Junge Symphoniker Hamburg

In his inimitable style, Dvořák told the old Bohemian horror story of the water sprite who kidnaps a girl, impregnates her, and finally kills their child shortly before the turn of the century. Naturally, this was accompanied by dark and dramatic orchestral colors – but not without the usual dose of folk verve.

A few years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander von Zemlinsky wanted to show that even predecessors such as Richard Strauss had not yet exhausted the art of creating captivating, brilliantly orchestrated program music for orchestra. He chose Hans Christian Andersen’s world-famous fairy tale »The Little Mermaid« as the basis for this compositional challenge. He mastered the task of translating a water nymph’s unfulfilled longing for human love into passionately indulgent, pictorial music with flying colors—better than his own unhappy affair with Alma Mahler, which he processed in »Die Seejungfrau« (The Mermaid).