919 and 1933, the Berlin Philharmonic performed Mahler's or-
chestral music 96 times, second only to the 135 performances of Strauss's works.
Levi 1994, 217-218.
Chapter 4
1. Pawel 1984, 316
2. Walter 1946, 162
3. A. Mahler 1971, 253.
4. Wechsberg 1971, 16.
5. Pawel 1984, 31.
6. Pawel 1984, 141.
7. Pawel 1984, 142. According to Horst Weber, Zemlinsky was not a member
of the literary cafe circle. Weber 1977, 29.
8. Pawel 1984, 180.
9. Pawel 1984, 105.
10. A. Mahler 1971, 254-255.
236 Notes
11. Ludvova 1983, 272.

12. Tancsik 2000, 291-292. Zemlinsky gave the Prague premiere of Richard
Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in June 1914. Tancsik 2000, 415.
13. Vyslouzil 1995, 243. In the 1938 Die Geschichte der deutschen Buhnen in
Prague, Richard Rosenheim wrote that Zemlinsky, a true disciple of Mahler, used
the ideal of the excellent ensemble as his model rather than the "star" system.
Rosenheim 1938, 205.
14. Eckstein 1993, 11. "Zemlinsky also engaged a sufficient number of Ka-
pellmeisters for rehearsals." Ludvova 1983, 275.
15. Quoted in A. Mahler 1976, 17.
16. Tancsik 2000, 379.
17. Vyslouzil 1995, 237.
18. Vyslouzil 1995, 241. The Philharmonic concerts sometimes included a mix-
ture of genres. Zemlinsky, for example, accompanied alto Emma Hoenig from the
Neues Deutsches Theater in songs by Schubert and Brahms between Beethoven
Symphonies no. 1 and no. 2 on the first Philharmonic concert of the season in
November 1914. Tancsik 2000, 649. On 15 October 1922, Edward Steuermann
performed Chopin's Ballade in F minor and his Polonaise in A-flat major, following
Brahms's Symphony, no. 3 in F major, Bartok's Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra,
and Richard Strauss's Orchestra Suite from Burger als Edelmann. Tancsik 2000,
530.
19. Weber 1995, 74.
20. A. Mahler 1971, 254.
21. Rosenheim 1938, 206. Beaumont maintains that problems with the Aryan
Choir centered around Czech choir members' complaints about singing in German.
Beaumont 2000, 222.
22. Vyslouzil 1995, 246. Zemlinsky performed works by German/Bohemian
composers for the first time in the 1915-1916 Philharmonic Concert Series, pre-
senting songs of Rudolf Prochazka (1864-1936, a founder of the German Music
Academy in 1920), and the premiere of Fidelio Finke's Friihling for soprano, tenor,
and orchestra (1891-1968; Finke was later editor of Der Auftakt). Rosenheim
1938,:223.
23. Prochazka 1926, 61. See Stuckenschmidt 1977, 207-209.
27. Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer 1979, 235.
30. Weber 1995, 152.
31. Weber 1995, 144.
32. Kokoschka 1974, 78.
34. Pawel 1984, 317.
35. Kraus 1977, 63.
36. Schoenberg 1965, 52-53.
37. Weber 1995, 160.
38. Weber 1995, 226.
Notes 237
39. Weber 1995, 221.

40. Suzanne Rode-Breymann notes that early in his career in Prague, Zemlin-
sky's efforts to perform contemporary opera were limited by the conservative taste
of the audience and the desire of the management to sell tickets. Rode-Breymann
1995, 270.
41. Der Auftakt, 14-15 (1921): 234; Der Auftakt , 1 (1922): 21.
42. Schleissner 1925, 194.
43. Tancsik 2000, 611, 604, 607.
44. Schleissner 1925, 194. Poor attendance at concerts with modern repertoire
also attests to the lack of enthusiasm from Prague audiences. Tancsik 2000, 591.
45. Biba 1992, 73.
46. Ottner 1995, 231. Clayton points out that Zemlinsky was not idle during
this period but was unable to find a workable libretto or complete a number of
opera projects. See Clayton 1982, 248-252. Zemlinsky, for example, spent several
years working on Gorki's Malwa, a project he had abandoned in 1902 and then
returned to in 1912; the Library of Congress has extensive sketches of the uncom-
pleted opera Raphael, begun sometime in 1918, and a nearly completed short score
for Der heilige Vitalis, begun in 1926.
48. UPL. Alma Mahler dates this letter 1915, but the performance took place
two years later.
49. Weber 1995, 170.
50. UPL.
51. Palmer 1959, 756.
52. Palmer 1959, 698.
53. Szeps 1938, 179.
54. Jonge 1978, 14.
55. Pfitzner 1920, 128.
56. Palmer 1959, 686-689.
57. T. Mann 1982, 12.
58. Carroll 1997, 185.
59. Pfitzner 1920, 115.
60. Pfitzner 1920, 125.
61. Pfitzner 1920, 130.
62. Pfitzner 1920, 123.
63. Levi 1994, 4.
64. Pfitzner 1920, 65.
65. Berg 1965, 208.
66. Pfitzner 1920, 217.
68. Cernusak 1954, 911.
69. Weber 1995, 218, 219.
70. Eckstein 1993, 25.
71. Pawel 1984, 408.
72. Pawel 1984, 408-409.
73. Zemlinsky, A. 1930. "Masaryk und das Neue Deutsche Theater." N euer
Morgen, 1 (March). Cited in Weber 1977, 32-33. State support also made the
founding of the German Academy possible.
238 Notes
74. T. Mann 1982, 117.

75. Der Auftakt considered itself the music magazine fo r the Czech Republic
(although written in German) and the official organ for the Prague Music Teachers'
Society. It published articles on modern music and included reviews, a calendar of
upcoming events, and discussions of both German and Czech music.
76. Der Auftakt, 14-15 (1921): 232.
77. Der Auftakt, 14-15 (1921): 223-224.
78. Der Auftakt, 12 (1922): 337.
79. Der Auftakt, 2 (1923): 65.
80. With E.J. Dent as it president, its headquarters were located in London.
Erich Steinhard, the chief editor of Der Auftakt, was also one of the founding
members.
81. Quoted in A. Mahler 1971, 255.
82. A. Mahler 1971, 257.
83. Max Brod, Franz Kafka's friend and biographer, made the German trans-
lation of Jenufa and was also Janacek's first biographer.
84. Tancsik 2000, 206.
85. A. Mahler 1971, 257.
86. Stephan 1978. 20.
87. Grun 1971, 329.
88. Adler 1923, 144-146. Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9, in a piano
reduction by Edward Steuermann, songs by Julius Bittner, and Webern's Passaca-
glia, op. 1, were also on the program.
90. Walter 1946, 251.
91. Weber 1995, 305.
92. Weber 1995, 311.
93. Grun 1971, 338-339.
94. Der Auftakt, 6 (1925): 194-195.
95. Weber 1995, 315, 318; Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 354.
97. Weber 1995, 245-247.
98. Weber 1995, 308-310.
99. Die Musik, 16 (August 1924): 792.
100. Weber 1995, 301.
101. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 347. Berg's Violin Concerto would be
premiered for the ISCM festival in Barcelona in 1936 after his death.
102. Haefeli 1980, 275.
103. Der Auftakt, 6 (1925): 193-195.
104. Vyslouzil 1995, 245.
105. Weber 1995, 248; Biba 1992, 69, 105.
106. UPL. Beaumont dates this letter as around June 1925. Beaumont 2000,
503.
107. UPL 155.
108. Heyworth 1983, 330.
109. A. Mahler 1976, 20.
110. A. Mahler 1976, 19.
Notes 239
111. Beaumont 2000, 336.

112. A. Mahler 1971, 257.
Chapter 5
1. Laqueur 1974, 26.
2. Walter 1946, 268.
3. Levi 1994, 1.
4. Frecot and Gunther 1982, 21-22.
5. Jonge 1978, 93
6. Jonge 1978, 101.
7. Laqueur 1974, 233.
8. Laqueur 1974, 229-233.
9. Laqueur 1974, 127.
10. Klemperer had been an assistant conductor at the Neues Deutsches Theater
from 1908 to 1911.
11. Heyworth 1983, 249.
12. Curjel 1975, 31.
13. Heyworth 1983, 161.
14. Heyworth 1983, 279.
15. Heyworth 1983, 374.
16. Heyworth 1983, 377.
17. Heyworth 1973, 58-59.
18. H. Canning 1992, 429.
19. Heyworth 1983, 374.
20. Social reforms, socialist ideals, and populist movements permeated much of
the social fabric of the times. Schoenberg had been a conductor of several workers'
choruses at the beginning of the twentieth century. His friend David Josef Bach
(1874-1947) founded the Arbeiter Symphonie Konzerte (Workers' Symphony Con-
certs), which were conducted by Webern. Also, when poet Richard Dehmel came
to Vienna to read for the Ansorge Society, he gave a reading for workers at their
cultural center. Stefan 1913, 36.
21. Curjel 1975, 20.
22. Heyworth 1983, 374.
23. Leo Blech had conducted in Prague from 1899 to 1906.
24. Curjel 1975, 243.
25. Weissmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Musik, 20, no. 8 (May): 609.
26. Weissmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Musik, 20, no. 5 (February): 376. Zemlinsky
became an advocate for Czech music.
27. Curjel 1975, 274.
28. Curjel 1975, 289.
29. Hugo Leichtentritt. 1931. Die Musik, 23, no. 4 (January): 286.
30. Curjel 1975, 308.
31. Die Musik 24, no. 5 (February 1932): 361.
32. Curjel 1975, 263.
33. Curjel 1975, 292.
34. Zemlinsky was also apparently offered a position as musical director at the
Leningrad State Opera. Beaumont 2000, 356-357.
240 Notes
35. H. Canning 1992, 429.

36. Heyworth 1983, 267.
37. Heyworth 1983, 348-349.
38. Walter 1946, 213.
39. Palmer 1959, 808.
40. GMf Ac 22a.
41. GMf Ac 22a.
42. GMf Ae 2. This review is included in Louise Zemlinsky's Nachlass. Zemlin-
sky evidently did not encourage her career.
44. GMf Ac 22a.
45. Dumling 1985, 173.
46. Because of the continued confusion about Zemlinsky's birthdate, Stefan
thought Zemlinsky's sixtieth birthday was 4 October 1932. Stefan 1932, 126-127.
48. Gulke 1995, 57.
49. Biba 1992, 106.
50. GMf Ac 22a.
51. Adolf Weissmann. 1929. Die Musik, 21, no. 8 (May), 623.
52. Hailey 1993, 65.
53. When Schreker vacated his position at the Vienna Academy to move to Ber-
lin, he asked Zemlinsky if he would like the Vienna Academy post. Zemlinsky wrote
Schreker that the Academy position alone would not be enough of an incentive to
come to Vienna. Weber 1995, 335.
54. Chadwick 1980, 740-741.
55. R. Palmer 1959, 808-809.
Chapter 6
The title of this chapter is taken from Bruno Walter's autobiography, Theme and
Variations (1946), 294.
1. Walter 1946, 301-302.
2. T. Mann 1982, 220.
3. From Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Uber Verganglichkeit" (About Transito-
riness). Feise and Steinhauser, 1959, 172. Zemlinsky set this poem in 1916.
4. T. Mann 1982, 305.
5. R. Palmer 1959, 808-809.
6. T. Mann 1982, 232.
7. T. Mann 1942, 230-231.
8. Reich 1971, 187-189.
9. Levi 1994, 18.
10. Bullock 1964, 279.
11. "Rosenberg, Alfred." 1988. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10: 185.
12. "Niirnberg Laws." 1988. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8: 833.
13. Steinweis 1993, 117.
14. See Chapter 2, n.17.
Notes 2 41
15. Hitler 1939, 417.

16. Hilmar 1990, 112.
17. Levi 1994, 82.
18. Beaumont 1995b, 248.
19. Canetti 1986, 279-280.
20. Levi 1994, 64.
21. Diimling and Girth 1988, 78.
22. Diimling and Girth 1988, pi. 83.
24. Levi 1994, 86.
25. Levi 1994, 94.
27. A re-creation of the exhibition occurred in 1988 and is captured in Albrecht
Diimling and Peter Girth's catalog, Entartete Musik. See Diimling and Girth 1988.
28. Polish-born Steuermann (1892-1964) studied piano with Busoni and com-
position with Schoenberg. He premiered almost all of Schoenberg's piano music
and many works of Berg and Webern. He also played for many of Karl Kraus's
readings. Smith 1986, 286.
29. Programs are included in Hilmar 1990. Pianist Paul Wittgensteinson of a
wealthy steel industrialist and brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgensteinlost
his right arm during World War I. He continued his career after the war, commis-
sioning works for one hand from Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten, and others.
30. Biba 1992, 99.
31. Hilmar 1990, 112.
32. Biba 1992, 97.
33. From the New York Times, 5 November 1933.
34. Hilmar 1990, 113-114.
35. Herzog, Friedrich W. 1934. "Oper." Die Musik, 26, no. 6 (March): 4 4 5 -
446.
Chapter 7
1. Zweig 1943. Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942.
2. T. Mann 1982, 167.
4. Mann and Mann 1939, frontispiece.
5. Bullock 1964, 434.
6. Beaumont 1995b, 248.
7. Bullock 1964, 442.
8. R. Palmer 1959, 824.
9. GMf Ab 12. U.S. authorities did not give Melanie Guttmann permission to
sponsor the Zemlinskys. The American Consulate granted them a visa to the United
States on the basis of a quota permit. Beaumont 2000, 455-456.
10. GMf Ab 20.
11. GMf Ab2a.
12. Wiesenthal 1999.
242 Notes
13. Wiesenthal 1999.

14. "Kristallnacht." 1988. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7: 7-8.
15. Pisk, Paul. 1933. New York Times, 5 November.
16. Bodanzky had prepared a reduction of Zemlinsky's Traumgorge for the Vi-
enna Court Opera, had been Zemlinsky's assistant at the Carl Theater, and had
conducted the Mannheim premiere of Es war einmal in 1912.
17. From the New York Times, 8 January 1939. Clayton makes the important
point that in this interview Zemlinsky "described his unfinished opera Konig Kan-
daules as 'ultra-modern,' a significant comment for a composer who rejected ato-
nality and serialism, but did not conceive of himself as a reactionary." Clayton
1983b, 475.
18. Tanner 1997, 84.
19. Beaumont 1995b, 253. Zemlinsky's attitudes toward popular music seem to
have been mixed. Between 1901 and 1902, he wrote several songs and a mime
drama, "Ein Lichtstrahl," in response to the cabaret movement.
20. GMf Ab 13.
21. Beaumont 1995b, 254.
22. A. Mahler 1975, 127.
23. Beaumont 1995b, 254.
24. Weber 1995, 291.
25. Kimmey 1979, 104.
26. GMf Aa 17.
27. Beaumont 1995b, 254-255.
28. Biba 1992, 112. Works by Alfredo Casella, Brahms, Chausson, and Saint-
Saens were also on the program.
29. Weber 1995, 279.
30. Newlin 1980, 294.
31. GMf Ac 15a.
32. GMf Ac 15.
33. Weber 1995, 280.
34. Kimmey 1979, 104.
35. GMf Ac 22b.
36. GMf Ac 15a.
37. GMf Ac 15.
38. GMf Ab 10.
39. Zemlinsky is reported to have destroyed many of his letters before he fled
Vienna in 1938. Beaumont 1995b, 248.
40. Louise Zemlinsky retained all copyrights. GMf Da 36.
41. The Webern scholar Hans Moldenhauer requested that Louise Zemlinsky
contribute something from Zemlinsky's papers to the Moldenhauer collection, and
Mrs. Zemlinsky sent him six boxes of materials. Moldenhauer reported to her that
one box did not arrive, and after speaking slightingly of the materials he had re-
ceived, he offered her $150. A memo in the Louise Zemlinsky Nachlass in the
Archive of the Vienna Musikverein notes that Moldenhauer sold his archive to
Harvard University for $1 million.
42. UPL.
43. GMf Da 63.
Notes 243
Chapter 8
1. Gal 1966, 441.
2. Die Musik, 28, no. 1 (October 1930): 74.
4. Schoenberg 1921, 228-229.
5. Schoenberg 1966.
7. Rauchhaupt 1972, 40.
8. UPL.
9. Wellesz n.d., 40.
10. Zemlinsky 1934, 33-35.
11. Ernst Hilmar indicates that Zemlinsky completed some of the piano/vocal
score of Sarema and corrected portions of Schoenberg's reduction. Hilmar 1976,
58. Clayton does not think that Schoenberg orchestrated Sarema as an assignment
for Zemlinsky since Zemlinsky usually asked his students to orchestrate songs and
sections of piano sonatas. Clayton 1982, 41.
12. Clayton 1983a, 92.
13. Webern 1963, 48. Webern's letters to Zemlinsky between 1912 and 1924
(see Weber 1995, 281-300) were filled with high praise for Zemlinsky's work. The
Moldenhauer Collection has a copy of Webern's Five Songs, op. 3, published in
1919, with an autograph dedication to Zemlinsky. Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer
1979, 656.
15. MacDonald 1976, 27.
16. Robert Morgan, in a panel discussion at the conference "Schoenberg and
His World" at Bard College, 14 August 1999, has noted that Schoenberg's break
with tonality coincided with the period in which he began to paint.
17. Breicha 1993, 22.
18. Breicha 1993, 23. Beaumont notes that the police report does not mention
that Gerstl stabbed himself. Beaumont 2000, 166. Gerstl's self-portraits from this
period reflect his personal hell.
20. Jarman 1997, 170. See Beaumont 1995a, 27 for a discussion of the cryp-
tographic and numerological secrets in the music of Alexander Zemlinsky.
21. Krones 1995a, 187.
22. GMf Ac 22a.
23. GMf Da 31. Letter to Louis Krasner, New England Conservatory of Music,
12 February 1983.
24. Breicha 1993, 24.
27. Schoenberg 1952, 523. Brahms's triadic melodies were also both vertically
and horizontally conceived.
28. Reich 1971, 49.
29. Reich 1971, 49.
30. UPL.
244 Notes

