Zemlinsky and the Moon    Poor Zemlinsky. He was a Jew in 1930’s
Berlin, and he fell for a completely unattainable woman. He died
of heart disease in New York in 1942. In the crazy post-war art
scene, his music was eclipsed by Arnold Schoenberg’s and the
hipsters of the Second Viennese school.  But now Zemlinsky’s
music is coming back. This past fall, when I was in New York
City at the NEA conference, I met conductor James Conlon and
heard about his efforts to shed light on this composer’s most
brilliant works.  Many of the art songs on the new disc
(performed beautifully by mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselbock and
pianist Florian Henschel) echo the Romantic sentiments of
Brahms, Schubert, and Schumann. The moon is a sad character. In
the first of Seven songs, he greets a waterlily “with bright
longing.”  Bashfully she lowers her head back down to the
ripples, but then she sees at her feet the poor pale fellow.
The moon represents unrequited love, but I’m not sure what’s
going on in this waltz-song on Tuscan Folk