Zemlinsky's The Mermaid

In 1901, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky was enjoying a passionate love affair with fellow composer Alma Werfel. But Alma abruptly broke the relationship off to marry Zemlinsky’s peer, Gustav Mahler. Zemlinsky was destroyed. Alma’s decision to leave him for a composer of higher standing was almost more than he could take.

Zemlinsky channeled his heartbreak into an orchestral work that would become his masterpiece. In Die Seejungfrau, the composer borrowed a famous story from Hans Christian Andersen concerning a mermaid’s love for a human prince who could never love her back. The score, for enormous orchestra, creates what musicologist Mark Morris has referred to as ‘kaleidoscopes of sound…akin to the constant shifting of dreams’. It embraces the luscious Romantic language of Richard Strauss and early Schoenberg with the declamatory passion and pain of Mahler’s own music.

Axel Kober conducts it here, after Strauss’s poignant Oboe Concerto performed by Bergen’s own Principal Oboe Boris Fatulaev and more evocative music born of the ocean, Britten’s Four Sea Interludes.