34. Reich 1971, 30.
35. UPL.
36. Stuckenschmidt 1974a, 40.
37. Weber 1995, 130.
38. Weber 1995, 198.
39. Weber 1995, 134.
40. Weber 1995, 136.
41. Weber 1995, 143.
42. Feise and Steinhauer 1959, 129. Since the German government considered
music a necessity for morale during the war, it refused to draft high-profile con-
ductors such as Bruno Walter, declaring them "indispensable." Walter 1946, 221.
43. Weber 1995, 113.
45. UPL.
46. Weber 1995, 118-119.
47. Weber 1995, 156.
48. Weber 1995, 189.
49. Der Auftakt, 5-6 (1922): 121-122.
50. Schoenberg had hand-bound scores of Zemlinsky's op. 2, op. 5, op. 7, op.
8, Florentinische Tragodie, Kleider machen Leute, Sarema, and Der Zwerg.
53. Smith 1986, 136.
54. Fleischmann 1921, 222.
55. Ratz 1974, 68.
56. See Szmolyan 1974, 71-83.
57. Smith 1986, 111.
58. Reich 1971, 122. See Szmolyan 1974 for a list of the works performed.
59. Glennan, McBnde, and Shoaf 1986, 690-691.
60. Reich 1965, 49.
61. Weber 1995, 209.
62. Vojtech 1974, 84.
63. Ringer 1973, 4.
64. Weber 1995, 237.
65. Weber 1995, 238-241.
66. Smith 1986, 90.
67. Milhaud 1944, 379-384; Mahler-Werfel 1963, 151.
69. G. Palmer 1980, 305.
70. Smith 1986, 97.
71. Vojtech 1974, 84. Beaumont states that Erich Steinhard, on the Czech com-
mittee of the ISCM, became a member of the Prague Verein committee in 1923 and
had the Verein subsidy transferred to the ISCM. "That was the death knell." Beau-
mont 2000, 291.
72. Hailey 1997, 19.
Notes 245
73. Levi 1994, 3. "The tension between internationalism and nationalism, be-
tween globalism and parochialist ethnocentrism, between universalism and class
privileges, were never far from the surface." Harvey 1989, 24-25.
74. UPL.
75. Weber 1995, 256.
76. Weber 1995, 265.
77. In a letter to Berg, Webern indicated that Zemlinsky declined an invitation
to contribute to this Festschrift. Hilmar 1976, 79 n. 98.
78. Grun 1971, 333.
79. Weber 1995, 174.
80. Weber 1995, 268.
81. Meibach 1984, 105.
83. Weber 1995, 104.
85. Smith 1980, 274.
86. Grun 1971, 235.
87. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 256-257.
88. Grun 1974, 290, 293.
89. Weber 1995, 139.
90. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 452. After Berg's death in 1935, Schoen-
berg at first expressed interest in completing the orchestration of Lulu but later
withdrew because he felt Lulu had anti-Semitic features. Erwin Stein, acting on
behalf of Universal Edition, then approached Webern, and finally Zemlinsky, who
studied the score and declined. Beaumont 2000, 424.
91. Pult und Taktstock, 4, no. 2 (1927): 44-45.
92. Smith 1980, 275.
95. Beaumont 2000, 407. Beaumont notes that Mrs. Zemlinsky did not destroy
all of Schoenberg's letters since so many still exist. Many of their letters have been
published by Horst Weber.
97. See Auner 1999, 1-36.
98. La Grange 1995, 687 n.133.
99. Konta 1921, 218.
101. Grun 1971, 329-330.
102. Grun 1971, 334.
103. Stephan 1978, 38. "In his dedication letter [for op. 15] to Schoenberg . . .
[Zemlinsky] wrote, 'I still belong to you, even if I am not like you.' " Weber 1977,
131.
104. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 281. By 1928, Franz Schreker's operas
had received about 1,000 performances in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Cze-
choslovakia, Sweden, and Russia. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 368 n.2.
105. Adorno 1978, 359, 360.
106. Weber 1995, 288-290.
107. Smith 1980, 283.
246 Notes
108. Smith 1980, 282.

109. Adorno 1991, 29.
110. Hailey 1993, 312-313.
111. Hailey 1993, 32. See his discussion of Schreker's "Fitful renaissance" for
a provocative discussion about the awakening interest in Schreker and others of his
generation. Hailey 1993, 304-325.
112. GMf Da 63. The spelling in this quotation has been corrected.
Chapter 9
1. Kraus 1986, 184.
2. Weininger 1975, 72.
3. Mahler-Werfel n.d., Herta Introduction.
6. Schroeder 1993, 281.
7. Timms 1986, 72.
11. Schopenhauer 1970, 83.
13. Mahler-Werfel 1997, 312-313.
14. Kraus 1986, 13.
15. Kraus 1986, 20.
16. Kraus 1986, 21.
17. Kraus 1986, 31.
18. Weininger 1975, 88-89.
19. Weininger 1975, 64-70.
20. Weininger 1975, 70.
21. Weininger 1975, 124.
22. Huysmans 1959, 93.
23. Huysmans 1959, 66-68.
24. Gilman 1990, 16.
25. Schmidgall 1977, 250. When Rainer Simons, director of the Volksoper and
Zemlinsky's boss, heard rumors in October 1905 that the censor of the Vienna
Court Opera would not allow Salome to be performed there, he immediately wrote
to Strauss for permission to perform the opera at the Volksoper (G. Mahler 1980,
84). Mahler tried unsuccessfully to convince the censor that the Volksoper would
upstage them if the Vienna premiere was taken away from the Court Opera. The
Vienna premiere of Salome was given by a touring company, the Breslau United
Theatres, in 1907 (G. Mahler 1984, 93), and the first production by a Viennese
company was given by Zemlinsky at the Volksoper in 1910.
26. Zemlinsky would later write operas on Oscar Wilde's The Florentine Trag-
edy and The Dwarf (Wilde's Birthday of the Infanta).
27. Fliedl 1997, 140.
28. Timms 1986, 69.
Notes 247
29. Lucie-Smith 1972, 186.

30. Pawel 1984, 91.
31. Pawel 1984, 82.
35. Freud 1988, 853.
36. Freud 1988, 860.
37. Freud 1988, 862.
38. Freud 1988, 859-863.
39. Freud 1988, 864.
40. He painted Alma Mahler and many of his other contemporaries in the arts:
Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, and Adolf Loos, to name a few.
41. This frail baby lived only a few months.
42. Mahler-Werfel 1963, 16. Alma's sister, Grete Schindler, was the product
of their mother's affair with painter Julius Berger. Grete was forced by her mother
to marry painter Wilhelm Legler, then later institutionalized after she attempted
suicide following her divorce. She was probably exterminated by the Nazis during
World War II. La Grange 1995, 423 n.26.
48. Mahler Werfel 1997, 475.
55. UPL.
58. Kennedy 1999, 141.
59. UPL.
64. UPL. A year earlier, on 29 June 1900, Alma Schindler had stopped by the
Zemlinsky house to deliver her compositions. The door was opened by Melanie
Guttmann, who told Schindler that Zemlinsky's father had just died that morning.
Guttmann was obviously considered a part of the family, yet Alma Schindler no-
ticed a picture of herself that she had given Zemlinsky on his desk. Strange behavior
for Zemlinsky if he were engaged to Guttmann.
65. UPL. Zemlinsky implied that caution was necessary for Schindler's repu-
tation. Schindler's many personal (often inaccurate) statements about Zemlinsky in
248 Notes
her published writings and in her recently published diaries compel scholars to try
to portray a more credible picture of the elusive Zemlinsky.
67. Mahler-Werfel 1963, 13-14.
70. UPL.
71. UPL.
72. UPL.
73. UPL.
75. UPL.
76. UPL.
77. UPL.
78. A. Mahler 1971, 254.
79. GMf Ab 5.
80. Beaumont 2000, 27.
81. GMf 22a.
92. Weber 1995, 4.
93. G. Mahler 1997, 109.
94. G. Mahler 1997, 108.
96. Grun 1971, 123.
97. Kokoschka 1974, 73.
100. UPL.
103. UPL.
105. G. Mahler 1924, 343.
107. Reich 1971, 145.
108. Weber 1995, 203.
109. Biba 1992, 57.
110. G. Mahler 1997, 440-441.
Notes 249

113. G. Mahler 1997, 464.
114. G. Mahler 1997, 465.
115. See Mahler-Werfel n.d., Introduction.
118. Gorrell 1993, 285.
120. In 1935, Berg dedicated his violin concerto to Alma Mahler-Werfel's
eighteen-year-old daughter, Manon Gropius, who died of polio.
121. Reich 1971, 86. The other judges, Ferruccio Busoni and Bruno Walter, had
determined Schoenberg should receive the award. Alma Mahler related Strauss's
comment to Schoenberg, and in 1914, when requested to write a peon in honor of
Strauss's fiftieth birthday, Schoenberg refused. Schoenberg 1965, 50.
123. UPL 141. Alma Mahler dates this letter as 1912, but Zemlinsky wrote to
Schoenberg about his plans to leave Prague in 1914. Weber 1995, 118.
124. Grun 1971, 198-199.
125. Weber 1995, 138; Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 240-241.
126. UPL 151. Alma Mahler dates this letter 1915, but the performance took
place two years later.
127. Weber 1995, 170.
128. Weber 1995, 199.
Chapter 10
1. Stein 1971, 156.
2. Schopenhauer 1958, 2: 448.
3. The period between 1890 and 1930 was a rich epoch in all of German
literature. Great writers of this period including Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler,
Franz Kafka, and Gerhart Hauptmann helped to shape the cultural climate in which
song flourished.
5. Weber 1995, 170.
6. UPL.
7. Weber 1995, 22, 24, 42, 65, 198, 82. Schoenberg scholar H.H. Stucken-
schmidt (1977) provides an impressive list of authors in Schoenberg's library, but
Schoenberg casts an interesting light on his library in a note to Berg (1916):
"[Ultimately my library consists mainly of books that others have enjoyed . . . that
I never, or only in the last instance, would have considered acquiring myself. In-
variably the ones I want are missing; my library never reflects my personality . . .
it takes on a kind of hybrid personality smacking of an all-round education."
Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987, 265. Berg's gifts to Schoenberg reveal something
of Berg's literary interests: Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Wagner's autobiography, Franz
Kafka, Strindberg, and Edgar Allan Poe. Berg read Poe, and his own library con-
tained the major classics, reference books, Ibsen, Strindberg, Balzac, Maeterlinck,
Kraus's Die Fackel, and more. Hailey 1997, 12. Webern and Zemlinsky seem to
250 Notes
have shared some of the same literary interests as shown in their song settings of
Goethe, Detlev von Liliencron, Dehmel, Stefan George, and poems from Des Kna-
ben Wunderhorn.
10. Schopenhauer 1958, 2: 448-449.
11. Brand, Hailey, and Harris 1987 65.
12. Schoenberg 1965, 23. See Chadwick 1971, 123-140 for a discussion of
Berg's unpublished songs.
13. Puffett 1997, 116. Strauss, in a letter to Romain Rolland, mentions that
Mahler "completely condemns the very principle of programme music. . . . In my
opinion, too, a poetic programme is nothing but a pretext for the purely musical
expression and development of my emotions, and not a simple musical description
of concrete everyday fact. For that would be quite contrary to the spirit of music."
Myers, Rollo, ed. 1968. Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland: Correspondence.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 29.
14. Schoenberg 1975, 217-218.
15. Jarman 1997, 176.
16. Bauer-Lechner 1980, 32.
18. Schoenberg 1975, 142. Accused of being antireligious after he wrote Pierrot
lunaire, Schoenberg responded sarcastically, "I am not responsible for what people
make up their minds to read into the words. If they were musical, not a single one
of them would give a damn for the words. Instead, they would go away whistling
the tunes." Schoenberg 1965, 82.
20. Medtner 1951, 124-125.
21. LC 2/6, LC 12/6. Zemlinsky had originally planned to publish the five bal-
lades as his op. 2 and dedicate them to his teacher, J.N. Fuchs.
22. Jarman 1997, 168. In the "Adagio appassionato," the fourth movement of
the Lyric Suite, Berg quotes "Du bist mein Eigen, mein Eigen" from the third move-
ment of Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony.
24. Auden, W.H., and Chester Kallman. 1955. An Elizabethan Song Book. Gar-
den City, NY: Doubleday, xvi-xvii.
28. Stroh 1968, 35, 44.
29. Quoted in Stroh 1968, 44.
30. Morgan 1991, 76.
31. Reich 1971, 51.
32. Lang 1941, 780-781.
33. Gorrell 1993, 15.
34. Gorrell 1993, 284.
35. Quoted by Marcia Citron in her 1980 "Corona Schroter: Singer, Composer,
Actress." Music and Letters, 61: 24. Edward Kravitt cites a contest sponsored by
Notes 251
the Berlin weekly Die Woche in 1903, which offered thirty prizes for newly com-
posed folklike songs. It received 8,859 entries! Kravitt 1996, 109-110.
36. Cook 1988, 202. Oddly enough, Krenek felt this resource did not exist for
German composers.
37. Thirty-one writers are represented by only one poem in Zemlinsky's work
poets such as Otto Franz Gensichen and Carl Pflegerwho are no longer remem-
bered; perhaps an idea or image in their work captured Zemlinsky's interest. Some
of Zemlinsky's early songs were probably composition exercises, and the poet may
have been assigned by Zemlinsky's teacher.
38. Copies of "Der Tag wird kiihl," another unpublished Heyse setting, dedi-
cated to Melanie Guttmann, are located in both the Moldenhauer Archive at Har-
vard and the Moldenhauer Archive of the Library of Congress.
39. Frisch 1993, 142, quoting from the 1987 Ph.D. Oxford dissertation of Simon
Trezise.
40. LC 7/3, dated 22 October 1898. Fragments of two songs on Dehmel poetry,
"Ein Grab" (LC 9/6) and "Waldseligkeit" (LC 9/12), also probably originated dur-
ing this period.
41. In a 1912 letter to poet Richard Dehmel, Schoenberg credited Dehmel with
influencing his early compositions. Schoenberg 1965, 35.
42. Beaumont 1995b, 26.
43. Feise and Steinhauer 1959, 129.
44. See Sichardt 1990, 365-388 for a discussion of the poems and settings by
these composers.
45. Dahlhaus 1975, 106. "That a single play \Pelleas et Melisande] elicits such
different musical responses shows that Maeterlinck's theatre of suggestion, evanes-
cence, hidden motives, and ambiguous discourse, of multiple silences and fractured
speech, has ensured that its openness to interpretationmusical, critical, or direc-
torialremains its most salient characteristic." McGuinness 2000, 127.
46. Mahler-Werfel 1997, 812 n.21.
47. Grun 1971, 63.
48. Weber 1995, 127. In 1918, Maeterlinck wrote Le Bourgmestre de Stilmonde
(The Burgomaster of Stilmonde), a play about Flanders governed during the war
by an unscrupulous German officer.
49. Grun 1971, 168-169.
50. Quinze Chansons (1900) was an expanded edition of Maeterlinck's Douze
Chansons (Twelve Songs, 1896). His first collection, Serres Chaudes (Hothouses),
thirty-three poems published in 1889, was the inspiration for Ernest Chausson's
Serres Chaudes, Arnold Schoenberg's op. 20, Herzgewachse for sop rano, celesta,
harmonium, and harp (1911), and Lili Boulanger's (1893-1918) exquisite "Reflets"
and "Attente" (1911).
51. Balakian 1967, 9-11.
52. Balakian 1967, 49.
53. Bithell 1913, 89.
54. Lucie-Smith 1972, 54.
55. Rees 1990, 134.
56. Quoted by Frisch 1993, 93.
57. Balakian 1967, 124.
58. Kravitt 1960, 33.
252 Notes

