Zemlinsky contra Mahler: Aesthetic Modernism, the Jewish Body, and the Violence of Fairy Tales

ABSTRACT:The compositions of the Jewish-Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) are often read as responding to Wagner's music and ideas, but for Zemlinsky, his mentor Gustav Mahler was a more logical point of orientation. This paper shows how a number of works by Zemlinsky that use fairy-tale plots—the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (1905), the opera Der Zwerg (1922), and the song "Das bucklichte Männlein" (1934)—respond to models provided by Mahler. The paper focuses, in particular, on traces of the Jewish body in Zemlinsky's musical fairy tales and their relation to aesthetic modernism. Through its insistence on the deficient and damaged body and its cultural frames, Zemlinsky's music demonstrates the untenability of Mahler's modernist aesthetics when confronted with the racial politics of (early) fascism.