Patrick Bade
The Tragic Story of Alexander von Zemlinsky

Patrick Bade - The Tragic Story of Alexander von Zemlinksy

- Right. Well, thank you, Lauren. So here is a picture of Alexander von Zemlinsky. He died in United States as a refugee in March, 1943. And shortly before he died, he was on a visit to New York, and I suppose like so many European refugees at the time, he really felt a fish out of water. And he was walking down Broadway with his wife, Louise. And he looked around him and he said to her bitterly, “I wouldn’t want to be buried here in this country.” He died thinking that he was completely forgotten and that his whole life had been wasted. And indeed for a generation, his music was completely cast into oblivion. It was only in the 1960s with the revival of interest in Mahler and people researching about Mahler, the name Zemlinsky was cropping up here and there. And people thought, well, let’s try out his music. And he underwent his own revival in the 1970s. Now around 1980, the BBC third programme, which is largely devoted to music, announced that Zemlinsky would be composer of the week. That means there would be five programmes on him every day at midday. And perhaps unwisely, they promoted this series of programmes with a quote from another great composer, Arnold Schoenberg. And Schoenberg said that everything he knew about music he had learned from Zemlinsky. Now at the time, there was a mini culture war going on, it’s still going on. I’ll say more about that in a minute. And the young journalist, he was young then, Simon Jenkins, he was attacking the BBC for being elitist. So he picked up on this quote from Schoenberg and he said, “Who is this composer Zemlinsky? "None of us have heard of him, "and if Schoenberg says, he learned everything from him, "we can guess what kind of music that is, "it’ll be some kind of dreadful cacophony "that nobody can understand.”

So I wrote a letter to Simon Jenkins at the Evening Standard for which he wrote, first of all, I defended very strongly Radio 3, I would say that I got a large part of my musical education from listening to Radio 3. And it still provides a wonderful service in this respect. And sadly, as I said, it’s very much under attack again, the sort of loony Brexity, crazy right wing people who want to destroy the BBC. And it’s already announced that it’s going to be staffed the funds and eventually deprived of public funds. Well, that’s another story for debate, but I followed my defence of Radio 3, by saying to Simon Jenkins, don’t judge before you’ve listened. And I recommended that he listened to the Lyric Symphony, which has becomes Zemlinsky’s best known and most frequently performed work. And he did so. And of course, this is… Oh, here is Zemlinsky with Schoenberg, who is his brother-in-law at one point, and here is an excerpt of Zemlinsky Lyric Symphony. So as you hear very sumptuous, gorgeous music, and actually Simon Jenkins, he did have the good manners to write back. And he said, yes, I’ve listened to the Lyric Symphony of Zemlinsky. And you are right, it’s gorgeous music. I don’t know whether he said it in public, but he said it privately to me. So Zemlinsky was born in Vienna. He was born and brought up in the predominantly Jewish inner suburb of Leopoldstadt, currently, of course the subject of a very successful play by Tom Stoppard. But was he Jewish? This is a question, I mean, this very, very thorny question of Jewish identity. His mother was half Jewish on her father’s side. His father, both parents actually when he was born were Roman Catholic.

And for whatever reason they converted to Judaism. So does that make him Jewish? It depends who you ask. I think probably for most Orthodox Jews, he would not be regarded as Jewish. He later reconverted to Catholicism, and I think it’s very doubtful whether at any point in his life he considered that he was Jewish. Unfortunately for him, other people decided for him. Alma Mahler, who had a brief affair with him, wrote about him as a Jew in the most horribly, unpleasantly, antisemitic terms in her diary. And of course, later he was regarded as a Jew by the Nazi. This whole inflamed, difficult question of what is a Jew? Who is a Jew? Who decides who is a Jew? I would recommend two things. I’m sure this has come up endless times in Trudy’s lectures and in other lectures from the team, but I’d like to recommend two things for you to read. One, you can find it on the internet, it’s Ernst Gombrich essay “Arts in Vienna circa 1900; "Reflections on the Jewish Catastrophe.” He says, “Isn’t it for the individual to decide "whether they’re a Jew or not? "It’s not for somebody else to tell you "that you are or not.” And that’s a very thought provoking in a very extraordinary essay of Gombrich. And the other, this book I’ve mentioned it before, I’m reading it at the moment, “Belonging and Betrayal,” how Jews made the art world. I’m only about quarter way through it, but it’s totally fascinating. It’s very gripping. And he deals with these questions, I think in a very sensitive way. This is the author Charles Dellheim. So as his father was certainly in favour of assimilation and he believed strongly in education. And he took the child Zemlinsky to a performance of Barney’s low inkling. And as in for so many people in the late 19th century, this was a revelatory experience.