60. Schoenberg 1975, 106. See Scholes, Percy A. 1955. The Oxford Companion
to Music, 9th ed. London: Oxford University Press, 200-208, 706.
61. Balakian 1967, 101.
62. Balakian 1967, 167.
63. Bennett 1954, 21.
64. Bennett 1954, 23.
65. Lloyd 1988, 174.
66. Schoenberg used George's poems in the last movement of his string quartet
no. 2, op. 10 (1907-1908); in his op. 14, no. 1, "Ich darf nicht dankend"; and in
the fifteen settings of George poems in op. 15, Das Buch der hangenden Garten,
taken from the middle section of George's thirty-one poems of that name. A George
translation of Seraphita by English symbolist poet Ernest Dowson is the first of
four songs in Four Orchestral Songs of op. 22. George's poetry was also of tre-
mendous importance for Webern, who set five poems in op. 3, five poems in op.
4, many in unpublished songs, and in his choral work Entflieht auf leichten Kahnen,
op. 2. Webern's biographers, Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, credit George's
poetry with leading Webern "over the threshold of conventional tonality to explore
the expressive dimensions of a novel idiom. The new musical language required a
form of its own, and a technique of new units of sound developed as a result."
Moldenhauer and Moldenhauer 1979, 122.
67. Adorno said of Der Wein: "In Berg, for the first time, there was a musical
interpenetration of Austro-German and French elements of the sort that became
common in music after 1945." Adorno 1991, 12.
68. Meyer states that Zemlinsky's source was either Franzosische Lyrik seit der
Grossen Revolution bis auf die Gegenwart (1904) or Gedichte und Skizzen von
Charles Baudelaire (1909). Meyer 1990, 25.
69. Bangerter 1977, 9.
70. Bangerter 1977, 3. Rimbaud created a similar sensation in the French literary
world.
71. Balakian 1967, 142. Ironically, both men are now primarily remembered
internationally for the operas in which their plays were immortalized.
72. Bangerter 1977, 96.
73. When Alma Schindler sent Zemlinsky the beginning of a dramatic work on
words by Hofmannsthal, Zemlinsky offered blunt criticism of her musical setting
and suggested that first she learn how to harmonize correctly and to manipulate
form. He told her that he could not predict whether she had enough talent to
succeed. To his knowledge, he said, he knew of no woman who had. "Lieder, that
is commonly the field of women!" UPL.
74. Beethoven and Schubert, both of whom studied with the Italian composer
Salieri at a time when Italian influence was quite strong throughout Europe, had
set Italian poetry in their songs. Also, Schubert and Schumann had set translations
of poetry by Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Hans Christian Andersen. Neverthe-
less, the nineteenth-century lied was primarily inspired by German lyric poetry,
despite the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Austrian Empire and of some of the
German principalities before Germany unification.
75. In Palestrina, Pfitzner was inspired by more complex motives than simple
Notes 253
nationalism, but his devotion to German culture was clearly embodied in the can-
tata "Von deutscher Seele" in 1922.
76. Stravinsky and Craft 1966, 167. Milhaud commented on the effect of lan-
guage in the performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. "The French language,
being the softer, made all the delicate passages appear the more subtle; but in the
German interpretation the dramatic passages seemed more powerful, while the del-
icate ones assumed more weight." Milhaud 1944, 383. The "music" of language,
therefore, is incorporated into the cultural nuance of a vocal work.
With the rise of Nazism, anti-German sentiment in Prague was exacerbated to
the point that the Czech Philharmonic performed Zemlinsky's op. 13 songs in a
French rather than a German setting. Beaumont 2000, 358.
77. Afrika Singt: Eine Auslese neuer Afro-Amerikanischer Lyrik, translated into
German and edited by Anna Nussbaum (Vienna and Leipzig, 1929). For additional
information, see Cole 1977. Cole notes that the difficult rhythmic character of
Zemlinsky's orchestral part is not reflected in the vocal line, which is "straightfor-
ward and frequently includes jazz syncopation." Cole 1977, 90. Beaumont states
that Marie Pappenheim mentioned this collection to Zemlinsky. Beaumont 2000,
360.
78. Cook 1988, 65.
79. Cook 1988, 66, 16.
80. Tancsik 2000, 611.
81. Potter 1998, 27.
82. Sachs 1970, 90.
83. LC 26/3.
84. Bethge did not actually know Chinese but constructed his poems from Hans
Heilmann's translations of French and English sources, including those of Hervey-
Saint-Denys and Judith Gautier. Mitchell 1985, 436.
85. Hoffmann 1924, 199-200.
86. Beaumont has identified fragments of two Zemlinsky songs for voice and
piano as being Chinese poetry on Bethge translations, found in a Library of Con-
gress manuscript of Zemlinsky's Quartet in D major for clarinet, violin, viola, and
cello. LC 25/3-4. Beaumont 2000, 484, 484, n.72.
Chapter 11
1. Werfel 1921, 199.
2. Adorno 1978, 358.
3. Grun 1971, 24-25.
4. Strauss 1953, 134.
5. Scholar Hartmut Krones, in "Tonale und harmonische Semantik im Lied-
schaffen Alexander Zemlinskys," shows how often Zemlinsky links key to partic-
ular moods and traces this process to earlier composers such as Brahms. Krones
1995b, 163-187.
6. Adorno 1978, 361.
7. GMf Ac 22a.
8. Adorno 1978, 364.
9. This idea originated with Alfred Clayton, who emphasizes the crucial role
254 Notes
of song in Zemlinsky's operas, pointing to "Madel kommst du mit zum Tanz?" as

defining Grete's character in Der Traumgorge; he concludes that the very compre-
hensibility of Kleider machen Leute hinges on the song "Lehn' deine Wang an meine
Wang," as does that of Der Zwerg depend on "Madchen, nimm die bliitende Or-
ange." Clayton 1982, 377-378.
10. Der Auftakt, 14-15 (1921): 217-219.
11. Hoffmann 1924, 198. Tibor Kneif takes issue with this statement, arguing
that the voice parts, particularly in op. 13, "are not put together on melodic prin-
ciples but on harmonic principles. They are constituent parts of the chord." Kneif
1976, 138. Hoffmann was, however, simply emphasizing Zemlinsky's melodic gift
and his careful portrayal of the text. The tight integration of melody and harmony
in Zemlinsky's music and in music of Schoenberg's circle, however, is an important
characteristic, with linear and harmonic features often merging.
12. Werfel 1921, 199.
13. A manuscript for "Des Madchens Klage" is located in the Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde in Vienna (Beaumont 1995b, 22); a manuscript for "Der Tag wird
kiihl" is in the Moldenhauer Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and
a copy by Schoenberg in the Moldenhauer Archive of the Library of Congress
(Beaumont 1995b, 24); the four songs of 1916 are found in the Paul Sacher Stif-
tung, Basel, with copies of the Hofmannsthal songs in the LC Collection. Beaumont
also states that handwritten copies of songs 1, 3, and 4, probably used for the
Society for Private Musical Performances programs, are in private hands. Beaumont
2000, 482, n. 58.
14. Two songs have already been mentioned: no. 25, "Uber eine Wiege" (Over
a Cradle) or "Schmetterlinge," published in 1910 in a music supplement to Der
Merker (a periodical founded in 1909 by Zemlinsky's former student, Richard
Specht); and no. 27, "Schlummerlied" (Lullaby) was published in Bohemia in
1912manuscript located in the Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Vienna. The
manuscript for a third song, no. 26, "Madel, kommst du mit zum Tanz" (Maiden,
Will You Come to Dance), from Zemlinsky's opera Der Traumgorge, is located in
Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Beaumont 1995b, 25.
15. After Hugo Wolf played some of his songs for Franz Liszt in 1883, Liszt
kissed Wolf on the forehead and suggested he write larger works. Walker 1951,
140.
16. Kravitt 1996, 20.
17. Weber 1977, 68.
18. Strauss may have been reluctant to write songs because of a contract dispute
with the publishers Bote & Bock, who had an option on his next group of songs.
Kennedy 1999, 200.
19. Boynton 1997, 189. Hans Redlich points to the influence of "Schliesse mir
die Augen beide" on Berg's Lyric Suite, which Berg began during this period. Both
works share the same "Basic Set." Redlich, Hans F. 1953. Afterword to Alban
Berg's Zwei Lieder. Vienna: Universal Edition.
20. Der Auftakt, 10 (1922): 268.
21. GMf Ael. Louise Zemlinsky studied voice with her husband for more than
two years before they were married. GMf Af2.
22. Zemlinsky appeared with Ferry Lubelsky. Neue Musikalische Presse, no. 6
(1899): 6. The names of singers in recital were featured in advertisements, but
Notes 255
accompanists were frequently not mentioned. When Zemlinsky accompanied his

own songs in recital, then it was more likely that his name would be mentioned.
23. Quoted in Tancsik 2000, 515.
24. As a conductor, Zemlinsky was often an orchestral accompanist. See Der
Auftakt, 5-6 (1922): 121-122 for his ideas about accommodating himself to the
singer in an orchestral performance.
25. Alfred Clayton identifies Zemlinsky's use of this tool through (1) thematic
quotation, (2) thematic metamorphosis, and (3) motivic resemblance. Clayton
1983a, 90.
26. Beaumont 2000, 107.
27. LC 9/7.
28. LC 9/8.
29. LC 9/17.
30. Reich 1971, 28.
Chapter 12
1. Hailey 1993, 59. Schoenberg brings a negative perspective to the discussion
of composing in the style of a master composer: "(T]o believe, when someone
imitates the symptoms, the style, that this is an artistic achievementthat is a mis-
take with dire consequences!" Schoenberg 1975, 178.
2. LC 1/3.
3. "Die Lotosblume" was also set by Robert Schumann and Robert Franz.
4. Brody and Fowkes 1971, 170.
5. Beaumont 1995b, 21.
6. Eichendorff's poem was also set by Adolf Jensen and Hans Sommer.
7. In his manuscript copy, Zemlinsky omitted some of the quotation marks
around the dialogue of the young man and drew ledger lines at the bottom of the
page to squeeze in the last four measures of postlude. Beaumont reconstructed the
bass line for the final portion of these measures, which was torn and missing.
8. LC 1/6. "Das Rosenband" continues on the same manuscript paper with
"Abendstern," which in turn continues onto the next page with "Lerchengesang."
9. Beaumont calls this the "Joy" motif and notes its frequent appearance in
Zemlinsky's music. Beaumont 2000, 105, 148.
10. This description of "Lehn' deine Wang' an meine Wang' " refers to its func-
tion in the 1922 revised version of Kleider machen Leute. "Lehn' deine Wang' an
meine Wang,' " set by Robert Schumann in 1840, was intended to be no. 6 in his
op. 47, Twenty Lieder, by H. Heine. Ultimately, four songs including "Lehn' deine
Wang' an meine Wang' " were withdrawn, and the remaining sixteen songs became
the Dichterliebe, op. 48.
11. This is dated 18/11 followed by a scrawled number that could be 90 or 92.
"Wandl' ich im Wald des Abends" was also set by Robert Franz.
12. Fruhlingsbegrabnis was revised five years later.
13. Beaumont 1995b, 23. "Im Lenz" is published in Lieder aus dem Nachlass.
The first song in this Library of Congress grouping, "Madchenlied," is quite long
and complex, while a fourth song, "Trutzliedchen," although written in ink, is
clearly incomplete. "Madchenlied" was Heyse's title for an entire group of poems.
256 Notes
14. Hugo Wolf set forty-six Heyse translations in the Italian Song Book and
twenty-seven Heyse translations in the Spanish Song Book (Heyse/Geibel). Brahms
set only one of Heyse's poems, "Madchenlied," and a Heyse Italian translation
(also called "Madchenlied," op. 95, no. 6) in his solo songs but used a number of
poems from Heyse's Jungbrunnen in his unaccompanied choral works.
Chapter 13
2. Der Auftakt, 14-15 (1921): 217.
3. Dates listed on the holograph scores in the Library of Congress: "Empfang-
nis," 2/7/96; "Im Lenz," 2/7/96; "Gefliister der Nacht," 3/12/94; "Vor der Stadt,"
27/3/95.
4. Biba 1992, 30.
5. La Grange 1973, plate 50.
6. The works of Afanasy Fet (1820-1892) were translated into German by
Friedrich von Bodenstedt.
7. Since op. 2 and op. 5 were published for both high and low voice, the
following discussions will point out key relationships rather than specific keys.
8. Robert Franz's "Mailied," op. 33, no. 3, uses the unusual meter 6/16. "Mai-
lied" was also set by Hugo Wolf for unaccompanied male chorus, op. 13, no. 3,
and by Schoenberg in an early, unpublished song.
9. Zemlinsky used this same poem for a four-part choral arrangement.
10. "Der Traum" was also set by Leo Blech. Clayton notes that Zemlinsky asked
his publisher Hansen to print "Der Traum" as an individual song rather than part
of op. 2. Clayton 1982, 36.
11. See Kravitt 1996, 132-141 for a discussion of the Kinderlied.
12. LC 616. Zemlinsky's undated, incomplete "Maiblumen bliihten iiberall"
(May Flowers Bloom EverywhereLC 26/11), a setting of Dehmel's "Die Magd"
for string sextet, is an even more tragic version of the unwed mother story. A
desperate young girl kills her baby after her sweetheart dies, and she has been
reviled and driven from her home.
13. See Beaumont 1995a.
14. The so-called Fate chord.
15. LC 7/4.
16. M. 3 in stanza 1 begins with an unreadable note that could be either E-flat
or F. Although this note is clearly E-flat in stanza 2, it may not be E-flat in m. 3
since the smear on the manuscript begins slightly above an E-flat.
17. Kravitt 1996, 298. Both Brahms and Mahler considered the distinction in
these terms important enough to call some of their groups of songs Lieder und
Gesdnge.
18. Stefan 1921, 215. Zemlinsky's fascination for the key of D minor is illus-
trated not only in his music but in his choice of music. A Philharmonic concert of
9 June 1917 consisted of J.S. Bach's Triple Concerto for three claviers in D minor
and Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D minor.
19. Neue Musikalische Presse, no. 1 (1900): 4.
20. Wilpert 1971, 2: 517.
Notes 257
21. See Schorske's discussion of Ravel's "La Valse." Schorske 1981, 3.

23. Frisch 1993, 161. With Rudolf Stefan Hoffmann's 1921 Der Auftakt article
as their starting point, Beaumont and Hartmut Krones each discuss the symbolism
in Zemlinsky's repeated use of particular motives and harmonic structures. Beau-
mont 1995a, 27-43; Krones 1995a 163-188. Zemlinsky's close relationship with
the superstitious Schoenberg and Berg, his cryptic statements to Alma Mahler, and
his membership in the Freemasons lend substance to their argument.
24. The songs of op. 6 represent an excellent group on a recital program but
may require some key adjustments either for very high or low voices.
Chapter 14
1. Adorno 1978, 357.
2. Mahler-Werfel 1997,470.
3. UPL.
4. Adorno 1978, 356.
5. Weber 1977, 76.
6. Zemlinsky began a song entitled "Erwartung" (eight and a half measures)
as well, but this was not the Dehmel text set by Schoenberg. LC 26/22.
7. For a discussion of "Meeraugen," see Weber 1977, 77. Weber notes the
sense of flux created by the harmonic instability of "Meeraugen" and Zemlinsky's
use of the circle of fifths in his tonal scheme. In a letter to Alma Schindler after he
had dedicated op. 7 to her, Zemlinsky referred to her "beloved, deep 'Meeraugen.' "
He also playfully referred to song no. 5, "Sonntag," saying she inspired his Sunday
mood. UPL.
9. Frederick Delius (1862-1934) also set Jacobsen's "Irmelin Rose" in Seven
Danish Songs (1897).
10. A holograph sketch of the last four measures of "Mit Trommeln und Pfeifen"
in the Library of Congress is dated 28.4.99. On the other side of the paper is a
holograph of Walzer Gesange's title page, dated 28 March 1898. LC 9/9. (Clayton
notes that Hansen paid 200 marks for op. 2, op. 5, op. 7, and op. 8 which, along
with prize money for Sarema and his Symphony in B-flat, allowed Zemlinsky some
financial security. Clayton 1982, 38.) Beaumont cites a letter to publisher Wilhelm
Hansen of 12 January 1898 that indicated op. 8 had already been delivered, but
Zemlinsky had decided to revise the third song. Beaumont 2000, 478 n.30.
11. Clayton 1983a, 84.
12. Konta 1921, 217.
13. Krones 1995a, 167.
14. UPL. Beaumont states that Schindler especially admired Zemlinsky's use of
seventh chords. Beaumont 2000, 117.
15. LC 26/31.
16. The order for op. 7 was listed as: "Entbietung," "Meeraugen," "Da waren
zwei Kinder," "Irmelin Rose," and "Sonntag." When op. 7 was published, "Da
waren zwei Kinder" became the first song. The proposed order for op. 8 reversed
the last two songs, "Mit Trommeln und Pfeifen" and "Tod in Ahren."
258 Notes
17. Beaumont 2000, 478.

