Helping Complete the Symphonic Picture

I'm guilty of oversights. Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler... it's a symphony trajectory I repeat ad absurdum. Of course I include the final Mozart Symphonies, a handful of Haydn's and maybe a Mendelssohn or two along the way. Schumann doesn't enthral and Bruckner still evades me. But while I'll venture out of Central Europe once or twice – Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius – the trunks, the totems remain the same. But I've been reminded time and again that the history of the symphony is not the simple genealogy our dumbing down culture would have us believe.

Given the wonderful task of writing about Zemlinsky's early symphonies – the Symphony in D minor (1892–3) and the Symphony in B flat major (1897) – I was confronted afresh with the issue that our symphonic history needs expanding. Hyperion's new recording presents a bridge between the Brahmsian and the Mahlerian traditions, which can appear exclusive, given the oft-repeated Brahms-Wagner dialectic. And what about Richard Strauss, this year's golden boy, whose early symphonies simply don't register. What might they reveal?  

When Zemlinsky conducted the first movement of the D minor Symphony at an end of term concert in the Musikverein in 1892, Brahms was in the audience. It was an auspicious occasion and marked the peak of Zemlinsky’s obsession with the great master, commenting in 1922 that ‘my works fell even more than before under the influence of Brahms’. ‘I remember how even among my colleagues it was considered particularly praiseworthy to compose in as “Brahmsian” a manner as possible. We were soon notorious in Vienna as the dangerous “Brahmins”.’

While Zemlinsky's symphonies keep a foot in the Brahms camp, he's also striding ahead, not in a Mahlerian fashion, but in his own inimitable way. There is a blur that is manifest when listening to these works. And the historiography that emerges after these events, when the symphonic mantle is passed cleanly to Mahler and thence to Schoenberg's atonal and later serial coterie, is also a nonsense, overlooking the symphonies of Felix Weingartner – the man who replaced Mahler at the Hofoper – those by Egon Wellesz, an Austrian in exile, and, of course, Korngold's late F sharp major Symphony.

The post-Romantic Symphony didn't die with Mahler, neither was it born with him. While Mahler and his output will remain a benchmark, as Brahms does before him, we need to colour in the drawing and therefore see things more clearly. Hopefully Hyperion's new zesty recording of Zemlinsky's early symphonies with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Martyn Brabbins will help us do that. Click here to order a copy.

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