Alexander Zemlinsky
was born and grew up in Vienna, spent some years at the German
State Theatre in Prague and died in the United States, where
he had been living since 1938. His early life in the musical
hothouse that was Vienna at that time was spent in composition
and conducting but in spite of prodigious gifts he never seems
to have achieved acceptance. Poor man, he suffered from poorly
developed "networking skills"; in fact he found that
aspect of Viennese life distasteful. As a composer his style
was already just sufficiently old-fashioned to discourage the
public. He gave composition lessons and his most celebrated
pupil, Arnold Schoenberg, was a lifelong admirer, saying of
him "His time will come sooner than we think." Well,
it hasn't really happened. In spite of his voluminous catalogue
of compositions, including two numbered symphonies, a large
amount of chamber music and operas almost into double figures,
most readers of these columns will know his name only as the
composer of the Lyric Symphony of 1923.
The work has
been compared by many, including the composer himself, to Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde, and at first sight the comparison
seems a fair one. Although Zemlinsky called his work a symphony
and Mahler did not, both works are effectively song-cycles for
two alternating solo voices conceived on a symphonic scale.
But Zemlinsky's music, for all its late-Romantic richness, only
fleetingly sounds like Mahler. It is perhaps closer to early
Schoenberg, to whose Gurrelieder the work has also been
frequently compared, but even this can seem to stretch the point.
There are seven
songs, alternating between the baritone, who has four, and the
soprano. The poems are by Rabindranath Tagore, whose work earned
him the Nobel Prize. Five of the poems Zemlinsky chose are meditations
on love and inevitably loss. By the way, Frank Bridge set two
of them to music in Tagore's own English translations. These
five poems are framed, first, by a poem of uncertainty, searching
and longing; and the final song eloquently sets a poem of farewell.
There is little in the way of drama or narrative drive.
Many will find
these poems self-indulgent today, but the richness of the imagery
clearly inspired the composer: the Lyric Symphony is
a great, if not perfect, work. The vocal lines have been conceived
with remarkable skill, and though far from easy are intensely
grateful to sing. The orchestra is huge but employed by a master,
never overpowering the singer. The music surges with passion;
the composer has, indeed, found the perfect musical embodiment
of the words, the intense sweetness of the harmony never quite
tipping over into excess. It could almost be Salome, such is
the erotic charge of the second poem, who declares to her mother
that though the young Prince apparently saw nothing she did
indeed throw her ruby chain into his path as he passed. At other
points the music recalls Wagner and, especially, Berg. There
is little variety of atmosphere or subject matter in the texts,
however, and here too the music follows suit. It is in this
respect that the work differs most crucially from Mahler's masterpiece,
as there is nothing like the range of mood and pace, nor of
orchestral texture and colour, to be found in Das Lied von
der Erde. But one looks for parallels between the two works
only because the composer did. When heard the Lyric Symphony
stands and convinces entirely on its own terms and anyone who
does not already know the work is strongly encouraged to seek
it out.
The performance
is outstandingly successful. Christine Schafer sings with
total conviction. She is vocally infallible, tracing a legato
line most singers would envy. The composer has given to the
soprano music of greater variety than to the baritone, and
within this limited, rather reflective role Matthias Goerne is
also outstandingly successful. The recording, which I have only
heard as a standard CD, is superb, rich and full, though with
the voices rather forward for my taste. This seems to be more
noticeably with the baritone than with the soprano, and in any
case the performance is so gripping that one forgets about it
after the first couple of minutes. All the same it would have
been interesting to see if I felt the same hearing the recording
in its SACD format. Christoph Eschenbach has been in the news
lately following the announcement of his early departure from
the Philadelphia Orchestra. The profoundly eloquent playing of
the Orchestre de Paris - I have rarely heard them in recent
years, but my memory of them was as lacklustre as their
reputation - can only attest to the
remarkable quality of the work Eschenbach has done with them
during the half-decade he has been at the helm. Listen to the
end of the work when, after the solo baritone's inconclusive
final notes, the closing four minutes or so are left to the
orchestra alone. You'll be able to savour the delicious, surprising
use of brass glissando just before the final, admittedly Mahlerian,
added sixth chord. And you won't hear finer orchestral playing
than this.
William Hedley
see also Reviews
by Anne Ozorio and Paul
Shoemaker
Christine Schafer
(soprano);
[51:47]
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