Alexander von Zemlinsky

Alexander von Zemlinsky was a fixture of musical Vienna at the turn of the century: a conductor, teacher, and composer whose lush late-Romantic style sat just behind the modernists he helped launch. He gave Arnold Schoenberg his only formal composition lessons, and Schoenberg later married his sister. He also taught the young Alma Schindler, before she became Alma Mahler.

His conducting career took him from Vienna's opera houses to Prague and Berlin, where he was admired for meticulous, unglamorous work in the pit. As a Jewish musician he had to flee the Nazis, and he died in 1942 near New York, largely forgotten. His music was seriously revived only decades later.

Begin with the Lyric Symphony, a song-symphony for two singers and orchestra on poems by Rabindranath Tagore, then try Die Seejungfrau, his orchestral fantasy on Andersen's Little Mermaid.