Im Schatten Schönbergs: Rezeptionshistorische und analytische Studien zum Problem der Originalität und Modernität bei Alexander Zemlinsky (review)

The first section of this book consists of a useful overview of the reception of Zemlinsky’s music in critical and analytical writing from Zemlinsky’s time to the present day. As Peter Wessel admits at the outset, ‘the observation that the composer Alexander Zemlinsky did not follow his friend Arnold Schoenberg on the path to atonality has cast a cloud over the evaluation of his historical position’ (p. 9). Many critics had problems with Zemlinsky’s apparent eclecticism and with the echoes of other composers’ works in his music. ‘The reception [of Zemlinsky’s music] revolves above all round the concepts tradition/progress, eclecticism/ originality, musical achievement and skill [Durchsetzungsfähigkeit der Musik]’ (p. 52).

The author proposes the following ‘hypothesis’ to summarize the links between the technique, effect, and reception of Zemlinsky’s music:

Zemlinsky’s compositions subsist on a linking-up [Vernetzung] of motivic material that is not laid out as a process in the sense of a developing discourse. They employ a harmonic language adapted to the immediate context, not goal-orientated. For these reasons they tend towards ambiguous formal structures which the listener cannot at the time grasp straight away as a logically consistent development. This leads to musical results that make it possible for the recipient to take the view that the works are confused, unclear in construction, assembled in a manner as eclectic as it is indifferent.

(p. 107)

It is certainly instructive in this regard to compare Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, Op. 7 (1905), with Zemlinsky’s Second Quartet, Op. 15 (1915). Both works are cast in a single movement which nevertheless preserves the elements of the traditional four-movement layout, and both works use a web of themes in a rigorously symphonic way. However, Schoenberg’s quartet is closer to the traditional sonata model and can be interpreted in terms of so-called ‘dual function’ where not only are the outlines of the traditional four movements fairly clear, but the work can also be viewed as a single vast sonata-form structure, with the first ‘movement’ forming the exposition. The same cannot be said of Zemlinsky’s quartet—indeed, the first ‘movement’, far from having the character of a sonata exposition like the Schoenberg, is more like a free fantasia serving as a storehouse of material for subsequent use.

A comparison of the two works that form the subject of the greater part of this book, Zemlinsky’s three-movement symphonic fantasy Die Seejungfrau and Schoenberg’s symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, both completed in the early months of 1903, yields similar observations that reflect on the different approaches of the two composers. It is paradoxical that it is in the more strictly programmatic of the two works, Pelleas, that traces of sonata structure are most in evidence. Berg undoubtedly went too far in analysing it as a four-movement symphony—though there are elements of ‘dual function’ form present—but Schoenberg’s tendency to indulge in thematic development and contrapuntal virtuosity for their own sakes made such an approach understandable if not excusable; and the closing section of the work (fig. 50 to the end) clearly functions as a sort of ‘recapitulation’ in the sonata sense. Zemlinsky, on the other hand, while adhering less strictly to the events of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale as the composition of Seejungfrau progressed, did not compensate by relying more on the procedures of absolute music. His musical conception remains considerably freer than Schoenberg’s (with the partial exception of the middle movement, in which the inclusion of an exact reprise of the ‘ball’ sequence after the central slower section lends the music a ‘scherzo-and-trio’ character). What is more, in a letter to Schoenberg dated 17 February 1918, Zemlinsky...