Ehetanzlied

Bearing in mind that the most popular composer at Ernst von Wolzegen’s Überbrettl Cabaret in Berlin in the early years of the 20th century was Oscar Straus, it is scarcely surprising that Arnold Schoenberg, who was briefly musical director at the theatre, and his brother in law Alexander von Zemlinsky, who wrote a few songs for it, had little success there. Unlike Straus, neither of them had the common touch. Although Zemlinsky’s two Überbrettl songs, In der Sonnengasse and Herr Bombardil, are certainly witty little pieces, his work in this area was more fruitful for the effect it had on expanding his literary interests. The Ehetanzlied – a a setting of a text by Otto Julius Bierbaum who published a collection of cabaret songs by ten German poets under the title Deutsche Chansons in 1900 – is no less tuneful in its waltz-time idiom than In der Sonnengasse and all the more charming for making no specially popular effort. Written two or three years earlier, the five songs of Irmelin Rose und andere Gesänge Op.7 are dedicated to Alma Schindler, a composition pupil who, but for the intervention of another, more attractive and more successful Viennese musician, might well have become his wife. Entbietung, which begins with an allusion to the Tristan chord, is an eloquent expression of the passion they shared before Alma was swept off her feet by Gustav Mahler. The failed relationship with Alma left a long-lasting scar on Zemlinsky’s emotions. That, surely, is the source of the intense valedictory sentiment of Und kehrt er einst heim, which is perhaps the most beautiful of the six Maeterlinck settings he wrote between 1910 and 1913.