Eric Schissel:

>I believe there's some discussion of this in the notes to the Marco Polo
>recording of the three movements that were known at the time of the fine d
>minor first symphony.  Though the conjecture that the 3rd is actually die
>Seejungfrau, I picked up somewhere else- Groves' perhaps (not sure which
>one?)?

As I initiated this thread, I considered the matter a little further and
muddied the waters even more:

Grove (1980 edition) has separate listings for:

Symphony No 3, Eb, c1903

Die Seejungfrau, fantasy after Andersen, c1903

which suggests that Grove considers them to be different works.  The notes
for the Conlon CD of the Symphonies 1 and 2 refers to "the two symphonies
which Zemlinsky wrote during his student years." It's not clear whether the
writer meant to distinguish these two symphonies from other works written
after Zemlinsky's student years, or meant that these were the *only*
symphonies he wrote.  In the notes for the Conlon CD containing Zemlinsky's
Ein Tanzpoem - which Grove calls Das gla"serne Herz, in turn based on only
part of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's Der Triumph der Zeit - it says that the
ballet, originally to have been for the entire von Hoffmannsthal work, was
"the largest and most important project on which Zemlinsky worked between
1900 and 1904." Ein Tanzpoem runs about 35 minutes, so the whole ballet
would have been of Tchaikovskian proportions.  I suppose that relatively,
the ballet might be considered a most important project, but I would have
thought that a symphony, not to mention Die Seejungfrau, would hardly be
regarded as minor accomplishments.

The jury remains out.

Richard Pennycuick
[log in to unmask]