18. Beaumont 2000, 479.
19. Beaumont 2000, 117.
20. LC 9/15. Both songs have been published in Beaumont 1995b.
21. Cited by Krones 1995a, 165.
22. LC 9/17.
23. Hoffmann 1921, 214.
24. Hoffmann 1921, 215.
25. Carl Busse (1872-1918), poet for "Kirchweih," is primarily remembered for
song settings by Zemlinsky, by Richard Strauss with three Busse settings in his op.
3, and by Alban Berg, whose two Busse settings were not published during his life.
26. Weber 1995, 30-31. Clayton also cites Richard Volkmann's Vom unsicht-
baren Kbnigreich and Hermann Sudermann's Der Katzensteg as sources for Feld's
libretto. Clayton 1982, 152-153.
27. In a letter of 12 January 1903 to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky mentions that he
is writing a few songs for Fraulein Gabriele Kunwald, who will be giving a concert
in Berlin that month and asks Schoenberg, who was living in Berlin at the time, to
attend her concert. Horst Weber identifies one of those songs to be "Es war ein
alter Konig" (dedicated to Lily Hoffmann) and speculates that the other songs have
been lost. Weber 1995, 38.
28. Hugo Wolf set Heine's "Es war ein alter Konig" in October 1878.
29. Beaumont 1995b, 25. (Clayton notes the Uberbrettl character of "Madel,
kommst du mit zum Tanz" and suggests that it might have been created from earlier
material. Clayton 1982, 167.) Beaumont identifies the fragment of another song for
voice and piano, "Sieh, wie wunderlich der Abend lacht," found in sketches for
Der Traumgorge, LC 12/9. Beaumont 2000, 480.
30. Zemlinsky also used the title "Schmetterlinge" on his holograph score of the
song in 1904. LC 12/8.
31. Beaumont 2000, 480.
32. Stuckenschmidt 1977, 91. See Weber 1972a, 705-714 for a comparison of
Zemlinsky's and Schoenberg's settings of "Jane Grey."
33. Kravitt 1996, 109.
34. Weber 1972a, 707, 714. The reappearance of the first melodic phrase (mm.
6-8) in stanza 3 (mm. 29-33) is accompanied by an octave figuration in the piano
that will be used again in op. 13, no. 6.
35. Schoenberg repeats his musical material for the first two appearances of
"Jane Grey" and uses a very similar version for its final appearance.
36. The affair between Zemlinsky's sisterSchoenberg's wifeand Gerstl had
not yet surfaced, and so it seems unlikely this suggested Zemlinsky's choice of text.
37. LC 14/10. "Vorspiel" is undated; the drafts for "Stromuber," "Ansturm,"
and "Vorspiel," all with December dates, appear complete. Beaumont uses Aribert
Reimann's performance version for several problematic spots in "Letzte Bitte."
Zemlinsky did not indicate an order for the five songs (Beaumont 1995b, 27), but
they will be discussed here in the order published by Beaumont. The Library of
Congress manuscript for "Stromuber" is quite beautifully copied, perhaps implying
that Zemlinsky originally planned to publish some or all of the Dehmel songs,
which share a number of features with songs Zemlinsky wrote nearly thirty years
later. Several of these Dehmel poems were set by other composers: "Letzte Bitte"
Notes 259
by Conrad Ansorge, op. 17, no. 5 (1902); "Ansturm" by Alma Schindler and by
Conrad Ansorge, op. 17, no. 1 (1902); "Auf See" by Ansorge, op. 17, no. 3 (1902)
and by Karol Szymanowski, op. 13, no. 3 (1906).
38. Vocal range, however, is not a clear indication that these songs were not
intended as a unit. In Zemlinsky's Walzer-Gesdnge, op. 6, the range of "Ich geh'
des Nachts" is noticeably lower than the other five songs and its mood much
darker, yet we know that Zemlinsky and soprano Melanie Guttmann performed
op. 6 as a group at its premiere. The Dehmel lieder do not exhibit motivic continuity
from one song to the next, but most of the songs in Walzer-Gesdnge are in keys a
third apart from one another. The order for the Dehmel songs is not known, but
Beaumont has arranged them in a logical textual sequence.
Chapter 15
1. Adorno 1978, 359.
2. Weber 1995, 89.
3. Slonimsky 1994, 139-140.
4. Wellesz n.d., 35.
5. Smith 1986, 70.
6. Smith 1986, 70-71.
7. Timms 1986, 6.
8. Zemlinsky's reordering of the poems from Maeterlinck's Quinze Chansons
(Gedichte) are: no. 2 becomes Zemlinsky's no. 5, no. 4 becomes no. 2, no. 14
becomes no. 1, no. 10 becomes no. 4, no. 9 becomes no. 6 and no. 15 becomes
no. 3. The songs written in 1910 are: "Die drei Schwestern," "Die Madchen mit
den verbundenen Augen," "Lied der Jungfrau," and "Und kehrt er einst heim"
(dated 22 April 1910 in the Library of Congress holograph score). The Library of
Congress manuscript for "Als ihr Geliebter schied," dated 18 July 1913, and "Sie
kam zum Schloss" were written at Kitzbiihel during Zemlinsky's summer vacation
there. "Lied der Jungfrau" was first published in the Neue Musikzeitung, 11 June
1911; appeared again along with "Und kehrt er einst heim" in a collection entitled
Das moderne Lied, published by Universal Edition in 1914; and was published
again in Musikblatter des Anbruch, no. 2 in 1920. Clayton 1982, 404.
9. McGuinness 2000, 230.
10. Weber 1995, 90.
11. Weber 1995, 304.
12. Weber 1995, 131.
13. Weber 1995, 288. See also Chapter 8 in this book. The complete op. 13 was
again performed in June 1919, sung by Hedi Jracema-Brugelmann with Ernst Bach-
rich at the piano. Four of the six songs were performed for the Society in April
1921 and sung by Marie Gutheil-Schoder. Edward Steuermann accompanied the
1921 performance and a performance of the complete op. 13 for the Prague Society
for Private Musical Performance on 10 April 1923, sung by soprano Felice Hiini-
Mihaczek.
14. Webern's use of metrical change is accompanied by much greater rhythmic
intricacy. Adorno complimented Zemlinsky for the genuine feeling his music pro-
jects, which nevertheless results from highly sophisticated harmonic constructs.
260 Notes
Zemlinsky eschews sensationalism, and this subtle understatement may therefore

fail to appeal to a mass audience. Adorno 1978, 361.
15. Adorno 1978, 360.
16. Stanza 2, "Er leidet vielleicht," and stanza 5, "aus Furcht, dass er weint."
Unlike his French contemporary Debussy, Zemlinsky repeated text if it was nec-
essary to his musical ideas. Text repetition or omission was common among the
German lieder composers such as Schubert, Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, and even
Schumann.
17. Weber 1995, 91. Adorno considered the quartal harmonies of "Und kehrt
er erst heim" to have originated with Schoenberg's early music. Adorno 1978, 361.
18. UPL. Letter dated 2 August 1914, but content indicates summer of 1913.
19. Maeterlinck's final stanza:
The king wept on the threshold
Take care in the twilight
The king wept on the threshold.
One could hear the queen's footsteps die away,
One could hear the withered leaves fall.
20. Meyer 1990, 25.
21. See Browning's discussion of this sonnet. Browning 1962, 312.
22. Browning 1962, 314.
23. See Hirsbrunner's comparison of Debussy's setting of "Harmonie du soir"
and Zemlinsky's "Harmonie des Abends." Hirsbrunner 1995, 197. (Zemlinsky in-
cluded a number of Debussy's works on Philharmonic concerts after 1918.) Beau-
mont points out Zemlinsky's quotation from "Die Madchen mit den verbundenen
Augen" (mm. 19-20) in "Harmonie des Abends" (mm. 61-66). Beaumont 2000,
276.
Chapter 16
1. LC 14/11. "Der alte Garten" and "Erdeinsamkeit" were completed by Beau-
mont and published by Ricordi in 1999.
2. Beaumont dates the orchestration of the last two songs of op. 13 as ap-
proximately April 1921. Beaumont 2000, 482.
3. Schreker orchestrated his Fiinf Gesange (written in 1909) in 1922 and his
1923 piano/vocal version of Zwei lyrische Gesdnge on texts by Walt Whitman in
1927. Hailey 1993, 355.
5. Derrick Puffett observes that Schoenberg's decision to perform just two brief
songs (nos. 2 and 3, which take about two minutes twelve seconds to perform)
from Berg's cyclic work of ten minutes was "incomprehensible" and highly pro-
vocative. He also notes that the performance was inadequately rehearsed and may
have been poorly presented. Puffett 1996, 118-119.
6. In 1923, Universal Edition published Vol. 1: (1) "Die drei Schwestern"; (2)
"Die Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen"; (3) "Lied der Jungfrau"; and (4)
"Und kehrt er einst heim." Vol. 2 was published in 1924: (5) "Als ihr Geliebter
schied" and (6) "Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen." This order reversed songs 4 and
5 of the piano/vocal score (Oncley 1977, 299). The orchestral score is now pub-
Notes 261
lished with "Als ihr Geliebter schied" as no. 4 and "Und kehrt er einst heim" as
no. 5. The final orchestral arrangement was published in 1924.
7. Keys for the orchestral lieder: (1) D minor/D major, (2) G-sharp minor, (3)
E-flat minor (enharmonic D-sharp minor)/E-flat major, (4) D minor, (5) A minor,
(6) D major. Keys for the songs with piano: (1) C minor/C major, (2) F-sharp minor,
(3) E-flat minor/E-flat major, (4) D minor, (5) A minor, (6) D major. Zemlinsky
changes the first song of the piano version "Die drei Schwestern" from C minor/C
major to D minor/D major in his orchestral lieder, thereby enhancing the overall
harmonic cohesiveness of the six songs by having the group begin and end in D
minor/D major. There is also a tighter internal harmonic cohesiveness in the tonal
progressions of the six songs of the orchestral arrangement.
8. Lichtenfeld 1976, 101.
9. Mahler, Gustav. 1912. Das Lied von der Erde. Ed. Erwin Ratz. Vienna:
Universal Edition.
10. Lichtenfeld 1976, 108-109. In the last movement of the Lyric Symphony,
Zemlinsky has the woodwinds quote a variant of the main motive from the first
movement of Das Lied von der Erde as it appears in the violins (mm. 4-8).
11. Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), one of Janacek's most gifted stu-
dents, was murdered by the Nazis.
12. From the eighty-five poems of The Gardener, Zemlinsky chose nos. 4, 7, 30,
29, 48, 51, and 61.
13. Pult und Taktstock, 1 (1924): 10-11. For an exhaustive technical analysis
of the Lyric Symphony see Metz 1988, 81.
14. Christoph Becher has defined the conflict as being "an antagonism between
wanting and being . . . a romantic motif which hinders real love. . . . The same thing
happens in Zemlinsky's operas: the dream of life shatters on the experience of life."
The woman seeks a worldly love, while the man, "most likely an artist. . . needs
love for inspiration." Becher 1992, 20.
15. Weber 1995 299.
16. A. Mahler 1976, 18.
17. Weber 1995, 307-308.
18. Weber 1995, 320.
19. LC 20/4. See Loll, Werner. 1995. "Musikhistorische Beziehungsvielfalt als
kompositorisches Problem. Alexander Zemlinskys Streichquartettfragment von
1927." In Hartmut Krones, ed., Alexander Zemlinsky. Asthetik, Stil und Umfeld.
Vienna: Bohlau Verlag.
20. Beaumont 2000, 341.
21. Langston Hughes was severely criticized by other black intellectuals for some
of his scurrilous images of black life.
22. Cole points out Zemlinsky's textual changes in "Ubler Bursche," "Afrikan-
ischer Tanz," and what he considers most drastically in "Totes braunes Madel"
where the words "black madonna" (Schwarze Madonna) are changed to "dark
brown girl" (Schwarzbraunes Madel). Cole 1977, 89. "Madel," however, is an
abbreviation of "Magdlein"a young virgin.
23. Cole 1977, 82.
24. Beaumont 2000, 363. The score is now available in a neat, hand-copied
manuscript from Universal Edition.
25. Cole 1977, 79.
262 Notes
16. Oncley 1977, 301.

27. Thanks to Ms. Friedrike Zeitlhofer for sending me the program for this
premiere.
Chapter 17
1. Rilke 1960, 4-5.
2. "Und einmal gehst du" was published in 1995 in Lieder aus dem Nachlass.
Beaumont 1995b, 171-173.
3. Biba 1995, 216.
4. Weber 1995, 362.
5. LC 23/6. In his rough drafts of the songs (LC 23/7), Zemlinsky listed "Auf
dem Meere meiner Seele" as no. 6 of op. 22, and it is also the sixth song of
Mobart's published version. But Zemlinsky's manuscript of December 1934 omit-
ted both "Auf dem Meere meiner Seele" and "Ahnung Beatricens" (apparently not
written until January 1935) and consisted of "Auf braunen Sammetschuhen,"
"Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht," "Feiger Gedanken," "Elfenlied," "Volkslied," and
"Das bucklichte Mannlein." LC 23/6-9. This draft included several versions of the
unnumbered "Das bucklichte Mannlein"; "Feiger Gedanken" and "Elfenlied," both
based on poems by Goethe, were written on the same page. He may have even
planned an entire group of songs on the subject of evening since "Auf braunen
Sammetschuhen" and "Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht" are called "Abendlieder" in
his draft of 10 January 1934.
6. In a letter of 1931 from Universal Edition, Hans Heinsheimer had written,
"Would you not care to write an orchestral work, short and practical in its re-
quirements, hence also easier to market?" Beaumont 2000, 410.
7. Levi 1994, 158.
8. Levi 1994, 159.
9. Richard Strauss also uses a steady musical pulse to portray the steps of night
as it emerges from the forest in his setting of Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg's
(1812-1864) "Die Nacht" (The Night).
10. Although quadruple "piano" might seem a bit extreme, Zemlinsky had sug-
gested ppppp in m. 26 of his manuscript for "Orientalisches Sonett."
11. Beaumont 2000, 445. Beaumont also looks on op. 27 as offering a reprise
of certain features occurring in earlier Zemlinsky songs. Beaumont 2000, 447.
12. T. Mann 1982, 178.
13. Beaumont calls the original lyrics "charming but unremarkable" and notes
that they were translated into "clumsy English." Beaumont 2000, 461.
14. LC 26/1.
15. LC 26/2.
Bibliography
Abbreviations: References for Unpublished Sources

GMf Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna: Nachlass of Louise
Zemlinsky. Letters, documents, personal papers, photographs, and news-
paper clippings relating to the life of Alexander Zemlinsky and his wife,
Louise Sachsel Zemlinsky.
LC Library of Congress Alexander von Zemlinsky Collection. This most im-
portant of the Zemlinsky archives includes almost all of the musical man-
uscripts Zemlinsky brought with him to the United States in 1938. Most of
his known compositions are represented here, along with fragments, musical
sketches, holograph fair copies, and annotated scores.
UPL University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt Library: From the Mahler/Werfel Col-
lection. More than 100 typed copies of letters, mostly undated, from Alex-
ander Zemlinsky to Alma Schindler/Mahler/Gropius/Werfel. Nearly half of
these letters were written in 1901 before Alma Schindler's engagement to
Gustav Mahler. The remaining letters were written between 1904 and 1926.
Zemlinsky's Published Songs

