Zemlinsky, Alexander

Zemlinsky, Alexander – Eine florentinische Tragödie Op. 16 (Vocal Score with German libretto)

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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. …

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