1871–1942 · Austria · 20th century
Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942), an Austrian composer, conductor and teacher, was a close friend and the only formal music teacher Arnold Schoenberg ever had; Schoenberg later married Zemlinsky's sister. He conducted in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, and wrote operas, symphonies and songs. On the site, a good place to start exploring his music is with his songs for voice and piano.
Alexander von Zemlinsky was born in Vienna on 14 October 1871. His grandfather Anton had left Žilina, in Slovak lands then under Hungary, for Austria, where he married an Austrian woman. The composer's father, Adolf, grew up in a Catholic household, while his mother, Clara Semo, grew up in Sarajevo, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish father and a Bosniak Muslim mother. Adolf converted to Judaism before marrying Clara, and their son Alexander was likewise raised in that faith.
The composer's father had added the aristocratic particle "von" to the family name, although none of his ancestors had been ennobled, and changed the original spelling, Semlinski, to Zemlinsky. Alexander had studied the piano from early childhood and played the organ in the synagogue on holidays.
In 1884, shortly before his thirteenth birthday, Alexander entered the Vienna Conservatory, where he first studied piano with Wilhelm Rauch and then moved to Anton Door's class. In 1890 he won the Conservatory's competition. His theoretical training came from Robert Fuchs, while composition lessons were given by Johann Nepomuk Fuchs and Anton Bruckner; his first attempts at composing music also date from this period.
Zemlinsky completed his studies in 1892. Even then he found strong support in Johannes Brahms, to whom he was introduced by his teacher Johann Fuchs: at Fuchs's invitation, Brahms attended a performance of one of Zemlinsky's early works, the Symphony in D minor. Brahms thought highly of the young composer and recommended his works to the publisher Simrock for print.
After three years of study, Zemlinsky's progress was assessed and he was awarded a Rubinstein scholarship of 1,000 guilders a year; this money, together with private lessons and competition prizes, supported him for a time.
During his student years Zemlinsky made the acquaintance of the conductor Artur Bodanzky and the cellist Friedrich Buxbaum; in 1893/94 he joined the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein, an association of artists founded by Anton Door in 1884.
During those years, Zemlinsky met Arnold Schoenberg, and the two formed a close friendship. In 1895 Zemlinsky founded the amateur orchestra Polyhymnia, in which Schoenberg played the cello. Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg lessons in counterpoint — this remained the only formal music education Schoenberg ever received. Later the friends also became relatives: Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde married Schoenberg.
In 1897 the premiere of Zemlinsky's Symphony No. 2 (chronologically the third, which is why his symphonies are sometimes numbered differently) was a great success. In 1899 the composer took the post of Kapellmeister at Vienna's Carltheater. Mahler also gave Zemlinsky's career a boost in 1900, leading the first staging of his opera Es war einmal at the Vienna Court Opera.
The symphony that brought Zemlinsky success in 1897 had been written for a competition established and funded by Brahms: the composer won joint first prize, sharing it with another author, Robert Gound.
Between 1893 and 1895 Zemlinsky wrote the opera Sarema, for which he won the Luitpold Prize in 1896; the opera was successfully staged at the Munich Court Opera in the 1897/98 season.
Zemlinsky grew close to Alma Schindler, one of his composition students, in 1900 and told her how he felt, but she turned him down — her family pushed hard for the relationship to end, and she gave in. Two years later, in 1902, Alma became Gustav Mahler's wife. That failed romance lies behind his orchestral fantasy Die Seejungfrau, finished in 1903 and premiered in 1905.
Zemlinsky married Ida Guttmann in 1907, though the marriage did not go well. After she died in 1929, he married Luise Sachsel the following year; she was twenty-nine years younger and had been his singing pupil since 1914. That second marriage was a far happier one, lasting for the rest of his life.
Zemlinsky's first major conducting post in Vienna came in 1906, when he became Kapellmeister of the Volksoper, before moving to the Vienna Court Opera in 1907–1908. Between 1911 and 1927 he conducted at the Prague opera, leading the premiere of Schoenberg's Erwartung, and in 1920 he became the first rector of the city's newly founded German Academy of Music.
After a long stay in Prague, Zemlinsky moved to Berlin, where he worked as a conductor at the Kroll Opera under Otto Klemperer.
During these same Prague years, Zemlinsky composed one of his major scores — the Lyric Symphony (1923), built on German translations of verses by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and scored for soprano, baritone and orchestra.
Fellow musicians such as Kurt Weill and Igor Stravinsky admired Zemlinsky's conducting, prizing both his readings of Mozart and his championing of Mahler and Schoenberg. Three composers who studied with him went on to establish their own reputations: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, as well as Hans Krása and Karl Weigl.
After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Zemlinsky moved to Vienna, where he held no official post but continued to compose and appear as a guest conductor. In 1938 he and his wife moved via Prague to New York — before they left, their property was confiscated to cover a special exit tax the Nazis imposed on Jews.
Unlike his friend Schoenberg, who had also emigrated to the United States and was received there with great enthusiasm, Zemlinsky never achieved popularity in America: he suffered a series of strokes, stopped composing, felt forgotten by everyone and was often ill. The composer died of pneumonia on 15 March 1942 in Larchmont, near New York. According to his will, his ashes were buried in Vienna, the city he always considered home.
Zemlinsky wrote in many genres: eight operas, four string quartets, symphonies, and numerous vocal cycles for voice with piano or orchestra. His early works show the influence of Brahms, though even then Zemlinsky handled dissonance more freely than Brahms himself; later his music absorbed more of the harmonic language of Wagner and Mahler. Schoenberg's path toward atonal and twelve-tone writing was one Zemlinsky never followed; some of his later works, though, lean toward the harder, leaner style typical of their era.
Among Zemlinsky's vocal works are numerous cycles and individual songs for voice and piano, which he wrote throughout his life. On the site, a good place to start exploring his music is with two such songs: "Fensterlein, nachts bist du zu" at the intermediate-plus level and the more demanding "Liebe Schwalbe" at the advanced level — both written for voice with piano accompaniment.
Zemlinsky's operas include Eine florentinische Tragödie (1915) and Der Zwerg (The Dwarf, 1919), a partly autobiographical piece; both draw on stories by Oscar Wilde. Among his orchestral works, the fantasy Die Seejungfrau stands out: Zemlinsky pulled it from performance soon after its premiere, and for decades the score was presumed gone, until two surviving fragments turned out, in the 1980s, to belong to the same work; today it ranks among his most often performed pieces.
Zemlinsky's chamber works include a Sonata in A minor for cello and piano, as well as choral works with orchestra, among them three settings of psalm texts; among his vocal cycles with piano, the best known is the Sechs Gesänge, Op. 13, set to texts by Maurice Maeterlinck.
The three-movement Sinfonietta (1934) was highly admired by Schoenberg and Berg; it draws on a harder-edged idiom shared with contemporary pieces by Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.
The Lyric Symphony, composed during these Prague years, is Zemlinsky's most celebrated piece: Alban Berg drew on it for his own Lyric Suite, borrowing a direct quotation and dedicating the new work to Zemlinsky.
Despite his skill at the keyboard, Zemlinsky wrote no solo concerto of his own, choosing instead to work as a much-requested accompanist in well-to-do Viennese homes; one piece he left unfinished was an early ballet, Der Triumph der Zeit, started in 1901.