1897. Lieder fur eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte, op. 2. Heft 1, 2. Copenhagen:
Wilhelm Hansen. Reprint available in the United States: Huntsville, TX:
Recital Publications.
1898. Gesdnge fur eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung, op. 5. Heft 1, 2. Copen-
hagen: Wilhelm Hansen. Reprint available in the United States: Huntsville,
TX: Recital Publications.
1899. Walzer-Gesdnge nach Toskanischen Liedern von Gregorovius fur eine Sing-
stimme mit Klavier, op. 6. Hamburg: Simrock. Reprint available in the
United States: Huntsville, TX: Recital Publications.
264 Bibliography
21 January 1900. "Nordisches Volkslied." Neue Musikalische Presse. Musical Sup-

plement, no. 3.
1901. Irmelin Rose und andere Gesdnge, op. 7. Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen.
Reprint available in the United States: Huntsville, TX: Recital Publications.
1901. Turmwdchterlied und andere Gesdnge, op. 8. Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen.
Reprint available in the United States: Huntsville, TX: Recital Publications.
n.d. Ehetanzlied und andere Gesdnge, op. 10. Vienna: Doblinger. Reprint available
in the United States: Huntsville, TX: Recital Publications.
1910. "Uber eine Wiege" or "Schmetterlinge." In Der Merker. Musical Supplement
5, II.
7 April 1912. "Schlummerlied," Bohemia, no. 96, 39.
1914. Sechs Gesdnge, op. 13. Vienna: Universal Edition. Available worldwide. Re-
print available in the United States: Huntsville, TX: Recital Publications.
1940. Three Songs. New York: Chappell.
1977. Six Songs, op. 22 (1934) and Two Songs (without op. no.). Hiilsdale, NY:
Mobart Publishing Co.
1978. Twelve Songs, op. 27 (1937-1938). Hiilsdale, NY: Mobart Publishing Co.
1995. Lieder aus dem Nachlass. Posthumous Songs. Ed. Antony Beaumont. Mu-
nich: G. Ricordi & Co.
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Unpublished Songs and Fragments
in the Library of Congress Collection
Identification of material in the Library of Congress Alexander von Zemlinsky Col-

lection has been hampered by the fragmentary nature of surviving manuscripts and
rough drafts, as well as by the illegibility of Zemlinsky's handwriting. Lawrence
Oncley began the heroic effort of cataloging Zemlinsky's works (listed below with
the letter O) with his 1977 article in Notes. The process has been continued by
Library of Congress Junior Fellow Linda Fairtile and Music Specialist Robert Sa-
ladini, who revised and expanded Oncley's original catalog in 1992. Further con-
tributions have been made by Anthony Beaumont (who has deciphered, edited, and
published a number of previously unavailable works found in the collection), by
Alfred Clayton (in his work on the operas of Zemlinsky and identification of poetic
sources for some of the songs listed below), by Horst Weber, Hartmut Krones, Udo
Rademacher, and Werner Loll. As scholars continue to pursue the elusive trail of
Alexander Zemlinsky, possible new manuscripts and further revelations will en-
hance our understanding of this vibrant, intriguing man.
Die Nachtigal auf meiner Flur (Geibel) LC 1/1 (02, 1888)

O war mein Lieb (Robert Burns) LC 1/1 (05, 1888)
Sah jemand (Burns) LC 1/1 (1889)
O lasst mich nicht ins dunkle Grab (Uhland) LC 1/1 (1889) [Clayton 1982, 405]
Two unidentified songs for voice and piano LC 1/1 (1889)
Manchmal schiesst am kleinen Bogen (Klaus Groth) LC 1/2 (07, 1889)
Komm, falsche Dime (Daumer) LC 1/2 [Clayton 1982, 406]
Unidentified song fragment LC 1/4
Nebel (Lenau) LC 2/2 (015, 1891?)
Mir traumte einst (Helene Hilfreich) LC 3/3 (023, 1892)
Madchenlied (Heyse) LC 3/4 (024, 1892)
Trutzliedchen (Heyse) LC 3/4 (024, 1892)
Die Trauernde (von Rustige) LC 3/6 (026, 1893?) [Beaumont 1995b, 19]
280 Unpublished Songs and Fragments
Die Nonne (Uhland) LC 3/12 (032, 1894?), soprano, cello, piano

Klagend weint es in den Zweigen (Wertheimer) LC 6/3 (045, 1896)
Unidentified song, " . . . fallt und fallt der stille Schnee . . . " LC 6/5
Ein Grab (fragment, Dehmel) LC 9/6 (ca. 1899) [Beaumont 2000, 478]
Waldseligkeit (Dehmel) LC 9/12 (ca. 1898) [Beaumont 2000, 478]
Mit Toves Stimme fliistert der Wald LC 9/18 (from Gurrelieder by Jacobsen,
probably written around the time that Schoenberg began his setting of the
Gurrelieder in 1900)
Licht in der Nacht (Bierbaum) LC 12/4 (ca. 1901)
Traume, traume (Dehmel) LC 12/5 (1903) [Clayton, 1982, 406]
Es war ein alter Konig (Heine, first version) LC 12/7 (O70) (1903)
Sieh, wie wunderlich der Abend lacht LC 12/9, LC 110 (1905?) [Beaumont 2000,
480]
Die Riesen (Eichendorff) LC 14/11, piano reduction of orchestral score (078, ca.
1901)
Der alte Garten (Eichendorff) LC 14/11, piano reduction of orchestral score
(078, ca. 1901)
Erdeinsamkeit LC 14/11, piano reduction of orchestral score (ca. 1901)
Ernste Stunde (Rilke) LC 20/5 (1928)
Fahre wohl (Keller) LC 23/9
Liebe in der Feme LC 26/9
Abschied LC 26/14 [see Beaumont 2000, 484]
Ein Pavillion von Bambusrohr LC 26/14
Am Waldessee (P. Wilhelm) LC 26/15
Ich schreite heim LC 26/17
Ihr Grab (Greif) LC 26/18
Der Monch zu Pisa: Ballade LC 26/19 (March 1895)
Wanderers Nachtlied (Goethe) LC 26/20 (27 July 1896)
Was klingt aus Feld und Walde LC 26/21
Erwartung LC 26/22 (ca. 1898) [Beaumont 2000, 478]
Der chinesische Hund, oder der englische Apfelstrudel (voice and tambourine) LC
26/23
Sketch of two songs from the Chinese (trans. Hans Bethge): Liebestrunken (LC
27/27 and 25/4 [see Beaumont 2000, 455, 484]
In the article "Zemlinsky: Un camarade viennois de Georges Enesco" in Revue

roumaine d'histoire de I'art (1968), Mircea Voicana lists an unfinished song from
the early 1890s, "Das liebliche Vergissmeinnicht," found among the papers of pi-
anist/composer Theodor Fuchs (1873-1953). The current location of this song and
several other works by Zemlinsky are unknown, although at one time they were in
the Romanian State Library in Bucharest.
Works for Voice and
Chamber Ensemble or Orchestra
Waldesgesprach, for soprano and chamber ensemble (LC 4/5-4/6) (1896) Ricordi
Die Astern schwankten (Dehmel) LC 26/12, voice and string sextet
(incomplete) (ca. 1902)
Maiblumen bliihten iiberall, for soprano and string sextet (incomplete, LC 26/12),
arrangement for soprano and string orchestra by Antony Beaumont,
Ricordi
"Der alte Garten," for middle voice and orchestra (incomplete, LC 14/11),
orchestrated by Antony Beaumont, Ricordi
"Die Riesen," for middle voice and orchestra (incomplete, LC 14/11),
orchestrated by Antony Beaumont, Ricordi
Sechs Gesdnge on text by Maurice Maeterlinck, for medium voice and orchestra,
op. 13, Universal Edition
Lyrische Symphonie in Seven Songs on the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, op.
18 for soprano and baritone, Universal Edition
Sinfonische Gesdnge, op. 20 for baritone (or alto) and orchestra, Universal
Edition
Song Index: Titles and First Lines
Abendkelch voll Sonnenlicht, op. 22, no. 2, 125, 2 1 6 , 2 1 7

Abendstern, Nachlass, 1 4 8 - 4 9 , 255 n.8
Ach, was bin ich aufgewacht? (Schlaf nur ein), 1 6 2 - 6 3
Afrikanischer Tanz, op. 2 7 , no. 9, 2 1 9 , 2 2 3 - 2 4
Ahnung Beatricens, T w o Songs, 67, 2 1 8 - 1 9
Allen weinenden Seelen (Lied der Jungfrau), 178, 1 9 1 , 192, 1 9 3 , 195, 259 n.8
Als ihr Geliebter schied, op. 13, no. 4, 1 8 3 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 4 - 9 5 , 197, 2 0 3 , 259 n.8
Altdeutsches Minnelied, op. 2, 11:2, 2 3 , 125, 158
Am Himmel strahlt in dunkler N a c h t (Der Morgenstern), xvi, 139, 1 4 9 - 5 0
Ansturm, Nachlass, 1 8 7 - 8 8 , 258 n.37
Atherische feme Stimmen (Lerchengesang), 148, 2 5 5 n.8
Auf braunen Sammetschuhen, op. 22, no. 1, 125, 135, 2 1 5 , 2 1 6 , 2 1 7
Auf dem Meere meiner Seele, op. 22, no. 6, 2 1 7 - 1 8
Auf die Nacht, Nachlass, 151
Auf See, Nachlass, 187, 189, 221
Beschwert von Bliiten (Regenzeit), 224
Blaues Sternlein, op. 6, no. 5, 168
Briefchen schrieb ich, op. 6, no. 6, 169
Chinese Serenade, 2 2 5
Das bucklichte Mannlein, Two Songs, 67, 108, 125, 215, 217, 218
Das Rosenband, Nachlass, 148, 255 n.8
Das verlassene M a d c h e n , op. 2, 11:4, 125, 147, 158, 182
Da waren zwei Kinder, op. 7, no. 1, 125, 170, 1 7 1 - 7 2 , 183, 2 5 7 n.16
Der Abend war so dunkelschwer (Stromuber), 1 8 8 - 8 9 , 258 n.37
Der Duft nach Sandel (Sommer), 2 2 0 , 224
Der du von dem Himmel bist (Wandrers Nachtlied), 132, 135, 2 2 4
Der Himmel hat keine Sterne, op. 2, 1:2, 155, 159
Der Liebe Leid, op. 2, 1:4, 18, 156
284 Song Index: Titles and First Lines
Der Morgenstern, Nachlass, xvi, 139, 149-50

Der Tag wird kiihl, Nachlass, 152, 251 n.38, 254 n.13
Der Traum, Ein Kinderlied, op. 2, 11:3, 23, 125, 158, 256 n.10
Der verlorene Haufen, Nachlass, 186-87
Der Wind des Herbstes, op. 27, no. 6, 222
Des Madchens Klage, Nachlass, xvi, 139, 149, 254 n.13
Die Beiden, Nachlass, 131, 139, 196, 198-99, 222, 227 n.4, 254 n.13
Die blaue Nacht geht leuchtend iiber'n See (Nach dem Gewitter), 164-65
Die drei Schwestern, op. 13, no. 1, 130, 163, 191, 192-93, 259 n.8
Die Hohn und Walder steigen (Gute Nacht), 145
Die Madchen mit den verbundenen Augen, op. 13, no. 2, 86, 191, 193-94, 259
n.8
Die schlanke Wasserlilie, Nachlass, 144-45, 150
Die Verschmahte, op. 27, no. 5, 221-22
Dirnen und Burschen hort ich Beifall rasen (Harlem Tanzerin), 219, 223
Doch hatte niemals tiefere Macht dein Blick (Auf See), 187, 189, 221
Du gabst mir deine Kette (Volkslied), 125, 217
Du weiche Nacht (Empfangnis), 23, 154, 159-60, 256 n.3
Ehetanzlied, op. 10, no. 1, 28, 179
Ein schwarzes Vogelein (Voglein Schwermut), 125, 143, 180
Ein Stiindlein sind sie beisammen gewest (Hiitet euch!), 162, 163
Elend, op. 27, no. 7, 219, 222-23
Elfenlied, op. 22, no. 4, 125, 215, 217
Empfangnis, op. 2, 11:6, 23, 154, 159-60, 256 n.3
Entbietung, op. 7, no. 2, 76, 126, 170, 173, 176, 178, 180, 257 n.16
Entfiihrung, op. 27, no. 1, 130-31, 219-20
Es griinten die Baume (Lieben und Leben), 146
Es ist ein Fliistern in der Nacht (Gefliister der Nacht), 155-56, 159, 256 n.3
Es ist schon spat (Waldgesprach), 146-47, 255 n.7
Es ist so still (Friihlingstag), 158
Es naht sich der Abend mit dusterem Schweigen (Harmonie des Abends), 129-30,
131, 132, 139, 196, 199-201, 227 n.4, 252 n.68, 254 n.13, 260 n.23
Es war ein alter Konig, Nachlass (1921 version), 74, 183
Es war ein Herr von Bombardil (Herr Bombardil), 28, 179-80
Es war ein niedlich' Zeiselein (Der Traum), 23, 125, 158, 256 n.10
Feiger Gedanken bangliches Schwanken, op. 22, no. 3, 135, 216-17
Fensterlein, nachts bist du zu, op. 6, no. 3, 167
Friihling, op. 27, no. 3, 221
Friihlingslied, Nachlass, 150
Friihlingstag, op. 2, 11:1, 158
GeflUster der Nacht, op. 2, 1:3, 155-56, 159, 256 n.3
Gib ein Lied mir wieder, op. 27, no. 10, 130-31, 224
Gibt's Strass' und Park (Ahnung Beatricens), 67, 218-19
Good or Bad Weather (My Ship and I), 225
Grollen die Tomtoms (Afrikanischer Tanz), 219, 223-24
Gute Nacht, Nachlass, 145
Harlem Tanzerin, op. 27, no. 8, 219, 223
Harmonie des Abends, Nachlass, 129-30, 131, 132, 139, 196, 199-201, 227 n.4,
252 n.68, 254 n.13, 260 n.23
Heilige Nacht, op. 2, 1:1, 154
Hell jubeln die Geigen mit Kling und mit Klang (Kirchweih), 179, 182-83, 258
n.25
Herbsten, Nachlass, 160
Herr Bombardil, Nachlass, 28, 179-80
Hortest du denn nicht hinein, Nachlass, 131, 139, 196, 198, 199, 227 n.4
Hiitet euch!, op. 5, 1:2, 162, 163
Ich geh' des Nachts, op. 6, no. 4, 166
Ich muss hinaus (Liebe und Friihling), 145
Ich sah mein eigen Angesicht, Nachlass, 145
Ich sitze machen langen Tag (Das verlassene Madchen), 125, 147, 158, 182
Im Friihlingsgarten fand ich sie (Das Rosenband), 148, 255 n.8
Im Garten wandeln weisse Sultansfrauen (Orientalisches Sonett), 18, 134, 156, 220,
262 n.10
Im Korn, op. 5, 11:4, 162, 165
Im Lenz, Nachlass, 151, 255 n.13
Im Lenz, op. 2, 11:5, 159, 256 n.3
Im Weizenfeld, im Korn und Mohn (Tod in Ahren), 175, 176, 177-78, 234 n.30,
257 n.16
In deiner Nah' ist mir so gut (Selige Stunde), 160, 178, 180-81
In der Feme, Nachlass, 146
In der Sonnengasse, Nachlass, 28, 179-80
Irmelin Rose, op. 7, no. 4, 105, 107, 126, 174-75, 257 nn.9, 16
Jane Grey, Nachlass, 77, 186, 258 n.34
Jetzt ist die Zeit, op. 27, no. 4, 221
Jetzt wird sie wohl (In der Feme), 146
Kirchweih, op. 10, no. 6, 179, 182-83, 258 n.25
Klagend weint es in den Zweigen (Herbsten), 160
Klagen ist der Mond gekommen, op. 6, no. 2, 166-67, 169
Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan, op. 10, no. 5, 147, 178, 179, 180, 181-82
Leg' deine Hand auf meine Augen (Letzte Bitte), 187, 188, 258 n.37
Leise zieht durch mein Gemiit (Friihlingslied), 150
Lerchengesang, Nachlass, 148, 255 n.8
Letzte Bitte, Nachlass, 187, 188, 258 n.37
Leucht heller als die Sonne (Altdeutsches Minnelied), 23, 125, 158
Liebe Schwalbe, op. 6, no. 1, 166
Liebe und Friihling, Nachlass, 145
Lieben und Leben, Nachlass, 146
Lied der Jungfrau, op. 13, no. 3, 178, 191, 192, 193, 195, 259 n.8
Love, I Must Say Goodbye, 225
Madel, kommst du mit zum Tanz?, Nachlass, 184, 254 n.14
Maienkatzchen, erster Gruss (Tiefe Sehnsucht), 30, 143, 162, 164
Mailied, op. 2, 1:5, 156-57
Meeraugen, op. 7, no. 3, 126, 170, 173-74, 257 nn.7, 16
Meine Braut fiihr ich heim, op. 10, no. 4, 126, 181
Mit Trommeln und Pfeifen, op. 8, no. 3, 177, 257 n.10
286 Song Index: Titles and First Lines
M y Ship and I, 2 2 5
N a c h dem Gewitter, op. 5, 11:3, 1 6 4 - 6 5
N a c h t ist es jetzt (Turmwachterlied), 126, 143, 1 5 3 , 175, 176, 1 7 7 - 7 8
N o c h spur' ich ihren Atem, Nachlass, 1 3 1 , 139, 196, 1 9 7 - 9 8 , 2 2 7 n.4, 254 n.13
Nordisches Volkslied, Neue musikalische Presse, no. 3 (1900), 184
N u n liegen Kranze um die schonen Briiste der M a d c h e n (Friihling), 221
N u n ruht und schlummert Alles (Um Mitternacht), 157
N u n schwillt der See so bang, Nachlass, 1 6 0 - 6 1
O Blatter, diirre Blatter, op. 5, 1:3, 162, 163
O h , das Korn das wogte so (Im Korn), 162, 165
Orientalisches Sonett, Nachlass, 18, 134, 156, 2 2 0 , 262 n.10
O Sterne, goldene Sterne, op. 5, 1:4, 139, 1 6 3 - 6 4
O zurne nicht (Ansturm), 1 8 7 - 8 8 , 258 n.37
The Quiet Pool of Silver Light (Chinese Serenade), 225
Regenzeit, op. 2 7 , no. 1 1 , 224
Ringelringelrosenkranz (Ehetanzlied), 2 8 , 179
Ruhe heilige Nacht! (Heilige Nacht), 154
Schlaf mein Kind (Schlummerlied), 1 8 5 - 8 6 , 2 5 4 n.14
Schlaf nur ein, op. 5, 1:1, 1 6 2 - 6 3
Schlummerlied, Nachlass, 1 8 5 - 8 6 , 2 5 4 n.14
Schmetterlinge. See Uber eine Wiege
Schmiick dir das H a a r mit wildem M o h n (Entbietung), 76, 126, 170, 173, 176,
178, 180, 2 5 7 n . l 6
Seht, es w a r einmal ein Konig (Irmelin Rose), 105, 107, 126, 1 7 4 - 7 5 , 2 5 7 n n . 9 ,
16
Selige Stunde, op. 10, no. 2, 160, 178, 1 8 0 - 8 1
Sie fiihrten ihn durch den grauen Hof (Jane Grey), 77, 186, 258 n.34
Sieh', ich steh' vor deiner Thiir (Klopfet, so wird euch aufgethan), 147, 178, 179,
180, 1 8 1 - 8 2
Sie hatte schiichtern zu ihm aufgesehen (Die Verschmahte), 2 2 1 - 2 2
Sie ist nur durch mein Zimmer gegangen (Vorspiel), 187, 258 n.37
Sie kam zum Schloss gegangen, op. 13, no. 6, 153, 1 9 1 , 1 9 5 - 9 6 , 2 5 4 n.34, 2 6 0
n.19
Sie trug den Becher in der H a n d (Die Beiden), 1 3 1 , 139, 196, 1 9 8 - 9 9 , 2 2 2 , 2 2 7
n.4, 254 n.13
Sommer, op. 27, no. 2, 2 2 0 , 224
Sonntag, op. 7, no. 5, 160, 175, 2 5 7 nn.7, 16
Spielt die Blues fiir mich (Elend), op. 2 7 , no. 7, 2 1 9 , 2 2 2 - 2 3
Stromuber, Nachlass, 1 8 8 - 8 9 , 258 n.37
Siisse, siisse Sommernacht, Nachlass, 139, 1 6 1 , 256 n.16
Tiefe Sehnsucht, op. 5, 11:2, 30, 143, 162, 164
T o d in Ahren, op. 8, no. 4, 175, 176, 1 7 7 - 7 8 , 234 n.30, 2 5 7 n.16
Trinkt aus, ihr zechtet zum letztenmal (Der verlorene Haufen), 77, 1 8 6 - 8 7
Turmwachterlied, op. 8, no. 1, 126, 1 4 3 , 1 5 3 , 175, 176, 1 7 7 - 7 8
Uber eine Wiege, Nachlass (originally Schmetterlinge), 30, 1 8 4 - 8 5 , 254 n.14, 258
n.30
Um Mitternacht, op. 2, 1:6, 157
Um Mitternacht, wenn die Menschen erst schlafen (Elfenlied), 125, 2 1 5 , 2 1 7
Und einmal gehst du, Nachlass, 214, 215-16