He came back in a kind of fever of excitement. You read this again and again in the memoirs of the period, Bruno Volta, Kandinsky and Benwaa and Less Savoury people like going to the opera as children or adolescents and experiencing vagner as being some kind of extraordinary life-changing thing like puberty or the discovery of sex. Often the two are actually linked together. So at 13 he was very gifted and precociously gifted, and he won a scholarship to the Vienna Conservatoire. One of his teachers there was Anton Bruckner. And already, when he was about 20 years old, he attracted the attention of Brahms. Brahms took a really fatherly interest in him, did all he could to help him even offered financial help and offered all his contacts. And Zemlinsky’s early music in the 1890s is very strongly influenced by Brahms, understandably. And I’m going to play you a fascinating recent recording made by the leading cellist, Raphael Wallfisch, who as I’m sure you know is the son of Anita, who has spoken to our audience several times. So this cello was performed in Vienna in 1894 and then disappeared. It was never performed again. People knew about it, but it was assumed that it had been last destroyed in the Second World War or destroyed by the Nazi or whatever. But Raphael Wallfisch was going through the papers of his father, the distinguished pianist, Peter Wallfisch. And he came across a very dim photocopy of the cello sonata. It was so dim that it was almost impossible to read. So he took it to the leading Zemlinsky scholar, Anthony Beaumont, who managed to decipher it and produce a performing version. So Raphael Wallfisch was able to replay it for the first time since 1894 and to record it. And here’s a bit of that recording. You’ll hear this, the very Brahms in quality and this dense piano part Brahms love of these chunky chords and the left hand going right down to the bottom of the piano.

So he seemed on the way to be having a successful career as a composer. And it looked like a great step forward when his fairytale opera Es war einmal once upon a time was performed at the Imperial Opera with Mahler in charge at the time with the top singers available, Zelma Coates, Eric Smithers, who you see on the screen. And it had a modest success. It wasn’t quite the sort of sensational breakthrough perhaps, that he’d hoped for. And then we see by this time and into the early 1900s how his musical style is evolving. He’s increasingly influenced by Vagner and he’s working in an incredibly lush post Vagnarian idiom. So I’m going to play you an excerpt from the first movement of his symphony entitled the Mermaid. And it is of course inspired by the story of Hans Christian Andersen. But it’s in this extraordinarily lush pop style that we associate with the music of Mahler and with the art of Klimt. And you can also see it as looking forward to the kind of music that his fellow Viennese composer Erich Korngold would introduce to Hollywood in the 1930s. I imagine you are all familiar with the story of the little mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen, which is a story about unrequited love. Now, Hans Christian Andersen was a very ugly man who didn’t find a woman to love him. He fell in love with the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind. And when he proposed to her, she laughed at him and she held up a mirror with incredible cruelty. And I think Zemlinsky must have identified quite strongly with that story, ‘cause in 1900 he met the most beautiful girl in Vienna Alma Mahler. And they had a sort of affair. As my granny would’ve said, they didn’t go all away, but they went very far down the road, I can tell you was a lot of heavy petting.

