Quartet No.3 Op.19

He comes from the innermost depths of music. Franz WerfelAlexander Zemlinsky
was one of the most powerful voices in European music until his career was
destroyed by Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938. In the Interwar period he
had been based in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, but as one of the Forbidden Music
composers his music was effectively wiped from the collective memory as
Hitler’s empire expanded. In his lifetime he was probably best known as an
outstanding conductor and was Musical Director at the Landestheater in Prague
from 1911-1927, where his assitants included Kleiber, Webern, Szell and Viktor
Ullmann, while his students included Weigl, Korngold and Krasa. His influence
was particularly far-reaching due to his intimate connections with the Second
Viennese School as well as more conventional composers. As with the great
violinist-composer George Enescu, Zemlinsky’s career as a composer was
undoubtedly restricted by the demands of his performance career.Just as his Fourth
Quartet was inspired by the sudden death of Alban Berg so was the Third Quartet
written as a result of the early death of his sister Mathilde, who was also
Schoenberg’s wife. That marriage had been far from easy and Zemlinsky had got
caught up in the crossfire and this, combined with their very different
compositional paths, had cooled the long-standing relationship between the two
composers.The first movement’s opening theme is
a quotation from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony: Forget
this night, when the night is no more –
the lament of a woman scorned and rejected, clearly refering to Mathilde, whom
Schoenberg had never forgiven for her affair with the painter Richard Gerstl.
This sorrowing theme is sharply contrasted with a brutal double-dotted very
masculine section, a confrontation that is never musically resolved.The year 1923 had
also seen Schoenberg’s famous presentation of his essay on the technique of
composition with twelve notes. Zemlinsky’s second movement casts a mocking eye
at this historic event. His theme is a simple three-note chromatic cell and the
thematic material is so sparse that the variations must create their own
musical ideas while the the three note theme casts a sardonic eye over
developments.

The Romanze however is deeply serious and
tells of Zemlinsky’s grief at the premature loss of his sister, she was only
forty-two when she died. The opening and closing music is almost frozen from
his sadness and only briefly breaks out in a great cry of anger and horror at
his loss with two-octave leaps in the cello and first violin. The mourning is
broken into by the solo cello demanding a change of mood, a challenge
delightedly taken up by the others, creating a whirlwind of mad dances in a
movement that consciously echo Mahler’s fugal Rondo
– Burleske in his Ninth
Symphony that was ironically dedicated to his brothers
in Apollo. Unlike Mahler
Zemlinsky finds no time for that heartbreaking glimpse of another world that
Mahler slips into his Burleske. The ending however is encouragingly upbeat.