Und hat der Tag all seine Qual, op. 8, no. 2, 126, 176-77
Und kehrt er einst heim, op. 13, no. 5, 86, 191, 195, 259 n.8, 260 nn.16, 17
Unter bliihenden Baumen, op. 5, 11:1, 162, 164
Vernichtet ist mein Lebensgluck (Des Madchens Klage), xvi, 139, 149, 254 n.13
Voglein Schwermut, op. 10, no. 3, 125, 143, 180
Volkslied, op. 22, no. 5, 125, 217
Von Melodien die mich umfliehn (Sonntag), 160, 175, 257 nn.7, 16
Vor der Stadt, op. 2, 1:7, 157, 256 n.3
Vorspiel, Nachlass, 187, 258 n.37
Waldgesprach, Nachlass, 146-47, 255 n.7
Wandl' ich im Wald des Abends, Nachlass, 150-51, 255 n . l l
Wandrers Nachtlied, op. 27, no. 12, 132, 135, 224
Was weilst du einsam an dem Himmel (Abendstern), 148-49, 255 n.8
Was will in deinen Augen mir (Meeraugen), 126, 170, 173-74, 257 n.7
Wenn Nachts im Wald (Der Liebe Leid), 18, 156
Will ich in mein Gartlein gehn (Das bucklichte Mannlein), 67, 108, 125, 215, 217,
218
Zieh mit mir, geliebtes Kind (Entfiihrung), 130-31, 219-20
Zwei Musikanten ziehn daher (Vor der Stadt), 157, 256 n.3
Zwischen Weizen und Korn (Mailied), 156-57
Subject Index
Adler, Alfred, 7, 41 Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 86, 89,

Adler, Felix, 4 9 , 1 4 1 - 4 2 90
Adler, Guido, 1 1 , 228 n.18 Auden, W . H . , 122
Adler, Peter H e r m a n n , 2 1 3
Adler, Victor, 6 Bach, David Josef, 2 3 9 n.20
A d o r n o , T h e o d o r Wiesengrund, 252 Bach, J o h a n n Sebastian, xiv, 2 2 , 4 0 ,
n.67, 2 5 9 - 6 0 n.14; assessment of 7 6 - 7 7 , 256 n.18
Zemlinsky, xiii-xiv, xv, 137, 2 2 5 ; Bachrich, Ernst, 2 1 , 2 5 9 n.13
Berg and Zemlinsky, 96, 190, 194; Bahr, H e r m a n n , 6, 15
the Second Viennese School, 9 5 , 123; Balakian, Anna, 128, 129, 130
Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, 170, Balzac, H o n o r e de, 118, 1 3 3 , 2 4 9 n.7
1 7 1 ; Zemlinsky's vocal style, 136 Bartok, Bela, 8, 48
Afrika singt, 132-33, 212, 253 n.77 Baudelaire, Charles, 117, 118, 1 3 1 ,
Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein 196, 1 9 9 - 2 0 1 ; synesthesia, 1 2 8 - 3 0 ;
(ADMV), 35 translation of " H a r m o n i e du soir,"
Altenberg, Peter (Richard Englander), 252 n.68
6, 11, 12, 99, 247; Altenberglieder, Bauer-Lechner, Natalie, 2 3 3 n.51
190-91, 202, 203 Beaumont, Antony, 1 5 1 , 178, 184,
Alwin, Karl, 49 2 3 3 n . 1 3 , 236 n . 2 1 , 238 n.106, 2 5 3
A m a n n , Heinrich, 77, 186 n.86, 2 5 7 nn.10, 14, 2 6 0 n n . 2 3 , 2;
Amaru, 2 2 1 - 2 2 Afrika singt, 253 n.77; completing
Andersen, H a n s Christian, 30, 252 Zemlinsky's unfinished w o r k s , 4 3 ,
n.74 67, 126, 139, 2 5 5 n.7, 258 n.37,
Ansorge, C o n r a d , 30, 127, 2 2 4 , 2 5 8 - 259 n.38; and Gerstl, 2 4 3 n.18; the
59 n.37 ISCM, 244 n . 7 1 ; the "joy" motif,
Ansorge Society, 7, 2 3 , 3 0 - 3 1 , 8 1 , 2 5 5 n.9; key relationships in Zemlin-
184, 234 n.30, 2 3 9 n.20 sky's music, 1 4 2 - 4 3 ; numerology
290 Subject Index
and symbolism, 231 n.2, 257 n.23; Botstein, Leon, xvi, 11

"Sieh, wie wunderlich der Abend Brahms, Johannes: influence on
lacht," 258 n.29; Zemlinsky's En- Schoenberg, 76, 151; influence on
glish songs, 262 n.13; Zemlinsky's Zemlinsky, xviii, 20, 23, 25, 151,
height, 108; Zemlinsky's musical 153-69; meeting with Zemlinsky, 2 1 -
summary of his songs, 262 n . l l 22; opinion of Zemlinsky, 232 n.34;
Beer-Hofmann, Richard, 185 song writing style, 124, 145, 146-
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 20, 30, 33, 47, 151, 152. Musical Works: Quin-
39, 58, 77 tet in B minor for clarinet and string
Beethoven Prize, xvii quartet, 23; Trio in A minor for
Bekker, Paul, 45 clarinet, cello, and piano, 23; Varia-
Berg, Alban, xvi, 6, 10, 13, 110, 136; tions and Fugue on a Theme by
admiration for Kraus, 14, 15; admi- Handel, 21
ration for Zemlinsky, xvii-xviii, 49, Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 59
50, 95-96, 190, 192, 194, 209; the Breicha, Otto, 79
ADMV, 35; conflict with Pfitzner, Brod, Max, 26, 38, 42, 238 n.83
46; orchestration of songs, 202-3; Burckhard, Max, 19, 104, 106, 108-9
and Schoenberg, 91, 92-93; secret Busoni, Ferruccio, 45, 48
messages, 121; Society for Private Buxbaum, Friedrich, and Buxbaum
Musical Performances, 8, 86-87. Quartet, 51
Musical Works: Chamber Concerto,
79; Der Wein, 151 n.67; Funf Or- Cabaret, 27-28, 55, 233 nn.5, 7, 8
chesterlieder nach Ansichtskartentex- Candidus, Carl, 148
ten von Peter Altenberg, 190-91, Canetti, Elias, 65
203, 260 n.5; Lulu, 71, 81, 93, 96, Carltheater, 27, 28, 29, 30, 4 1 , 127
245 n.90; Lyric Suite, 111, 209; Pi- Casals, Pablo, 40, 48
ano sonata, op. 1, 40; "Schliesse mir Chamberlain, Houston, 4, 63
die Augen beide," 119, 141, 254 Chappell, 138, 264
n.19; Sieben friihe Lieder, 119, 144, Chavannes, Pierre Puvis de, 8-9
188; Violin Concerto, 238 n. 101, Clayton, Alfred, 237 n.46, 257 n.10,
249 n.120; Wozzeck, 21, 43, 49-50, 258 n.26; importance of song mate-
66, 94, 96, 115, 179 rial in Zemlinsky's operas, 253-54
Berg, Helene Nahowski, 6, 110 n.9; influence of Brahms on, 175;
Berlin Staatsoper am Platz der Repub- Sarema, 243 n . l l ; technique of de-
lik. See Kroll Opera veloping variations, 255 n.25; Zem-
Berlioz, Hector, 15, 202 linsky as a modern composer, 242
Bethge, Hans, 134, 253 n.86 n.17
Biba, Otto, 21, 66 Coffeehouse culture, 5-6, 12, 37-38,
Bierbaum, Otto Julius, 27-28, 114, 154
179, 233 nn.7, 10, 14 Cole, Malcolm, 212, 253 n.77
Bischoff, Hermann, 32 Cullen, Countee, 132; "Totes braunes
Bismarck, Otto von, 1-2, 63, 229 n.24 Madel," 211
Blech, Leo, 56, 58, 256 n.10 Czech National Theater, 38, 48, 50
Bliithgen, Victor von, 158 Czech Philharmonic, 48, 52, 253 n.76
Bocklin, Arnold, 8 Czerny, Carl, 20
Bodanzky, Artur, xvii, 24, 27, 37, 70-
71, 72, 242 n.16 Dahlhaus, Carl, xv
Bodenstedt, Friedrich von, 256 n.6 Darwin, Charles, 4, 17, 96
Subject Index 291 291
Debussy, Claude, 4 8 , 87, 88, 189, 2 6 0 Franz, Robert, xviii, 1 4 4 - 4 5 , 146,

n.23 155, 2 5 5 n n . 3 , 1 1 , 256 n.8
Degenerate Music. See Entartete Music Franz Joseph, Emperor, 2, 4, 6, 17,
Exhibition 3 1 , 33
Dehmel, Richard, 2 7 , 4 2 , 77, 114; and Fredric-Hottges, Vally, 82
Ansorge Society, 30; inspiration for Freud, Sigmund, 7, 1 1 ; and Austria, 9 -
Zemlinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, 10, 16, 7 1 ; view of w o m e n , 1 0 2 - 3
1 2 1 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 ; as a populist, 239 Freund, Eva, 2 1 4
n.20; synesthesia, 129; and World Freund, M a r y a , 88, 89
W a r I, 83; Zemlinsky's op. 7, 1 7 1 , Fritsch, Theodor, 65
173; Zemlinsky's unpublished songs, Fuchs, J o h a n n N e p o m u k , 2 0 , 2 1 , 148
187-89 Fuchs, Robert, 2 0 , 33
Dent, Edward, 238 n.80 Fuchs-Robettin, H a n n a , 6, 121
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 32, 108, Furtwangler, Wilhelm, 56, 58
114, 125, 158, 218
Dick, Marcel, 94, 191
Doblinger Verlag, 179 Gal, H a n s , 69
Door, Anton, 20, 23 Gartner, Eduard, 82
D r a c h m a n n , Holger, 133 Gay, Peter, 9 - 1 0
Dreyfus, Alfred, 11 Geibel, Emanuel, 145
Dukas, Paul, 35 Geller, Oskar, 28
Dvorak, Antonin, 4 0 , 157 Gensichen, O t t o Franz, 162, 164, 251
n.37
Eichendorff, Joseph von, 144, 145, George, Stefan, 2 3 4 n.30, 252 n.66;
1 4 6 - 4 7 , 157 The Book of the Hanging Gardens,
Eigner, August, 2 1 4 8 0 - 8 2 , 1 2 2 - 2 3 ; inspiration to Zem-
Einstein, Alfred, 57, 66 linsky and Schoenberg, 118; songs
Eisler, H a n n s , 9 1 - 9 2 of op. 2 7 , 2 1 9 , 2 2 4 ; and symbolism,
Englert, Anton, 131 130-31
Entartete Music Exhibition, 55, 66, Gerigk, Hermann. See Lexikon der Ju-
241 n.27 den in der Musik
Epstein, Julius, 23 German Academy of Music and the
Estes, Simon, 2 1 3 Performing Arts, 46
Evers, Franz, 164, 165 German Theater. See N e w German
Theater
Fairtile, Linda, 7 3 , 279 Gerstl, Richard, xix, 6, 7, 7 9 - 8 0 , 90,
Falke, Gustav, 28 2 4 3 n.18
Fallersleben, Hoffmann von, 145 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna
Faure, Gabriel, 2 1 9 (Musikverein), 2 0 - 2 1
Feld, Leo, 183, 184 Gide, Andre, 67, 133
Ferrai, Bianca, 18 Giraud, Albert, 113, 132
Fet, Afanasy, 154, 256 n.6 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 4
Finke, Fidelio, 90, 236 n.22 Goebbels, Joseph, 63
Firner, Walter, 71 Goethe, J o h a n n Wolfgang von, 9 8 - 9 9 ,
Fitzner, Rudolf, 2 3 ; Fitzner Quartet, 117, 1 2 5 - 2 6 , 132, 134, 135, 154,
2 3 , 2 3 2 n.42 156, 165, 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 , 2 2 4 , 2 4 9 - 5 0
Fleischer, Arthur, 142 n.7, 2 6 2 n.5
Forbach, Moje, 93 Gorki, M a x i m , 133
292 Subject Index
Grasberger, Hans, "Orientalisches So- Zeit, 15; and George, 131; the songs
nett," 156, 262 n.10 of 1916, 118, 134, 196-99
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 165-69 Holger, Drachmann, 25, 133
Gropius, Manon, 112 Holz, Arno, 28, 179
Gropius, Walter, 42, 103, 112 Home, Frank, 132, 212
Giilke, Peter, 60 Hughes, Langston, 71, 261 n.21; "Af-
Gutheil-Schoder, Marie, 30, 50, 86, rikanischer Tanz," 223-24; "Mis-
259 n.13 ery," 222-23; op. 27, 219;
Guttmann, Ida. See Zemlinsky, Ida Symphonische Gesdnge, op. 20, 132-
Guttmann 33, 210-12
Guttmann (Rice), Melanie, 6, 24, 32, Humperdinck, Engelbert, 158
105-6, 140; relationship with Zem- Huni-Mihacsek, Felicie, 49, 196, 227
linsky, 247 n.64; reviews of, 148, n.4, 259 n.13
165; song dedications to, 106, 152, Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 101
162, 179, 182, 251 n.38
International Society for Contemporary
Hafiz (Shamsuddin Mohammed), 134 Music (ISCM), 46, 244 n.71; forma-
Hailey, Christopher, xix, 90, 96, 144 tion of, 48; premiere of Erwartung
Handbuch der Judenfrage, 65 and the Lyric S ymphony, 50-51, 90,
Hansen, Theophil von, 4 209
Hanslick, Eduard, 22, 233 n.49
Hartleben, Otto Erich, 113, 132 Jacobsen, Jens Peter, 30, 77; "Mein
Hauer, Josef Matthias, 85 Braut fiihr ich heim," 181; settings
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 27, 108 by Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, 78,
Heine, Heinrich, 144-45, 150-51, 255 126; songs of op. 8, 175, 176
n.10; Der arme Peter, 183 Jalowetz, Heinrich, 47, 95, 197
Heinsheimer, Hans, 262 n.6 Janacek, Leos, 48, 125, 149, 238 n.83,
Hellmesberger Quartet, 21 261 n . l l
Hertzka, Emil, 192, 232 n.37 Jone, Hildegard, 118
Herzl, Theodor, 11-12 Jugendstil, 8, 136, 229 n.44
Heuberger, Richard, 27, 232 n.34 Jung-Wien, 8
Heyse, Paul, 77, 154; published songs,
155, 159, 162-63; translations of Kafka, Franz, 37, 38, 47
poetry, 132, 166, 256 n.14; unpub- Kalidasa, 125-26, 219; "Der Wind des
lished song group, 126, 151-52, 251 Herbstes," 222; "Friihling," 221;
n.38, 255 n.13 "Jetzt ist die Zeit," 221; "Regen-
Hilmar, Ernst, 64, 66, 232 n.21 zeit," 224; "Sommer," 220
Hindemith, Paul, xix, 43, 54, 66; Kallir, Otto, 79
Amar String Quartet, 89 Kallman, Chester, 122
Hindenburg, Paul von, 62 Khnopff, Fernand, 8, 104, 129
Hitler, Adolf, 2, 3, 4, 45, 49, 62-64; Klabund (Alfred Henschke), 133
Kristallnacht, 70 Klaren, Georg, 47
Hoffmann, Rudolf Stefan, xvii, 22, 34, Kleiber, Erich, 21, 56, 58, 94
138, 172; influence of the waltz, 182; Klein, Carl August, 131
Mahler's influence on Zemlinsky, Klein, Max, 141
134 Klemperer, Otto, xviii, 37, 49, 52, 55-
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 5-6, 11, 30, 58
62, 77, 252 n.73; Der Triumph der Klemperer, Viktor, 77, 186-87
Subject Index 293
Klimt, Gustav, 5, 9, 98, 101; and Zemlinsky Collection, 20, 73-74,

