Zemlinsky: The Mermaid

About this episode

This episode explores the passionate and tumultuous relationship between Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alma Schindler, leading to the creation of Zemlinsky's tone poem 'The Mermaid'.

The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and famously beautiful Alma Schindler came to Zemlinsky's home to study composition. Wildly passionate feelings soon developed between them, and Alma wrote the following in her diary: "I would gladly be pregnant for him, gladly bear his children. His blood and mine, commingled: my beauty with his intellect. I would gladly serve him in his professional life, live for him and his kith and kin, breathe [for him], attend to his every happiness, serve him with a gentle hand. God give me the strength and the willpower to do so." The relationship lasted a little over a year, until one night when Schindler attended a party that happened to be frequented by a brilliant conductor and composer twenty years her senior: Gustav Mahler. The rest is history. Zemlinsky was devastated and poured his energies into a tone poem based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid . The source may seem surprising, but as we'll see later on, it proved to be the perfect vehicle for Zemlinsky to exorcise the…

People in this episode

Host: Joshua Weilerstein

Topics covered

• romantic relationships
• classical music
• Zemlinsky
• Alma Schindler
• musical composition

Keywords

• Zemlinsky
• The Mermaid
• Alma Schindler
• Gustav Mahler
• tone poem

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Mermaid, The Little Mermaid

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