Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony

Composer, prominent conductor and influential composition teacher, Zemlinsky was at the centre of turn-of the century Viennese musical life. Among his distinguished pupils were Arnold Schoenberg (who also happened to be his brother-in-law), Berg, Webern and Korngold. He also taught and was romantically involved with Alma Schindler until she decided to marry a certain Gustav Mahler. And it's Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde which provided the model for Zemlinsky's best-known work, his1923 Lyric Symphony. Mahler had chosen Chinese poetry for his song-symphony and Zemlinsky, too, looked east, setting poems by the then fashionable 1913 Nobel Prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. The seven texts, an exploration of love, are sung alternately by baritone and soprano, accompanied in lush late-Romantic style by a large orchestra.