Alma Schindler, 7, 100, 104; paint- 126, 137, 139, 159
ings with music as the subject, 7; the Lichtenfeld, Monika, 207
Secession, 8 Liliencron, Detlev von, 162, 164, 175,
Klinger, Max, 7, 9 177, 184; and the Ansorge Society,
Klopstock, Friedrich, 148 30-31, 234 n.30
Knab, Armin, 158 Lingen, Thekla, "Klopfet, so wird euch
Kokoschka, Oskar, 6, 42, 230 n.63, afgethan," 181-82
247 n.40; and Alma Schindler, 103, Liszt, Franz, 20, 35, 147, 254 n.15
110, 112; ambivalence to Vienna, 10; Li-Tai-Po, 134
the bond of the Viennese radicals, Lueger, Karl, 3-4, 25, 228 n.18
96; opinion of Kraus, 15 Lynx, Aissa, "Siisse, siisse Sommer-
Kolisch, Rudolf, 31, 86, 91; Kolisch nacht," 161
Quartet, 51
Konigliches Deutsches Landestheater, Maeterlinck, Maurice, 77, 127, 253
38,47 n.76; Aglavaine et Selysette, 195; im-
Konta, Robert, 138, 176 portance of Pelleas et Melisande,
Korngold, Erich, 41, 43, 45, 47, 52, 120, 127, 251 n.45; political re-
71; as Zemlinsky's student, xvii, 3 3 - sponses in World War I, 127-28,
34 251 n.48; Quinze Chansons, 128,
Korngold, Julius, 33, 235 n.54 191, 251 n.50, 259 n.8; Soeur Beat-
Kramer, Leopold, 44, 50 rice, 194; symbolism, 128, 130; We-
Krasa, Hans, 69-70 bern's opera on Les Sept Princesses,
Kraus, Karl, 11, 12, 14-15, 28; Die 92; Zemlinsky's settings of, 190-96,
Fackel, 12; and women, 98, 100, 203-6
102, 191; and World War I, 15, 42 Mahler, Arnost, 39, 52, 231 n.2
Kravitt, Edward, xviii, 140, 250-51 Mahler, Gustav, xviii, 10, 20, 27, 30,
n.35 32, 36, 136, 190, 256 n.17; anti-
Krenek, Ernst, 43, 65, 89, 125, 133, semitism, xix, 11, 228 n.18; arrange-
215 ments of his music, 86; assistance to
Kroll Opera, xviii, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, Zemlinsky, xvii, 21, 24-25, 34; and
93 Christianity, 11; eclecticism, xvi, xix;
Krones, Hartmut, 177 marriage, 7, 102, 109-11, 112;
meeting with Freud, 7, 102; poetry
and song, 122, 125; popularity after
La Grange, Henry-Louis de, 227 n.14 his death, xv, xix, 235 n.70. Musical
Laber, Louis, 47-48 Works: Das Lied von der Erde, 111,
Labor, Josef, 99, 104, 105 133-34, 206-7; "Der Tamboursg'-
Lang, Paul Henry, 123-24 sell," 177; Des Knaben Wunder-
Lehar, Franz, 29-30 horn, 32, 234 n.46; "Hans und
Lehman, Robert, 73 Grete," 179, 184; Lieder eines fah-
Lehmann, Lotte, 58, 142 renden Gesellen, 184, 196; Riickert
Leichtentritt, Hugo, 57 lieder and Kindertotenlieder, 32, 184-
Leixner, Otto von, 158-59 85
Levetzow, Karl Michael von, 27 Mahler-Werfel, Alma Schindler, 46, 9 8 -
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, 64, 116, 178, 179; anti-semitism, 11,
231 n.17 106, 109; and Berg, 115, 249 n.20;
Library of Congress Alexander von and composing, 104, 105, 106, 110-
294 Subject Index
11, 112; and Freud, 102, 103; her Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 20, 22,
songs, 112, 113-15, 127; her view 30, 31, 38, 39, 51, 52; songs, 156
of women, 99, 102, 106; "In meines Muck, Carl, 37
Vaters Garten," 113; and Kraus, 15; Muhlfeld, Richard, 23
marriage, 7, 109, 110, 112; opinions Miiller-Hermann, Johanna, xvii, 228
about Zemlinsky, the man and the n.19
musician, xiv, xvii, 104, 106, 107, Munch, Edvard, 101
108, 109, 110, 115, 173; and Ar- Musikverein. See Gesellschaft der Mu-
nold Schoenberg, 82, 115; as a stu- sikfreunde, Vienna
dent of Zemlinsky, xvii, 77, 105,
106, 113-14, 252 n.73; Zemlinsky's Nachod, Hans, 18, 24, 41, 72
dedication of his op. 7 to, 171, 175; Nahowski, Anna, 6
Zemlinsky's letters to, 28, 106, 107, Nahowski, Helen. See Berg, Helene
108, 111, 115. Musical Works: Fiinf Nahowski
Lieder (1910), 112; Fiinf Gesdnge Nessy, Julia, 142, 214
(1924), 112; Vier Lieder (1915), 112 Nettl, Paul, 141
Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 43 New German Theater (Neues
Mallarme, Stephane, 9, 101, 117, 128, Deutsches Theater), 37-53
130 Newlin, Dika, 72-73, 108
Mann, Heinrich, 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 104, 234 n.30
Mann, Klaus, 63, 115 Novalis, 114
Mann, Thomas, 42, 45, 47, 58, 62, Novotna, Jarmila, 66
68, 224
Masaryk, Tomas, 42, 47 Offenbach, Jacques, 36, 56, 57
Mayreder, Rosa, 102 Oncley, Lawrence A., 73
Mayrhofer, Johann, 148 Oppeln-Bronikowski, Friedrich von,
McKay, Claude, 133, 219, 223 127, 191-96
Medtner, Nikolay, 121, 173 Ostrcil, Otakar, 43
Mendelssohn, Felix, xiv, 150 Ottner, Carmen, 231 n.2
Mengelberg, Willem, 58
Merz, Oskar, 24 Pappenheim, Marie, 35, 95, 235 n.60,
Messchaert, Johannes, 175-76 253 n.77
Meyer, Felix, 252 n.68 Pawel, Ernst, 37, 101-2
Mihacsek, Felicie. See Hiini-Mihacsek, Pfau, Ludwig, 162, 163
Felicie Pfitzner, Hans, 30, 86, 252-53 n.75;
Milhaud, Darius, 43, 56, 87, 88, 89 Die neue Asthetic der musikalischen
Moldenhauer, Hans and Rosaleen, 252 Impotenz, 45-46; "Futuristenge-
n.66 fahr," 45
Moll, Anna Bergen Schindler, 103, Pieau, Walter, 24, 30
110, 112 Pisk, Paul, 66, 70, 92
Moll, Carl, 8, 15, 98 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 48
Moreau, Gustave, 101 Poe, Edgar Allan, 60, 71, 118, 128
Morgan, Robert, 123, 243 n.16 Polnauer, Josef, 191
Morgenstern, Christian, 28, 126; eve- Polyhymnia Orchestra, 24, 77, 148,
ning songs, 216, 217-18; a new 232 n.44
path, 171-72; a song of death, 180- Poulenc, Francis, 88
81 Prussian Academy of the Arts, 92
Morike, Eduard, 172-73 Prutz, Robert, 145
Subject Index 295
Puccini, Giacomo, 56, 57, 235 n.59 Schnitzler, Johann, 5

Puffett, Derrick, 260 n.5 Schoenberg, Arnold, 24, 42, 44, 48,
Pulletz, Wenzel, 18 73, 75-97, 108, 148; and Christian-
ity, 11; and composing, xiii-xiv, xvi,
Rachmaninoff, Sergei, xiv xvii, 21; Festschrifts in his honor,
Ratz, Erwin, 85 93, 245 n.77; friendship with Alma
Ravel, Maurice, 43, 48, 56, 134, 166, Mahler, 115; friendship with Zem-
208, 241 n.29 linsky, 24, 40, 41, 73, 75-78, 82-
Recital Publications, 138, 263-64 83, 94, 96-97, 170, 179, 245 n.103;
Reger, Max, xviii, 87, 88, 89, 140, and George, 118, 252 n.66; as an
158 immigrant, 68, 72; and Judaism, 16,
Reinhardt, Heinrich, 29-30 19, 63; and Kraus, 4-15; marriages,
Reinhardt, Max, 11, 36 79-80, 90-91; modernism, 80, 84-
Rice, William Clarke, 6, 106 85, 90, 91, 94-95, 118, 243 n.16;
Ricordi, 72, 139, 260 n.l, 264 musical ideas held in common with
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 114, 122, 131, Zemlinsky, 76-77, 84, 151, 162,
214 167, 186, 260 n.17; opinion of
Rimbaud, Arthur, 117, 252 n.70 Zemlinsky, xiii, 44, 83, 84, 192;
Ringer, Alexander, 227 n.28 personal copies and arrangements of
Roberts, Al, 71 Zemlinsky's music, 78, 84, 90, 159,
Rode-Breymann, Susanne, 36, 234 244 n.50; his personality, 78, 82, 92;
n.27, 237 n.40 as a student of Zemlinsky, xvii, 75-
Rodenberg, Julius (Levy), 157 77, 78; views on song writing, 119,
Rodin, Auguste, 7, 9 120, 121-23, 140-41, 143, 250
Roller, Alfred, 7, 49 n.18; Zemlinsky's assistance to, 30,
Rose, Arnold, and the Rose String 40, 41, 42-43, 77, 82; Zemlinsky's
Quartet, 6, 40 defense of Erwartung, 93. Musical
Rosenberg, Alfred, 63 Works: Solo Vocal: "Abschied," op.
Ruckert, Friedrich, 114, 184 1, no. 2, 143; Buch der hdngenden
Rufer, Josef, 8 Garten, op. 15, 80-82, 119, 120,
Russell, Bertrand, 15 123; "Erwartung," op. 2, 173;
Rychnovsky, Ernst, 22, 51, 232 n.44 "Herzgewachse," op. 20, 122; "Pier-
rot lunaire," op. 21, 28, 40, 42, 43,
Sacco, Nicola, 59 51, 87, 88, 121, 132, 166, 191, 253
Sachsel, Hanna, 73 n.76; "Schlaf, mein Piippchen,"
Sachsel, Louise. See Zemlinsky, Louise 33; Three Songs, op. 28, 141; Ope-
Sachsel, Otto, 71, 72 ras: Die gliickliche Hand, 35, 129;
Saladini, Robert, 73, 279 Erwartung, 35, 50-51, 57, 90;
Salten, Felix (Siegmund Salzmann), 11 Moses und Aron, 71; Chamber Mu-
Scandal Concert (31 March 1913), 190- sic: String Quartet in D major, 23,
91, 260 n.5 77, 78; String Quartet in D minor,
Scherchen, Hermann, 48, 64, 66 no. 1, op. 7, 78, 95; String Quartet
Schillings, Max von, 52, 63 no. 2, op. 10, 40; Orchestral Music:
Schindler, Alma. See Mahler-Werfel, Chamber Symphony, op. 9, 85, 190;
Alma Pelleas und Melisande, 32, 42, 120,
Schleissner, Leo, 43, 50, 51 167; Verkldrte Nacht, 23, 42, 76,
Schnitzler, Arthur, xix, 6, 11, 13-14, 78, 82, 84, 120; Choral Music: Die
30, 230 n.81 Jakobsleiter (fragment), 91; "Friede
296 Subject Index
auf Erden," op. 13, 93; Gurrelieder, vatauffuhrungen), 43, 46, 85-90;
42-43, 76, 78, 82, 126. Writings: ideals of, 8, 32, 85-87, 191; per-
Harmonielehre, 36, 66, 77 formances of Zemlinsky's songs, 86,
Schoenberg, Gertrud Kolisch, 91, 96, 89, 139, 196, 227 n.4, 254 n.13,
97 259 n.13; waltz evening to raise
Schoenberg, Mathilde Zemlinsky, 6, 7 9 - funds, 182
80, 90-91, 234 n.19 Society of Creative Musicians (Vereini-
Schonberg, Heinrich, 41 gung schaffender Tonkiinstler), 3 1 -
Schonerer, Georg Ritter von, 3 32, 111, 234 n.46
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 104; aesthetic Sonneck, Oscar, 48
views, 117, 118-19; view of women, Specht, Richard, 230 n.58
99, 101, 110, 112 Spitzer, Friedrich Victor, 178-79
Schorske, Carl, 5, 8 Stefan, Paul, 22, 30, 59, 234 n.30
Schreker, Franz, xix, 11, 20, 35, 47, Stein, Erwin, 81, 86, 87, 89
51, 67; assistance to Zemlinsky, 40, Steinberg, William, 52
60; orchestration of songs, 260 n.3; Stein-Firner, Irma, 71, 225
popularity of, 245 n.104; Zusner Steinhard, Erich, 70, 238 n.80, 244
competition, 149 n.71
Schroder, Rudolf, 179 Stengel, Theo, and Herbert Gerigk. See
Schubert, Franz, xiv, 121-22, 123, 143; Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
as a model, 148-49, 151; poetic Stephan, Rudolph, 95
changes, 146-47, 148 Steuermann, Edward, 66, 86, 87, 89,
Schulhoff, Erwin, 70, 90
236 n.18, 241 n.28, 259 n.13
Schulz, Johann Peter, 125
Stiedry, Fritz, 72, 73
Schumann, Clara, 144-45
Storm, Theodor, 154, 155-56
Schumann, Robert, 146, 150, 151;
Straus, Oscar, 28
childhood themes, 158, 164; late
Strauss, Johann II, 30
songs, 219, 222; "Lehn' deine
Strauss, Richard, xvi, xviii, 48, 51;
Wang' an meine Wang,' " 255 n.10;
choice of poetry, 127, 134, 154; and
"Volksliedchen" and Zemlinsky's
lieder, xv, 136, 138, 140, 146, 150,
"Tiefe Sehnsucht," 162
Schwarzwald, Eugenie, and the 160, 254 n.18, 262 n.9; opinion of
Schwarzwald School, 31, 182 Arnold Schoenberg, 115, 249 n.121;
Secession, 8, 31-32, 127 and program music, 250 n.13. Musi-
Second Viennese School, 95-96 cal Works: Alpine Symphony, op.
Semlinsky, Anton, 18 64, 39; Also sprach Zarathu stra, 58;
Semo, Clara. See Zemlinszky, Clara Ariadne auf Naxos, 15, 39; Der Ro-
Serkin, Rudolf, 31, 86 senkavalier, 15; Elektra, 15, 43; In-
Shakespeare, William, 43 termezzo, 43; Salome, 35, 56, 71,
Sibelius, Jean, 48 101, 105, 246 n.25; Symphoma do-
Siebel, Karl (Emil Thilva), 158 mestica, 32, 39, 86
Simons, Rainer, 31, 246 n.25 Stravinsky, Igor, xiv, 48
Simrock, 22 Stroh, Wolfgang Martin, 122-23
Singer, Maximilian, 25 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 57, 92
Sistermans, Anton, 143, 154, 175-76 Sullivan, Arthur, 36, 133
Smetana, Bednch, 25, 48, 57, 58, 66 Symbolist movement, 8, 117, 128-31,
Society for Private Musical Perform- 191-96
ances (Verein fiir Musikalische Pri- Synesthesia, 128-29
Subject Index 297
Szeps-Zuckerkandl, Berta, 9, 17, 4 4 - for Brahms, 153; admiration for

