CONFERENCE ON THE DWARF

"WHO ARE YOU, ZEMLINSKY"#3

Free conference in the context of the exhibit ” Zemlinsky / Vienna at the start of the 20th century ”.

By Karl Zieger (Professor, Department of Germanic studies and Comparative literature at Lille University 3)

Information from Jean Levy Mediatheque of Lille +33(0)3 20 15 97 20

"As with Gustav Mahler, the Viennese Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was recognized in his day more as a conductor than a composer. The rise of Nazism obliged him to emigrate to the United States where, unlike other artists such as Kurt Weill, Marlene Dietrich or Fritz Lang, he was unable to adapt to American life and died forgotten, after suffering severe material hardship. It has been only quite recently, in the early 1970s and thanks to vinyl records (several recordings of his Lyric Symphony), that the world rediscovered this essential figure of the last dying embers of the Viennese tradition, an heir to Schubert, Brahms and Mahler. A complete musician, he is the author of several scores for orchestra, collections of lieder, four string quartets and eight operas (the last, Circe, unfinished) – his preferred genre.

The composer wished to write a work “on the tragedy of the ugly man” – guided perhaps by his subconscious… Zemlinsky apparently suffered from physical shame, if we are to believe Alma Schindler, his student, who described him as “comic, small, with no chin, and protruding eyes”; she also preferred to marry Gustav Mahler. Furthermore, some have seen in the character of the Capricious and cruel infant the thinly disguised portrait of the beautiful Alma." Franck Mallet