She teased him, she tempted him, she tortured him in an absolutely appalling way before dropping him in favour of Gustav Mahler, who was obviously a much better match. I think this really scarred Zemlinsky for life. I mean, so much of his work, I think later is referring to this very harrowing experience he had with the beautiful Alma Mahler. I’m going to talk a lot more about it when I get to Alma in about a week’s time. I’ve got some extraordinary quotes from her diary, which I will give you. And so this theme of longing for love, longing for some beautiful princess, this is a big theme for the rest of his work. And his next opera is is about a young man who longs for love and a kind of ideal princess figure. And it’s called Der Traumgörge. And this again was, I think intended by him to be a big breakthrough work. He thought this was going to make him as a composer. And it was eventually accepted for performance at the opera by Mahler. Mahler was very imperious and very demanding. He asked for lots of changes and improvements and the whole thing dragged out, dragged out, dragged out until 1907. But it got as far as having sets designed and made by the great Alfred Roller, who was Mahler’s favourite designer. Sets were made, the opera was in rehearsal, the score had been printed. And then disaster strikes, Mahler in a fit of peak as we shall hear on Wednesday, walked out of the Vienna Opera and he left Austria and he went to America. And the new director Felix Weingartner was seen as a kind of anti Mahler.

So he immediately sacked the people, particularly associated with Mahler. Despite the fact that so much money and effort had been involved in staging this opera, as I said, getting quite far into rehearsals, he cancelled the whole thing. And it disappeared without trace. And no note of it was heard until the Zemlinsky revival in the late 20th century. And it was actually performed for the first time in 1980. And I’m going to play you the very exquisite, beautiful end of this opera where in fact the hero does find his beautiful princess. Zemlinsky next opera, first performed in 1917 is Eine florentinische Tragödie, the Florentine Tragedy, which is inspired by an unfinished play by Oscar Wilde. And it has an extremely purid plot. A woman called Bianca, who is unhappily married to Simone. And she takes a handsome lover widow. And in the final scene Simone strangles her lover in front of Bianca. Instead of being horrified, she’s really excited and turned on and she and her husband proceed to make love over the body of her lover. So pretty kingly stuff. It was this, of course, later the Nazi would accuse Jews of being over interested in sex and being depraved and all that stuff. And other Jewish composers like Shreka were accused of being perverted and degenerate. And of course the whole industry, so to speak, of psychoanalysis and freudian ideas about sex were denounced by the Nazi. Now in this opera is once again really an opera about his relationship with Alma.

And she was very indignant and upset. And when he wrote her and told her this, and this is what he said to her rather brutally in a letter that survives, “The treachery of fate drives two people apart,” obviously thinking of his relationship with Alma, “the husband’s passion” Mahler, you can see for his work, “Husband’s passion for his work leads him "to overlook his wife’s beauty "while the woman she side finding herself cheated "of her youth and physical appeal "becomes a slave to apathy, dejection an open hatred. "And you of all people Alma "have failed to understand that exclamation mark.” So I’m going to play you just the final moments of the opera when Simone strangles Quido you’ll hear wonderful description in the orchestra of his dying breath as he expires. And then the excitement as Simone and Bianca over the body of the lover look at each other with lust. Now, where is my thing on? I’ll find the… I may have to leave that one out. I can’t seem to find the thing to click on, these things are mysterious. So at 1913, he’s had quite a good career in Vienna. He was in charge of the two main operator theatres, Karl Theatre and Theatre an der Wien. And then he took over the Volksoper. Which is the most European cities will have a kind of royal opera or prince opera, imperial one, and they’ll have a sort of lesser opera house with operas done less lavishly at more modest prices, which is sort of opera for the people. Zemlinsky was in charge of the Volksoper in Vienna, in a very successful regime, paralleled the regime of Mahler at the whole opera.

He gave memorable premieres of Strauss’s salami, which had been banned at the whole opera, and he presented Toska to the Vietnamese. Partly I think because as I shall explain to you next week, Mahler intensely disliked Puccini. He was happy for somebody else to premiere Toska. And then in 1913, he goes to Prague and he takes over the Prague as we saw here when we get to Czechoslovakia was a completely bilingual city. It was really a city of three cultures who were the Czechs, there were the Germans and there were the Jews who identified more with the Germans than they did with the Czechs. That if they didn’t speak Yiddish, the Czech Jews were more likely to speak German as a daily language than they were Czech. But the various communities in Prague lived pretty harmoniously together. There was, you could say a peaceful coexistence, it was almost kind of voluntary apartheid. They were living separately. So the Czechs had their opera house where operas were performed in Czech. And the German speakers had their opera house where everything was performed in German. As you can see, it’s a very magnificent building as splendid as the National Czech Opera House.

