Zemlinksy: Eine Florentinische Tragödie

 Opera no 157

Zemlinksy: Eine Florentinische Tragödie

Soloists

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Bertrand de Billy

Last year I included Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony in my 365 project https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/02/zemlinsky-lyric-symphony.html . My overall reaction was that I didn’t warm to it. Unfortunately my reaction to this opera was exactly the same. I found it rather hard going. The style was broadly Straussian with perhaps a hint of  early Schoenberg and like much of those composers works it was (at any rate to me) overblown and relentless. Only towards the end did we get sort of relief from the bombardment of the full orchestra and overstretched voices. This was definitely not one for me.

This ends this particular part of the project looking at post-Wagnerian German opera. It has been an interesting exercise to hear the worlds of some composers who I only knew by name, but equally it has not persuaded me that I have being missing out for years by not exploring this repertory. That said there were certainly some parts of most of these works which grabbed my attention and of course Der Ferne Klang was a major discovery. Was it perhaps no coincidence that this was the least overtly Germanic of all of the operas in his sequence.

Next I am going to cover a few operas by important Russian composers before then turning to something which I have hardly touched on - operas written at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st.