Zemlinsky's lyrics & chords

Zemlinsky's best-known work is the Lyric Symphony (1923), a seven-movement piece for soprano, baritone and orchestra, set to poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (in German translation), which Zemlinsky compared in a letter to his publisher to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (though the first part of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is also a clear influence). The work in turn influenced Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which quotes from it and is dedicated to Zemlinsky. Other orchestral works include the large-scale symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (T...read more