Alexander Zemlinsky

Alexander Zemlinsky

Alexander Zemlinsky, the brother-in-law and teacher of Arnold Schönberg, was born in Vienna in 1871 and died an American immigrant in 1942. Despite his imporance in the fin-de-siècle epoch and the musical life of his own time, his inborn modesty prevented him from making his mark, let alone establishing himself in Vienna and then later in Prague and Berlin, even though he composed a large number of operas and a series of symphonic works and orchestral song cycles such as the "Lyric Symphony" based on texts by Rabindranath Tagore. As a conductor, Zemlinsky uninterruptedly took up the cudgels for his more famous contemporaries, while diffidently leaving himself out of the picture: "I´d rather not even talk about why all of that is, but with increasing age and the calm judgment that comes with it, I have come to one conclusion: we are always accountable for our own destiny. I am definitely lacking in that certain something one has to have - and today more than ever - to make it to the top. In the madding crowd it is of little use to have elbows, you also have to know how to use them

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