The Lyric Symphony is Zemlinsky’s homage to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
Who knew this rapturous performance was lurking on Loot-tube?
The vocal soloists are Maria Bengtsson and Bo Skovhus.
From the general manager’s self-admiring Sunday sermon in…
The press service of the Mariinsky Theater has…
From the French magazine le canard enchainé, under…
The death has been announced, aged 94, of…
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It’s an interesting work. I’m not sure if it was really an homage to Mahler. According to Universal Edition, Zemlinsky said, “I have written something this summer like Das Lied von der Erde”. Maybe that’s splitting hairs.
I always wonder if Alma Schindler would have become a truly important composer if she hadn’t agreed to Mahler’s draconian terms for marriage (but not unusual for those days) and kept studying with Zemlinsky instead.
I can’t offer an opinion as to how this performance stacks up against the competition. It seems pretty good to me.
“Studying with Zemlinsky” is my new euphemism of the year…
Hahahaha
. . . implying what, that Zemlinsky isn’t very good?
Rather the opposite, I would think.
Better than Gustl, at any rate.
Mahler wasn’t prehaps at his best with women.
I thought Daphne meant, like, a euphemism for sex. Kind of like “visiting Oberlin” is a euphemism for bisexual experimentation.
Didn’t she study with Walter Gropius, too?
I wanted to mention that Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” was genuinely inspired by Zemlinsky’s “Lyric Symphony”. Berg really loved this work – or so he claimed.
It appears that Mahler priests would have us believe that he
influenced every composer in history, with the possible
exception of Vivaldi, don’t ask me why he is spared.
No matter how ludicrous the claims, the Mahler Industry knows not defeat.
The Connection Mahler – Zemlinsky is pretty straight forward. Incidentally, Gustav Mahler told Julius Korngold to send his then very young son Erich Wolfgang to Zemlinsky for lessons, so there is another link. EWK saind his best orchestration lessons were watching Zemlinsky orchestrate “Der Schneemann”.
I don’t care for Vivaldi. I do like Mahler’s music. I would never claim that Mahler influenced Vivaldi. How would that be possible? More to the point, I don’t preach that the ‘Vivaldi industry’ should go take a hike. Really, what’s the point here?
I think it’s indisputable that Mahler had a pretty profound impact upon both Shostakovich and Alban Berg. Some say that R. Strauss wrote “Alpine Symphony” as a response to Mahler’s death.
Who says that? The conception of Alpine Symphony dates back to 1900.
No, what Strauss said when Mahler died indicates a correlation to the creation of his Alpine Symphony, but nothing like causation can be constructed out of that.
R.Strauss: “The death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist [is] a grave loss … Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity. As an old man the hero Wagner returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity … I shall call my alpine symphony: Der Antichrist, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.”
OK, fair enough. Thanks for the information.
I shouldn’t even try to dignify such ridiculous comments, but I don’t know of a single Mahler enthusiast or author who would claim that Mahler had any influence upon such great 20th Century ‘heavy weights’ as Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Faure, Messiaen, Vaughan Williams, Stravinksy, Prokofiev, de Falla, Kodaly, Dohnanyi, Nielsen, Sibelius . . . and on and on and on.
Even among the so-called ‘Vienna second school’, it’s clear that Mahler had a more profound effect upon Berg than either Schoenberg or Webern.
Shostakovich, on the other hand, claimed that he heard and/or studied all the Mahler symphonies at an early age. He also claimed that he had seen “Wozzeck” numerous times in St. Petersburg. To me, it seems clear that the Shostakovich’s 4th is not only the first of his ‘tombstones for the Russian people’ (Volkov), but that it’s also something of an homage to Mahler (or certainly influenced by Mahler). “Lady Macbeth” certainly had a predecessor in Berg’s “Wozzeck”, I think. Regardless, the Mahler, Berg, Shostakovich connection makes a lot of sense to me.
Alma didn’t like Zemlinsky at first because “He has no chin!!”
Whereas Pfitzner liked Mahler quite alot:
‘In ihm ist Liebe.’
Mahler did Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten at the Vienna Opera in 1905.
And listen to that slow movement of Pfitzner’s Violin Concerto, the slow passage towards the end (rehearsal E), it’s straight out of Mahler, and is most hauntingly beautiful.
From 03:31 in this performance, we hear the ‘Mahler sound’ for a brief moment Pfitzner’s Violin Concerto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by1TKvTjwD8
And she also complained about his ferocious body odor, according to De La Grange.
Or maybe was it Jens Malte Fischer’s biography? I’m not sure, since I read them both…
Petrenko seems to have a taste for slightly offbeat pieces – the Zemlinsky, recordings of Suk’s A Summer Tale and Asrael, Pfitzner’s Palestrina. Plus an absolute mastery of Richard Strauss. I foresee a great era in Berlin.
So I guess it would be fair to say that he has a taste for post-Wagnerian, harmonically chromatic sorts of music – music that falls between “Tristan” and atonalism. Perhaps he’ll do Scriabin as well.