The Zemlinsky-Messiaen connection

Witnessing an excellent concert performance of Zemlinsky's A Florentine Tragedy in Prague in the spring, I was struck by a curious resemblance, which I mentioned in my subsequent column: the opera's closing gesture is more or less the same as the one that ends Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur, written twenty years later. Listening to "Dieu parmi nous" on Christmas Day, as one does, I pondered the putative link again. In both pieces, a sustained major chord — augmented by a sixth in Messiaen's case — is at once underpinned and undermined by a bass line that begins a major third above the tonic and descends by way of a semitone, a whole tone, and a semitone again. In Zemlinsky, the key is A-flat major, and the bass line is C, B-natural, A-natural, A-flat:

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In Messiaen, the key is E major and the pedal line is G-sharp, G-natural, F-natural, E:

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Notice a further resemblance: in each case, the bass line begins on the second beat of the bar and is doubled at the octave. Zemlinsky has octaves in the trombones and bass tuba and also on the harp. What creates goosebumps in both cases is the dissonant grinding of the second and third notes against the general blaze of major.

The associative contexts of the two works are almost comically disparate.  A Florentine Tragedy, based on a dramatic fragment by Oscar Wilde, tells of a Florentine merchant who discovers that a prince has seduced his wife. When he kills the prince in a duel, the wife is impressed by his fortitude, and passion returns to the marriage. That four-note motif runs all through the opera and is heard in many different harmonic guises. You glimpse it already at the end of the prelude (B-flat, A, G, G-flat):

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But it really comes to the fore in a central sequence in which the merchant Simone, having overheard his wife hoping for his death, sings: "Who spake of Death? . . . What should death do in such a merry house?" In ironically refulgent B-flat-major, Simone has a descending line of B-flat / A-natural / G / G-flat, so that the final note is heard as a flattened sixth. Immediately after, it recurs in a B-flat-minor setting, ending on the leading tone. This happens again in the scene of the duel, amid orchestral mayhem. (Frantic repetitions of the figure make me think of Shostakovich's D-S-C-H.) But the four-note descending pattern can also expand to fill a wider intervallic space: it may traverse a fourth, in the familiar Lamento formula, or even a tritone, as at the beginning of the excerpt at the top of this post. Or it can be compressed to a chromatic line. Such extraordinarily subtle motivic variations are typical of Zemlinsky's method. When husband and wife are reconciled, the opulent major-key version returns, first in D major and then in the concluding A-flat — key areas a tritone apart but somehow in perfect harmony. The notorious music for the kiss in Salome plainly provides inspiration for this spasm of grisly lust. But the final appearance of the motto is almost stealthy, with a marking of diminuendo. It's more of a shudder amid ecstasy.

Messiaen, in a completely different universe, is depicting the glory of "God among us," the Lord made flesh. Here, the four-note figure stems from the octatonic scale, as does the sustained chord. (Whether one can analyze Zemlinsky along octatonic lines is not something I'm going to hazard off the top of my head, but similar interstitial slitherings can be found in his Second Quartet, among other scores.) Notably, Messiaen marks his bass line quadruple-forte: he obviously wants us to feel those passing dissonances in our gut. In his own performance, he holds down the pedals for a good long while, and other organists draw them out even more. This is dissonance as a maxing-out of joy. I tried playing the sequence on the Disney Hall organ once, and I've never had so much fun in my life.

So, is there a conscious or unconscious echo here? I assume not. It's possible that Messiaen knew Zemlinsky's music: Paul Dukas, his teacher, was well versed in the Mahler-Strauss orbit, and Zemlinsky had conducted Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue at the Vienna Volksoper. More likely, though, it's a spooky coincidence of a kind that so often occurs in musical history. What it does show is a likeness between worlds that might seem far separated. I've commented before on Messiaen's seemingly improbable kinship with Richard Strauss; composers like Zemlinsky and Schreker sometimes come even closer. What it also shows is the fertility of Zemlinsky's invention. He has yet to receive anything like his due.