European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group

Alexander Zemlinsky in Focus in July

Jul. 03, 2007

http://eamdllc.com/images/composers/zemlinsky_alexander100px.jpgJuly sees two separate focuses on Alexander Zemlinsky’s work, highlighted by productions of his one-act operas A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf. At the Ravinia Festival, James Conlon leads a week of events focused around Zemlinsky’s music, including a Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance of his Lyric Symphony on July 7, a Zemlinsky showcase on July 14 featuring some of his rarely heard works, and a production of A Florentine Tragedy on July 11, as Zemlinsky serves as Ravinia’s “Breaking the Silence” composer. At Bard College, Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra through a double-bill of staged productions of A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf July 27 and 29, with a supplemental ‘Opera Talk’ with Leon Botstein before the concert on July 29.

While an important composer and conductor in fin-de-siècle Vienna, to many Alexander Zemlinsky exists as a double footnote to the mainstream history of music: he was Schoenberg’s teacher (and later brother-in-law), and his pupil and lover Alma Schindler left him to marry the more successful Gustav Mahler.

Of his eight operas, two were based on works by Oscar Wilde, and Zemlinsky seemed drawn to both as expressions of grief over his anguished love life. A Florentine Tragedy is a story of a merchant who comes home to find his wife in the arms of a prince, whom he strangles; The Dwarf tells of a princess who makes a dwarf dance at her birthday party and then cruelly spurns his naïve advances. They merge the sardonic wit of Wilde with an opulent orchestration à la Richard Strauss. The Bard College double-bill of these operas mark the first time these operas have been staged together in North America.

 

Alexander Zemlinsky
A Florentine Tragedy (1916)
3343 - 6431 - timp.3perc - hp.cel.mand - str
60'

Alexander Zemlinsky
The Dwarf (1921)
3333 - 4331 - timp.4perc - hp.cel.mand.guit - str; stage music: 2001 - 2300 - tamb - mand - str(4.3.2.2.1)

 

 

 

For more information on Alexander Zemlinsky’s life and works, please visit www.universaledition.com.

For more information about Zemlinsky events at Ravinia, please visit www.ravinia.org.

For more information about performances of A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf at Bard College, please visit www.fischercenter.bard.edu.

News