String Quartet No.3, Op.19

Allegretto

Thema mit Variationen: Gehemnisvoll bewegt

Romanze: Sehr mässige Achtel

Burleske: Sehr lebhaft

In spite of all the personal and political misfortunes they experienced, none of Zemlinsky’s Viennese contemporaries - Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern - can compete with him as a tragic figure. His major misfortune was not his notoriously ugly appearance: “A small, repugnant, chinless, toothless, and unwashed gnome," he was nevertheless attractive to Alma Mahler for “the force of intellect in every glance of his eyes and in every one of his abrupt movements.” Nor was it the manner of his death, forgotten and poverty-stricken in wartime exile in Larchmont, New York. It was his failure, consummate musician though he was, to fulfil himself as a composer.

Zemlinsky was no more successful than anyone else in emulating Mahler, fairly close though he came in his Lyrische Sinfonie. At the same time, he was too attached to tonality to take the escape route opened up by his pupil and brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. And, squeezed between these two forces, he couldn’t develop the distinctive creative personality he might have acquired in other circumstances.

Perhaps the most individual of his works is the String Quartet No.3, Op.19, which he wrote in 1924, towards the end of a long period as conductor of the German Theatre in Prague. By this time he had absorbed influences from well beyond Vienna - Debussy and Bartók are both in evidence here - and was synthesizing his own style and structural approach. Though ostensibly cast in sonata form, the opening Allegretto is actually shaped by the conflict between lyrical legato material and a percussive rhythmic element which, though sparingly used, is the dynamic force behind it. The seven brief variations of the second movement add up to an unpredictable and delightfully scored Pierrot kind of fantasy. While the Romanze is remarkable for the contrast between its curiously numbed outer sections and its expressive middle, only the Burleske - a rondo with a Czech-style theme and entertainingly playful episodes - betrays a conventional frame of mind.

Gerald Larner