Recollections of Zemlinsky from My Years of Study

This chapter contains Erich Korngold's personal reflections on his former teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. Zemlinksy was an Austrian composer and conductor who enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a private music teacher in late Habsburg Vienna. He is perhaps best remembered in this capacity for the counterpoint instruction he gave to his future brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg. For a brief time, beginning in 1900, Zemlinsky taught Alma Schindler, with whom he had a love affair in the period before she began the relationship that would lead, in March 1902, to her marriage to Gustav Mahler. Among the last—and certainly the most precocious—of Zemlinsky's Viennese students was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose lessons were initiated in 1908 and continued for upward of two years until Zemlinsky departed Vienna to become the music director of Prague's New German Theater.

Korngold Father and Son in Vienna’s Prewar Public Eye

This chapter describes the early life of Erich Korngold. As a child, Korngold was a prodigy the likes of which had rarely been encountered before. He was not only an accomplished pianist but also a composer of preternaturally mature and astonishingly modern-sounding music. He was even called “the little Mozart.” In 1907, at the age of ten, Korngold began contrapuntal studies with Robert Fuchs, a venerable teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, and Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942). From there, Korngold embarked on his early musical career. The chapter also describes the reviews and criticisms of Korngold's work, as well as the controversies surrounding the boy and his growing fame, during this period.