Zemlinsky contra mahler: Aesthetic modernism, the jewish body, and the violence of fairy tales

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.