The Riesenrad in Vienna, built by Gabor Steiner (1858–1944), father of the composer Max Steiner (whose Godfather was Richard Strauss).

A still from Max Rheinhardt’s 1935 cinematic adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which Erich Wolfgang Korngold arranged Mendelssohn’s original score.

“It is in Zemlinsky’s early works that we encounter a fusion of Brahms and Wagner, mediated through Mahler, who chose to present Zemlinsky’s Es war einmal at the Vienna Opera in 1900, which… Continue reading →

The prelude to Zemlinsky’s 1900 opera Es war einmal (premiered by Mahler at the Hofoper)

Listen to a recording of Zemlinsky’s 1933 opera Der Kreidekreis on Spotify.

There’s more information about the extraordinary premiere of Zemlinsky’s opera in Berlin in this essay by Marc D. Moskovitz on the Orel Foundation website.

“We have eradicated International Jewry from cultural life; we have purged the theatres and cinemas and we have returned a respectable press to the German people. We have placed our entire intellectual and… Continue reading →

“The Kolisch Quartet performed Korngold’s First String Quartet at the 1925 Venice Festival in a series of concerts that also featured music by the Schoenberg pupil Hanns Eisler. By then, Eisler was in… Continue reading →

“The third principal composer in the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler was Karl Weigl. Like Schoenberg, he was a pupil of Zemlinsky and, like Webern and Wellesz, he studied musicology with Adler. In common with… Continue reading →