Zemlinsky apparently all his years in Prague and he never learned Czech. He never learned enough Czech, according to his wife, to buy a ticket for a tram. But he did a lot for Czech music. He promoted the operas of Yana Czech, he promoted the young Kraza, Fibich and other Czech composers. Put on very daring avant-garde programmes. He gave the world premiere of Schoenberg’s in 1924. And he was also well known for nurturing the careers of promising young singers and two singers who heard a great deal to him, on the left hand side as Octavian, you can see Reza Stephens, who got her first experiences in Prague under Zemlinsky and then went on to a highly successful career in New York at the Metropolitan. And another singer who also eventually lands up the metropolitan, the very beautiful Jarmila Novotná. And I’m going to play you a record of her singing an orchestral song by the Czech composer Fibich. But the conductor on this recording is Zemlinsky. We do have a number of… Unlike 'cause we have no recordings of Mahler conducting, but we have a number of recordings of Fibich, of Zemlinsky conducting not his own music unfortunately, but music by other composers. I think that’s a heavenly record. Beautiful music, wonderful singing, and beautiful conducting from Zemlinsky. Now Zemlinsky wrote several operas. He’s quite a prolific composer, but to me he’s apart from the Lyric Symphony, which is wonderful, I played you already. His greatest masterpiece is the Opera Der Geburtstag der Infantin was also known as Der Zwerg “The Birthday of the Infanta.” So it’s either the birthday of the infanta or the dwarf. And this was premiered in 1922 in Cologne under the baton of Otto Klemperer. And once again, it’s a setting of, in this case, a novella by Oscar Wilde, which is inspired by Velazquez Las Meninas.

And in Oscar Wilde’s story, I think Oscar Wilde was probably also suffering a little bit from the same problem that Zemlinsky had, that he wasn’t a good looking man. He was really, I suppose an ugly man. But he was in love with beauty. And in this story, one of the infantas dwarfs falls desperately in love with her. And she thinks this is very funny. She thinks it’s amusing and she teases him and she leads him on and she makes him think that she’s in love with him too. Shades of Alma, of course, once again, it’s the same story of Zemlinsky and Alma. So get rid of that. Yeah. Here is a scene towards the end of the opera, the infanta has been playing with the dwarf and then she leaves, there’s a ball going on and she leaves him to go and dance and she leaves him alone. And he at this point still thinks that she is in love with him. She’s given him a rose. And he goes into this beautiful poetic revere thinking about his love for her and her love for him. At the end of it, he goes to find her in the ballroom, but on the way there he comes across a huge mirror and he’s never seen his reflection before. And he’s absolutely horrified. First of all, he doesn’t realise it’s him. And then when he does realise it’s him, he realises that it’s all been a fantasy and a lie and that the princess doesn’t really love him. So he collapses dying. His heart is broken. The infanta nurse Ghita comes in. She’s the only really sympathetic character in the opera. She worries for him and she understands what has happened. And the princess comes in and she wants to play with her toy. And of course he’s dying and her reaction is, well, my present already broken. Next time I want a toy without a heart.

Anyway, so opera, I think that is written from the heart. I find it incredibly poignant. I don’t know why it’s not done more often. I think it’s a real masterpiece. In 1924, Zemlinsky arrived in Berlin. 'Cause Berlin is absolutely hot in the middle of the 1920s. We’re past the immediate crisis of inflation and so on. It’s just crackling, bubbling as Vienna had been, of course in 1900. And it has three opera houses, all of them of an incredibly high level. There is the Stadtische Oper, which you see at the top. There’s the Kroll Opera in the middle. That’s where Zemlinsky was working with Otto Klemperer. And there is the Deutsche Oper, the town opera at the bottom, which was also doing incredible things. So it was an exciting period for him. 'Course, amazing time to arrive in Berlin. Our team had done a whole series of lectures on Berlin in the '20s. And I’m sure we’ll come back to that at some point in the not so distant future, as I said it was just a bubbling cauldron of innovation, new ideas, controversies, culture wars, yes, similar culture wars like the ones we’re having at the moment. Berlin’s always saying, Judy’s always saying to me, oh my God, what’s happening in the world today? Is it Berlin, 1920s? I hope it’s not. This is of course the Berlin of the '20s, the most famous image on the left hand side of the journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix and a drawing by George Gross. So a very different world from Vienna 1900, extraordinary to think this, it’s just a generation between them. And there were many people who lived through both. 1927 was one of those moments I’ve been talking about them in regard to Vienna, 1897, 98 a year where there is a sea change in the culture. And this was represented, and I will talk more about this when I talk about Korngold in a couple of weeks time. With an operatic battle, two operas were premiered in Berlin, Vienna, and actually all the major German speaking centres in 1927.

