Zemlinsky, Alexander

Alexander Zemlinsky – Eine florentinische Tragödie

(b. Vienna, 4 October 1872 – d. Larchmont, NY, 16 March 1942)

op. 16 (1915-16)

Opera in one act after Oscar Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy in the German translation by Max Meyerfeld

Preface

Like many other composers of fin de siècle Vienna – Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Schreker – Alexander Zemlinsky wore his heart on his musical sleeve and poured his inmost feelings into his scores. One of the most intense of those feelings was the traumatic end to his love affair with his brilliant eighteen-year-old composition student, the famously beautiful Alma Schindler, who bluntly wrote to say that she found him physically repulsive (she went on to marry his older and superior rival Gustav Mahler, whom, however, she likewise found physically repulsive). Zemlinsky never completely recovered from this brutal setback, which reverberates in the plots of his operas like so many romans à clef, whether as wish-fulfillment (Kleider machen Leute, 1910), tragic re-enactment (Der Zwerg, 1922), or as revenge, as a thinly disguised act of revenge, as in the present work, Eine florentinische Tragödie.

In 1915 Zemlinsky had just completed his monumental Second String Quartet (op. 15), a work of Strindbergian intensity, and was seeking release in the more extrovert genre of opera. His interest soon lit on a little-known play by Oscar Wilde, A Florentine Tragedy. Zemlinsky had personal motives for choosing this material: the previous year Hugo von Hofmannsthal had snubbed his request to collaborate on a dance-drama for Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, letting it be known that he was content to remain with his present superior collaborator, Richard Strauss. Once again Zemlinsky was stung to the quick, and he resolved to cross swords with Strauss on his own turf. If Strauss had achieved world-wide fame with an operatic adaptation of a lurid drama by Oscar Wilde in Salome, then he, Zemlinsky, would surpass him by setting an equally lurid drama by the same playwright.

One of Wilde’s lesser theatrical creations, A Florentine Tragedy is a somewhat recherché and overheated love story found among his posthumous papers by his literary executor Robert Ross, who published it in 1908. It was never performed during Wilde’s lifetime and has not survived intact: the original manuscript was stolen shortly before his imprisonment for “gross indecency” and has never resurfaced. Ross had to work with a surviving copy that unfortunately lacks the opening scene, evidently depicting the torrid romance between Bianca and Guido. In this truncated form, the play was premièred in Germany in 1906 by the redoubtable Max Reinhardt (who had Guido sing a serenade in lieu of the first scene) and was given a short while later in London with a newly written first scene. The work immediately attracted the interest of composers. Puccini seriously pondered setting it to music for years, and was only dissuaded from doing so by his publisher Ricordi. Ferruccio Busoni likewise gave serious thought to A Florentine Tragedy, only to reject it, finding the ending too frivolous and unmotivated (indeed, this remains the major critical objection to Wilde’s play). Zemlinsky felt no qualms of the sort: seeing in it a romantic triangle akin to his own (Bianca is even allowed to call Simone physically repulsive), he found the ending a perfectly apt way to relive his personal trauma, this time with a decidedly different outcome.

read more / weiterlesen … HERE