Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) is an important composer, conductor, and educator in the history of music, whose career spanned from the post-romantic era to the modern era of the twentieth century. He was very fond of literature and vocal music, and wrote a great many lieder throughout his life. His compositional career also witnessed the decline in popularity of lieder. More than ten years after Zemlinsky’s death, music scholar Anthony Beaumont (1949-) excavated and sorted through the unpublished and unnumbered drafts, songs, and manuscripts left by Zemlinsky from 1889 to 1924, re-editing and publishing them so that the world would know more of his lieder. For this study, Zemlinsky’s posthumous song cycle “Seven Lieder” (Sieben Lieder), written from 1889 to 1890, was selected as the scope of research. The poems intended to accompany the music from the song cycle were complied, and the songs analyzed and interpreted. My hope is that this study gives rise to to a deeper understanding of Zemlinski’s early art songs and contributes to the scholarship pertaining to the lieder of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction, explaining the research motivation, purpose, scope and method; the second chapter outlines Zemlinsky’s life and the style of his early songs by reviewing the relevant literature; chapter three provides an overview of the lives and literature of the six poets whose work was set to accompany the seven unnumbered songs; chapter four analyzes and interprets the seven unnumbered songs; chapter five concludes with the aforementioned materials and summarizes my personal experiences singing the unnumbered songs.