45, 104 Kraus, 15; admiration for Zemlin-
sky, xiv, 51, 78, 96, 192, 235 n.56,
Tancsik, Pamela, 38, 48 243 n.13; attitude toward Jews, 11;
Teweles, Heinrich, 40, 44 coaching for the Society for Private
Theater an der Wien, 27, 30 Musical Performance, 86, 227 n.4;
Tietjen, Heinz, 67 mental health, 7; relationship with
Timms, Edward, 191, 230 n.81 Arnold Schoenberg, 92; relationship
Tonkiinstlerverein. See Wiener Ton- with Mathilde Schoenberg, 79; set-
kiinstlerverein tings of poems by Dehmel, 127; set-
Toomer, Jean, 132; "Lied der Baum- tings of poems by George, 81-82,
wollpacker," 211 252 n.66; settings of poems by
Trakl, Georg, 6, 12, 42, 123 Trakl, 123; and World War I, 42;
Zemlinsky's assistance to, 41. Musi-
Uberbrettl (cabaret), 27-28, 55, 233 cal Works: "Christus factus est" (op.
nn.5, 7, 8 16), 216; "Die geheimnisvolle Flote"
Ullmann, Viktor, 70, 90 (op. 12), 134; Five Pieces for Or-
Universal Edition, 22, 31, 33, 127-28, chestra, op. 10, 51, 86; Five Songs,
212, 215, 232 n.37 op. 4, 81-82; Four Pieces for violin
University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt- and piano, op. 7, 40; Six Orchestral
Dietrich Library, 106 Pieces, op. 6, 190; Six Songs, op. 14,
123. Writings: The Path to the New
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 59 Music, 78
Ver Sacrum, 8, 127 Weigl, Karl, xvii, 70, 228 n.18
Verdi, Giuseppe, 17, 34, 56, 57, 134 Weill, Kurt, 28, 43, 59, 71, 215
Verein fiir Musikalische Privatauffuhr- Weingartner, Felix, 34-35
ungen. See Society for Private Musi- Weininger, Otto, 98, 100
cal Performances Weissmann, Adolf, 56-57, 60, 111
Vereinigung schaffender Tonkiinstler. Wellesz, Egon and Emmy, 28-29, 77,
See Society of Creative Musicians 108
Verlaine, Paul, 117 Werfel, Franz, 37, 103, 109; admira-
Vienna Court Opera, xvii, 24-25, 31, tion for Zemlinsky, 47, 136, 138;
33, 34, 35 poetry of, 67, 112-13, 218
Vienna Volksoper, 31, 34-35, 59, 127 Wertheimer, Paul, 126, 154, 159-60,
Vivaldi, Antonio, xiv 175, 180
Vulpinus, Theodor (Renauld), 145-46 Wiener Tonkiinstlerverein (Viennese
Musician's Society), xvii, 23, 77-78,
Wagner, Otto, 5 105, 165, 232 n.43
Wagner, Richard, 38, 39, 48, 90; ideal Wiener Werkstatte, 9
of Gesamtkunstwerk, 129; and "Im Wiesbaden State Theater, 60
Treibhaus," 187; influence on Zem- Wilde, Oscar, 43, 49, 60, 101, 108,
linsky and Schoenberg, 76; Zemlin- 133
sky and Alma Schindler's love of Wilhelm I, Kaiser, 17
Wagner, 107 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 28, 101, 127
Walter, Bruno, 6, 7, 25, 37, 49, 54, 62 Winternitz-Dorda, Martha, 40, 120
Weber, Horst, 18, 140, 186, 257 n.7, Wittgenstein, Karl, 5
258 n.27 Wittgenstein, Paul, 66, 241 n.29
Webern, Anton, 19, 140; admiration Wolf, Hugo, xviii, 7, 20, 74, 224, 254
298 Subject Index
n.15, 140; orchestration of songs, music, 165-66, 182-83, 201. Musi-

202; and similar musical techniques cal Works: Operas: Der Konig Kan-
used by Zemlinsky, 147, 156, 176, daules (completed by Antony
177; synthesis of poetry and music, Beaumont), 67, 71, 133, 137, 242
114, 122, 124, 162 n.17; Der Kreidekreis, 66-67, 133,
Wolff, Werner, 72 134, 192, 217; Der Traumgorge, 31,
Wolzogen, Ernst von, 27-28, 233 34, 137, 182, 183-84, 235 n.56,
nn.5, 8 242 n.16, 258 n.26; Der Zwerg, 35,
47, 48-49, 52, 55, 60, 95, 108, 133,
137-38, 192, 206; Eine florentim-
Zehme, Albertine, 40 sche Tragodie, 35, 36, 42, 43-44,
Zemlinsky, Alexander: ancestors, xix, 63, 115, 133, 181-82; Es war ein-
18-19, 231 nn.2, 4; childhood and mal, xvi-xvii, 21, 24-25, 105, 133,
family, 17-20, 29, 234 n.19; as a 137, 178, 181, 184, 192, 227 n.14,
composer of opera, 137; composi- 233 n.49; Kleider machen Leute, 34,
tional style and modernism, 84-85, 43, 48, 59; Sarema, xvi, 18, 22, 24,
94-95, 137, 138, 140, 141, 185-86, 78, 118, 156, 231 n . l l , 243 n . l l ;
242 n.17; concepts of key and trans- and the song, "Lehn' deine Wang'
position, 142-43, 253 n.5, 256 nn.7, an meine Wang,' " 137-38, 150,
18, 261 n.7; as a conductor, 23, 24,
255 n.10; Incomplete Operas: Circe,
27, 29, 30, 31, 38-40, 47-48, 51,
71, 137; Der Graf von Gleim (pro-
55, 56, 64, 84, 93-94, 206, 239
posed), 235 n.60; Der heilige Vitalis,
n.34; decline in reputation, xvii-xviii;
137, 237 n.46; Der Meister von
early successes and awards, xvi-xvii,
Prag, 137; Die Folkunger, 137;
21, 22, 24-25, 149; education, 19-
Herm Ames Schatz, 137; Malwa,
24; emigration, 69-70; honored on
133, 137, 237 n.46; Raphael, 133,
his fiftieth birthday, 47; and Juda-
137, 237 n.46; Other Stage Works:
ism, xix, 18-19, 64-65, 231 n.2; life
during World War I, 41-42; loyalty Cymbeline, 43, 169; Der Triumph
to friends, 40, 41; and Gustav Mah- der Zeit (Das gldserne Herz; Drei
ler, xvii, 24-25, 32, 33, 34, 111-12, Ballettstiicke; Ein Tanzpoem), 15,
134, 206-7; and Mozart, 31; nation- 109; Ein Lichtstrahl, 28, 233 n.12,
alism, 127-28, 253 n.76; orchestra- 242 n.19; Mikado, 133; Orchestral
tion of songs, 202; organization of Music: Die Seejungfrau, 32, 60, 176;
song collections, 139-40, 178-79, Orchester Suite, 23; Sinfonietta, 67,
257 n.16, 259 n.38; physical de- 72-73, 139, 196, 215; Symphony
scriptions, 65, 108; as a pianist and no. 2 in B-flat major, xvii, 24; Sym-
accompanist, 19-21, 23, 30, 82, phony in D minor, 20, 21, 24; Sym-
112, 141-42, 232 n.43, 236 n.18, phony in E minor, 24; Voice and
254 n.22, 255 n.24; relationship Orchestra: Lyrische Symphonie, 18,
with Arnold Schoenberg, 75-97; Sec- 50-51, 76, 90, 121, 133-34, 206-
ond Viennese School, 23, 95; song 10, 250 n.22; "Maiblumen bliihten
and opera, 137-38, 184, 253-54 n.9; iiberall," 256 n.12; Sechs Gesdnge
superstitions, 121, 193, 243 n.20, nach Tex ten von Maurice Maeter-
257 n.23; as a teacher, xvii, 46, 60, linck, 41, 190-91, 202, 203-6, 260-
75, 84; and Vienna, 10, 40-41, 44, 61 nn.2, 6, 7; Symphonische Ge-
64, 230 n.58; waltz influences on his sdnge, 132-33, 140, 162, 210-13,
Subject Index 299
261 nn.22, 24; "Waldesgesprach," 67, 115; Psalm 23, 19, 35, 89;
24, 148; Lieder (see Song Index for Psalm 83, 19; Piano: Ballades, 20,
individual titles), 138-39, 140; keys, 232 n.24, 250 n.21; Fantasien Uber
261 n.7; Lieder aus dem Nachlass, Gedichte von Richard Dehmel, 2 3 -
139, 255 n.13, 262 n.2; Maeter- 24; Ldndliche Tdnze, 19, 23;
linck's poetry, 127-28; op. 2, 19, "Skizze," 23; Chamber Music: Hu-
23, 153-61; op. 5, 19, 24, 161-65; moreske, 115; Hunting Piece, 225;
op. 6, 22, 24, 165-69, 257 nn.24, Piano trio in A minor (incomplete),
10, 259 n.38; op. 7, 143, 170-75, 20; Quartet for clarinet, violin, vi-
178, 257 n.16; op. 8, 175-78, 257 ola, and cello in D major, 253 n.86;
nn.10, 16; op. 10, 28, 178-79, 180- String Quartet (two movements), 71,
83; op. 13, 35, 49, 72, 74, 86, 89, 209; String Quartet no. 1 in A ma-
138, 190-96; op. 22 and two songs, jor, op. 4, 22, 24, 40; String Quartet
67, 72, 214-19, 262 n.5; op. 27, 67,
no. 2, op. 15, 43, 83-84, 86, 87, 89-
72, 215, 219-24, 262 n . l l ; order of
90; String Quartet no. 3, 51, 209;
songs, 259 n.8; performed in French,
String Quartet no. 4, 67, 215; String
253 n.76; three songs, 71, 215, 225,
Quintet (fourth movement) in D ma-
262 n.13; Incomplete Songs, Lost jor, 232, n.33; String Quintet in D
Songs, and Fragments, 279-80;
minor (incomplete), 21, 232 n.33;
those mentioned within the book:
Suite for violin and piano, 23; Trio
"Der chinesische Hund, oder der en-
in D minor for clarinet, cello and pi-
glische Apfelstrudel" for voice and
ano, op. 3, 20, 22, 23, 24. Writings,
tambourine, 33, "Ein Grab," 251
21-22, 77-78, 93, 208-9
n.40; "Eine ganz neue Schelmweys,"
234 n.16; "Ernste Stunde," 131, Zemlinsky, Ida Guttmann, 6, 32, 59,
140, 201; "Erwartung," 257 n.6; 91, 111, 187
"Es war ein alter Konig" (1903), Zemlinsky, Johanna, 19, 32-33, 70
258 n.27; fragments of two Chinese Zemlinsky, Louise Sachsel, 6, 18-19,
songs based on Bethge's words, 253 20, 59, 69, 73, 74, 79-80
n.86; "Julihexen," 28, 234 n.16; Zemlinsky, Mathilde. See Schoenberg,
"Madchenlied," 255 n.13; "Mit To- Mathilde
ves Stimme fliistert der Wald," 126; Zemlinszky, Adolf von, 18-19, 20,
"O war mein Leib," 74, 142; "Sie, 118, 231 nn.2, 11
wie wunderlich der Abend lacht," Zemlinszky, Clara Semo, 18, 29, 156
258 n.29; "Trutzliedchen," 255 n.13; Zschorlich, Paul, 57
"Waldseligkeit," 251 n.40; Choral Zuckerkandl, Berta. See Szeps-
Music: "Aurikelchen," 126; Friih- Zuckerkandl, Berta
lingsbegrdbnis, 23, 151, 255 n.12; Zusner, Vincenz, 149-50
"Hochzeitsgesang" (Baruch aba, mi Zweig, Fritz, 55
adir), 19, 231 n.15; Psalm 13, 19, Zweig, Stefan, 12-13, 68
About the Author
Mezzo soprano LORRAINE GORRELL is Professor of Music at Winthrop

University in South Carolina. Educated at Hood College and Yale Univer-
sity, she has contributed to such journals as The Music Review and Music
and Musicians, and is the author of The Nineteenth-Century German Lied.
Recent Titles in
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Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan
Susan M. Asai
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Wagner's Music-Dramas
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CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY

The paper used in this book complies with the

1. Fin de siecle Vienna 1

3. The Real World 27

11. Introduction to the Songs 136

13. A Notorious Brahmin: O p . 2, O p . 5, O p . 6 153

14. A N e w Path: O p . 7, O p . 8, O p . 10, Unpublished Songs 170

15. Maturity: Op. 13, Unpublished Songs of 1916 190

I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Donald Friedman, Friederike

Werfel is referred to as Alma Schindler before her marriage to Mahler and

The one to whom I owe most of my knowledge of the technique and

today, captivated by conventional aesthetic idealism, one tends to go too far in

Because his music was perceived to be a synthesis of stylistic elements of

Indeed, composer, conductor, pianist, and teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky

Perhaps this explains why Gustav Mahler, w h o was never perceived as

There is also an inertia in the reevaluation of composers whose works

Zemlinsky's work is gradually being viewed as having a "greater signifi-

Fin de siecle Vienna

[Mjodernism, after 1848, was very much an urban phenomenon. . . .

T h r o u g h o u t the nineteenth century, the H a p s b u r g Empire was weakened

zerland) under Prussian rule. Bismarck swallowed up Schleswig/Holstein,

other European cities, it attracted waves of Jewish immigrants. Soon, over

Chavannes, admired by the "official" art world in France and by symbolist

A similar view of Vienna was expressed in the famous 1911 edition of

ful solitude, unpleasant incidents of Jew-hatred." 5 4 Nevertheless, after

Fin de siecle Vienna's amazing artistic, scientific, and intellectual renais-

Arthur Schnitzler chronicled the sexual deception and distress of those

In his play Reigen (Round Dance, 1 8 9 8 - 1 8 9 9 ) , Schnitzler presented ten

composer was Offenbach," was uninterested in Schoenberg's music. 8 6 In

Alexander Zemlinsky was born on 14 October 1871 in the Jewish working-

Israeli community in Vienna when Zemlinsky was nearly seventeen years

1890 indicated that the eighteen-year-old Zemlinsky had "completed his

So many facets of Brahms's character are charmingly revealed in this an-

Brahms appears to have heard several of Zemlinsky's early works. O n

war einmal, adapted by Maximilian Singer from a Danish play by Holger

The Real World

In 1900, the twenty-nine-year-old Zemlinsky accepted a position as Ka-

Arno Holz, Frank Wedekind, Gustav Falke, Christian Morgenstern, and

technical perfection. . . . His conversation was highly stimulating and cyn-

Zemlinsky's humor, frankness, lack of posturing, and skepticism enlivened

Because of his blossoming reputation at the Carltheater, Zemlinsky was

pathetic audiences.43 Zemlinsky was named president, Schoenberg was

Korngold highlights a number of Zemlinsky's splendid qualities: his won-

Weingartner's Kain und Abel at the N e w German Theater with Weingart-

stage director Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt's move away from naturalism to

Prague was on a different planet from Vienna or Berlin.

In 1 9 1 1 , Zemlinsky was appointed conductor of the German Theater in

After he assumed his post in Prague, Zemlinsky immediately inaugurated

Zemlinsky String Quartet in A major, op. 4 (Rose Quartet)

Zemlinsky premiered his orchestral arrangements of four Maeterlinck songs

A Florentine Tragedy was premiered at the Stuttgart Court Opera on 30

rounded in Vienna. I understood immediately that if it goes on like this

theaters had been taken over. 69 O n 16 November 1920, a group of Czech

Zemlinsky's superb musicianship made him a formidable advocate for

the opera's performance in Prague. "I believe [Wozzeck] would present a

17th May 1925

18th May 1925

According to critic Leo Schleissner, the Wozzeck Fragments made a strong

derful performance of both works, noting that Erwartung was "perhaps

applauding. Zemlinsky was finally allowed to speak: "All I have to say, I

Zemlinsky's move to Berlin has generally been regarded as a step down.

in 1 9 2 3 , debilitating inflation destroyed the modest economic recovery that

1928 as "praiseworthy throughout."25 Weissmann had earlier objected to