Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and famously beautiful Alma Schindler came to Zemlinsky's home to study composition. Wildly passionate feelings soon developed between them, and Alma wrote the following in her diary: "I would gladly be pregnant for him, gladly bear his children. His blood and mine, commingled: my beauty with his intellect. I would gladly serve him in his professional life, live for him and his kith and kin, breathe [for him], attend to his every happiness, serve him with a gentle hand. God give me the strength and the willpower to do so." The relationship lasted a little over a year, until one night when Schindler attended a party that happened to be frequented by a brilliant conductor and composer twenty years her senior: Gustav Mahler. The rest is history. Zemlinsky was devastated and poured his energies into a tone poem based on