It was Ernst Krenek, Johnny Spielt Auf and Korngold The Korngold is Mal irian plus gorgeous, unbelievably sumptuous in that style that we’re familiar with from his Hollywood movies. Whereas Johnny Spielt Auf was edgy. It was more in keeping with the art that I’ve just shown you with the . It was jazz influenced and it has a black hero. So it was absolutely hated by the Nazi, as you can imagine. But Zemlinsky is an interesting case because he comes out of that, that same world as Korngold, the world of Mahler and Clinton, lushness, sumptuous orchestration and beautiful tunes. But he changes, he changes with the times. The following year is the premiere of opera. Clearly Zemlinsky is taking this on board and he actually works with them in 1931, he conducts the premiere of one of the later collaborations of , the musical piece, Mahogany. He changes with the times and his style undergoes quite a radical transformation. And we hear that in his opera, Der kaukasische, the Chalk circle. This was completed and about to be presented all over Germany in 1933. Timing, my God, for Zemlinsky throughout his life, the timing was disastrous, I already talked about 1907 and the cancellation of his opera at the whole opera, and the disaster that was for him. But to write another masterpiece that you think was going to present your new style to the world and you hope will be a big breakthrough. And it really looks, everybody loves it.

They think it’s going to be great. There were projected productions in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg for what year? 1933. Not a good year for a Jewish composer to present his masterpiece to the German speaking world. So immediately all three productions were cancelled. It was performed, it was performed in Zurich. And then there was, surprisingly, it’s hard to explain this, a short run of performances in Berlin in 1934, but then that production was also called off. And that was obviously the end of Zemlinsky’s career as far as Nazi Germany was concerned. So I’m going to play you the opening scene. I think it’s a very effective piece. I like it a lot. You’ll hear the influence of and you can smell Weimar, in the rather notoric rhythms, the very astringent harmony and the use of saxophones is kind of wailing saxophones all very, very associated with the culture of the Weimar Republic. Just to tell you the story a little bit, well you’re going to hear it in German here, also that’s very much like a better breast piece that you have a speaker talking over the orchestra. And the speaker who introduces the play is a brothel keeper who’s a retired executioner. And the story is of a young girl who’s sold by her family into prostitution, but she succeeds in her career and lands up as empress of China. So it’s a piece a bit like therap opera, of course, which has got a very strong element of social and political comment. Now, after being forced to leave Germany, he goes back to Vienna.

He had recently married for the second time his wife Louise, who was quite wealthy, so he didn’t starve. And as you can see from the image on the right hand side, they had a very nice modernist house. Inclinsing, they had an art collection that included Sheila. If life was not as exciting for him as it had been in 1900 in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s, it was comfortable enough of course, until the angelas in 1938. Zemlinsky was adamant that he wanted to stay and he desperately searched for birth certificates and documents to try and prove his Arian descent. His wife was more realistic. And she said, no, no, no, we’ve really got to go. She forced him and she applied for visas for the United States. They got them, they managed to get out via Prague and arrive in America. But of course he was completely unknown there. He was of no interest whatsoever, hence his extreme depression. And the remark that I reported to you. Well one piece of positive news I can give you is that his wish not to be buried, at least not buried permanently in America, was satisfied because his body was taken back to the Vienna, where he was born and that he loved so much and he was interred in the Central Fleeth hall along with other great musicians, including Mahler of course. And this is the monument and his grave in Vienna in the Central Fleeth hall.

