Friday, April 4, 2008

Listening Journal No. 3

Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony

Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was an Austrian composer, conductor and teacher, who tended to be associated within many prominent music circles. Through these networks, Zemlinsky met Arnold Schonberg and Gustav Mahler. These two composers promoted Zemlinsky’s music, and Mahler even conducted the premiere of Zemlinsky’s opera Es war einmal. Zemlinsky had a notable impact upon Schonberg’s pupil, Alban Berg, who dedicated his Lyric Suite to Zemlinsky. Berg also used quotes from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony in his tribute. Even though he had this impact upon the younger composer, Zemlinsky never used atonal or 12-tone techniques in his compositions. Zemlinsky’s relationship with Mahler bears a striking resemblance to that of Hans von Bulow and Richard Wagner. Zemlinsky and Bulow both fell in love with women who eventually left them for their idols. In 1900, Zemlinsky fell in love with Alma Schindler. Alma left Zemlinsky and married Mahler in 1902. Despite this heartbreak, Zemlinsky and Mahler still supported each other’s music.
Written in 1922, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony is a seven-movement work written for solo soprano, solo baritone and orchestra. The text is a German translation of poems by the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. (The Bengalis are a community that lives in Bangladesh and India). Zemlinsky, when presenting it to his publisher, likened it to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Prior to the Lyric Symphony, Zemlinsky wrote three other symphonies, none of which incorporated voices.
Zemlinsky’s used his vocal soloists as soloists, never pairing them together. They both have their own individual movements, and the movements tend to alternate back and forth between the two singers. Zemlinsky carefully crafted the vocal lines to accentuate the natural inflections of the German language, to the point where (if I understood German better) the text is easily intelligible through the music.
Upon a first hearing of this piece, I was reminded of two diverse pieces: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade. The association between this work and the Sea Symphony seems fairly straight-forward. Both works have a very similar instrumentation (with one notable difference being Vaughan Williams’s inclusion of a choir). Both emphasize the vocal soloists using the orchestra mainly as an accompaniment and for dramatic effects. The borderline bombastic brass opening of the first movement in the Lyric Symphony seems to share many qualities with the opening of the Sea Symphony. Both utilized a dotted rhythm with a very secco, march-like quality in execution. Similar to the Sea Symphony, the Lyric Symphony seems to incorporate aspects of tonality without utilizing a completely functional tonal system. Given that the Lyric Symphony was written between 13 and 19 years after the Sea Symphony, it is possible that Zemlinsky heard Vaughan Williams’s piece and incorporated a similar sound into his work.
The second immediate connection that I made was to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade. The correlation here is a bit more obscure. I think the relationship I heard between the two is a shared focus on the orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov was a master of orchestrating sounds, and examples of his focus on timbre are apparent throughout his works. It is also clear that Zemlinsky, in the Lyric Symphony, focused a lot of energy on his orchestration. The third movement clearly demonstrates Zemlinsky’s control over the orchestra, and his understanding of the instruments’ capabilities. One example of this facility is a well-crafted trade-off of the melody from the baritone soloist to a solo horn in F. This trade is made seamless by Zemlinsky’s scoring of the accompaniment in the string section, which is continually playing throughout this movement. By retaining a common accompaniment, Zemlinsky effectively transferred the melodic material between parts without disrupting the flow.
It is interesting that Zemlinsky compared this piece to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler’s work is quite similar in instrumentation (substituting a tenor for the baritone), and there are moments where Zemlinsky’s piece seems to resemble Mahler’s. Each piece broke the standardized four-movement symphonic form (Mahler had six; Zemlinsky seven). Both pieces had a deep, personal connection to their creators. Mahler had just lost his daughter and was diagnosed with a heart condition. The text of the Lyric Symphony tells of a love affair from origin to termination (which calls to mind Zemlinsky’s lost of Alma). But Zemlinsky did not garter much success, in his lifetime, with this piece. At this point, the German Expressionism, Neo-Classicism, the French movement of Les Six, and other composers (such as Hindemith) began to dominated the modern music scene. Zemlinsky’s late romantic style had all but faded from the modern composition arena.
It would be very interesting to compare, on a much deeper level, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade, and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony to find what Alban Berg found so influential within Zemlinsky’s work that inspired the Lyric Suite.
This work of Zemlinsky’s should be heard and played much more often, than it is presently. Although, in recent years, the Lyric Symphony has gained much more attention and has begun to receive many recordings and performances. It is Zemlinsky’s best known work and a great example of another composer pursuing the Late Romantic Tradition without entering the realm of atonality. But because of this refusal to look forward, as well as backwards, Zemlinsky was writing music in the 1930s and 1940s that people were no longer interested in hearing from modern composers. It should be included within the Canon, though, as the best representation of the composer who influenced many future composers and who worked in a fading traditional style during the outpouring of styles in the early twentieth century.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Derek,
Again, I appreciate the way you tied the music into other composers and musical trends of the time. Zemlinsky's similarities to Vaughn Williams and Rimsky-Korsakov are two interesting comparisons that I wouldn;t have necessarily expected...