Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid)

Description

Zemlinsky's symphonic poem was almost lost to us. Fleeing the Nazis in 1939, Zemlinsky took two movements with him to America, which were later misidentified as parts of a symphony. With the rediscovery of Zemlinsky in the 1960s and 1970s, two individual researchers noticed the two movements of the "symphony" and sample pages of an unidentified work held in a private Viennese colletion, and calculated that these together formed the lost Die Seejungfrau! Beaumont's new critial edition contains an excellent history of the work, from its genesis through its reconstruction. The New York Philharmonic also has an excellent set of program notes on the composer, the work, and the story by Andersen.