Despite initial impressions, he became her composition teacher. Zemlinsky would stop by frequently to instruct Schindler, and after lessons they would spend personal time together. Their feelings gradually deepened, with another of Schindler’s diary entries claiming she would gladly start a family with him, with children who would have her beauty and his brains. Yet Schindler’s friends and family pressured her to end the affair, citing Zemlinsky’s lack of international reputation and his physical shortcomings. Soon, her words of endearment soured into aesthetic and antisemitic mockery, and her excuses against furthering their courtship led Zemlinsky to the brink of a nervous breakdown. 

Not long after, Schindler met the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler at a dinner party and began an affair with him. The pair became engaged on December 8, 1901. Zemlinsky found out about it four days later. He poured his heartbreak into the orchestral fantasy The Mermaid, but it clearly haunted him long after the fact, so much so that he returned to the memory in 1919 to begin composing The Dwarf. Perhaps it was his own unhappy marriage—by then he was married to Ida Guttmann—that spurred it, or Alma Mahler’s second marriage to Walter Gropius after Gustav Mahler’s death that led him to reminisce.  

Whatever his personal reasons, Zemlinsky clearly identified with Wilde’s protagonist, so hopelessly in love with a woman that he is incapable of seeing past his physical appearance. If The Mermaid   captures Zemlinsky’s initial feelings of heartbreak, The Dwarf   paints a far broader picture of his social standing and his lonely realization that no one sympathized with his side of the situation. The Dwarf   conveys heartbreak in such a visceral, gut-wrenching way that you can’t help but feel you’re watching Schindler’s rejection of Zemlinsky in real time.  

It’s strange to think that Zemlinsky’s life would so closely resemble a short story written years before he had even met Alma Schindler but, as Wilde says, life imitates art more than art imitates life. And it was only through art that the composer was able to express his suffering at a time when the world offered no sympathy. Though Zemlinsky’s career never reached the heights of Gustav Mahler’s (doubtlessly adding salt to the wound), his work continues to be rediscovered and performed with increasing frequency as modern audiences resonate with his brilliance, creativity and the depths of authentic emotion behind his music.