Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky taught Schoenberg the only formal composition lessons he ever had, conducted for forty years, and spent his career being told he was not quite first-rate. He came from a mixed Viennese family - Catholic, Jewish and Sephardic connections - studied at the Conservatory, and was encouraged early by Brahms. He became Schoenberg's teacher and then his brother-in-law when Schoenberg married his sister Mathilde. Alma Schindler studied with him and they were briefly and intensely involved before she married Mahler; he was, by her own account, the only teacher who took her composing seriously, and the humiliation of that ending runs through his later work. He conducted at the Vienna Volksoper, then for sixteen years at the German theatre in Prague, where he gave Schoenberg and Mahler premieres, and later in Berlin under Klemperer. The Lyric Symphony sets Tagore for two voices and orchestra and Berg quoted it. The Dwarf, after Wilde, is about a man who does not know he is ugly until he sees a mirror. He fled to New York in 1938 and died there, forgotten, in 1942. Schoenberg wrote that he knew of no one to whom he owed so much of his knowledge of the technique and problems of composition. The Dwarf was staged in 1922 and dropped; its revival in the 1980s began the reassessment of him. Erich Korngold and Hans Krasa were among his pupils in Prague. He conducted the Prague premiere of Erwartung and championed Mahler s later symphonies when few would programme them. His music was banned by the Nazis and he arrived in New York in poor health, suffered strokes, and composed almost nothing in his last four years.

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