Credits:

Rebay / Duo Imperial

Description:

The story takes place in ancient Greece. King Kandahoules, who has taken a beautiful wife, forces his bodyguard Gigesus to look at her naked body. The work was begun in 1933, and he continued to compose it from 1936 onward, but after a slow start, when the Germans occupied Austria in 1938, he went into exile in New York via Prague, where he found it in his luggage. Although it retains the romantic style of his youth, it is characterized by an ambitious, almost atonal style, and is said to reflect Zemlinsky’s refracted views on love. Zemlinsky completed it in the U.S. and dreamed of having it performed at the Metropolitan Opera, but the radical bed scene in the second act proved too much for him, and he never completed the work. In 1992, Antony Beaumont, a British musicologist, completed the work, and this recording is the legendary 1996 performance by Gerd Albrecht, a great admirer of Z