And I’ve got one more piece to play you, which it’s a song that he wrote in in 1934. And it’s a setting of one of the poems of which had actually already been set to music by Mahler. But this is clearly a text, a little hunchback man who’s in love with a woman and is dismissed. It’s clearly a poem that had a very personal meaning for him. I better stop there to allow some time for comments and questions. The last thing I’ll say is what is it about this life and career? Was it bad luck? Was it bad timing or was there some inner thing that led him to repeated disaster and failure. And I think he suspected this, and I’m going to finish with a quote from a letter that he wrote to Palmer. He said, “Certainly I lack that "that one needs today more than ever to make one’s way. "It’s no use having elbows, "one also needs to know how to use them.” So that’s it. Let’s see what we’ve got in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, special birthday. Shout to Carol.

Q: How was Zemlinsky related to Schoenberg?

A: He is related to Schoenberg by marriage. His sister Matilda was Schoenberg’s first wife.

I agree about Radio 3.

Q: This is James. Do you know what is the extreme right thinks the BBC is biassed.

A: Everybody thinks that BBC is biassed. The left think it’s biassed to the right, which I think is probably a sign that it’s not really very biassed one way or the other. But obviously an authoritarian government doesn’t want an independent news organisation.

When you try to access some of Zemlinsky’s working library from recordings, the digital selection of Berlin Philharmonic Art Orchestra wasn’t a single composed. That really does surprise me 'cause it is quite performed quite a lot these days.

Yes, the Wannsee Conference thought they had decided who is a Jew. Of course there’s that very famous quote isn’t there of gabbles. And I know Trudy has given you many times when he said, I decide who is a Jew and who isn’t. To a non-Jew, who is a Jew is in the eye of the beholder.

Yes. Berlin Phil under Kirill Petrenko will play Lisa Symphony on 10th of June and they have a digital platform. So you can listen to that. The Tom Laris song I’m going to cover in my talk on Alma Alma did, I wouldn’t say she cheated on Mahler constantly, but she cheated on Mahler, that’s for sure. And I’m presuming that, well I’m sure Zemlinsky knew that, all of Vienna knew it. And I think that the story of the Florentine tragedy is referring probably in particular to her affair with Walter Gropius. Well the Anthony Beaumont book on Zemlinsky is the best one. I recommend that one to you. The name of the article.

Yes, it’s by Gombrich, the great art historian, and the title is “The Visual Arts in Vienna 1900; "Reflections on the Jewish Tragedy.” If you Google Gombrich, you’ll find it on the internet and you’ll be able to read it. It’s not about the book I’m reading. I’ll put that in my next list for you. It’s this one. And if you can, well, it’s back to front, isn’t it? Or is it. It’s by Charles Dellheim “Belonging and Betrayal.” It’s not about musicians, it’s about the visual arts. And it’s fantastic.

Margaret, if I had to guess the origin of music by Novotná , it’s not German, it’s Czech, it’s by Fibich. And as you say, it’s got a very, a slavic quality, doesn’t sound German and it’s just a song by Fibich. It’s on the list and it’s sung by the wonderful wonderful Jarmila Novotná. Jarmila Novotná of course, some of you may also know her from the film called “The Search,” which was really, I think the absolute first film after the Second World War to deal with the consequences of the Holocaust and the concentration camps. And it’s about a mother who is separated from her child in a concentration camp. And the whole movie is about how her search for the lost child.

The name of the opera, it’s also on the list Der Zwerg, or which is the dwarf, or it’s also known in some recordings, the title is Der Geburtstag der Infantin, the infanta’s birthday. How well Germany was doing in the '20s and how far left they were. It seems to have brought about the ultra right wing acceptance of the Nazi. Makes me think of how far the left is today and the rise. Well, we’re in very, very scary times. What can I say? I agree with you about that. It’s very unnerving.

Right, well that seems to be the end of the questions and comments. Thank you very much and we’ll move on to Mahler and his stint at the Vienna Opera on Wednesday. Oh incidentally, if anybody’s still listening, it is confirmed that I will be doing a Vienna tour in June four day tour for Kirker Travel. Maybe I’ll put that on my next list if anybody’s interested. There are still some places on that tour. Thank you everybody. Bye-Bye.