Alexander von Zemlinsky was born in Vienna, Austria, on Oct. 14, 1871. He died in Larchmont, N.Y., on March 15, 1942.

Among the constellation of great artists that made Vienna the cultural capital of Europe at the turn of the last century, Alexander Zemlinsky may be the most unfairly overlooked. With the likes of first Brahms and Bruckner, then Mahler and Schoenberg shining around him, his misfortune is understandable, but he nevertheless was an integral part of the city’s musical life for several years.

Zemlinsky’s family was culturally diverse, comprising Catholicism on his father’s side and Judaism on his mother’s; the composer’s father converted to Judaism. The composer, then, was born and raised as Jewish. (Interestingly, in his 20s, the composer took another path altogether and converted to Protestantism.)

Zemlinsky’s musical training started young, and he was playing organ at his synagogue while he was still an adolescent. He was still just 13 when he was admitted as a piano student at the Vienna Conservatory. He studied at the conservatory until 1892, including composition lessons with Anton Bruckner, and along the way won the school’s piano prize. Another composition teacher, Johann Fuchs, had complimented Zemlinsky’s work to Johannes Brahms, who then attended performances of the young composer’s early works and even recommended them to his publisher.

Zemlinsky’s conducting career also dates to the 1890s, when he founded an amateur orchestra, Polyhymnia. Among that orchestra’s members was a young cellist named Arnold Schoenberg. Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg counterpoint lessons, and the two became close friends and eventually family when Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister. Schoenberg later claimed only Zemlinsky as a teacher.

Zemlinsky was named music director of the Vienna Volksoper in 1906. Now known primarily for presenting lighter fare, the Volksoper at the time undertook adventuresome programming, including the city’s first performances of Tosca and Salome. He went on to hold prominent conducting posts in Prague, at the Deutsches Landestheater, and Berlin, at the Kroll Opera. He continued to conduct actively through 1938, when the rising Nazi tide finally forced him to flee to the United States.

Unlike some of the many European emigres who came to the U.S. to escape the Nazis, Zemlinsky’s reputation had not preceded him, and lived his final years in declining health and artistic obscurity. He succumbed to pneumonia after less than four years.

Psalm 23 dates from 1910, which proved to be a watershed year in the composer’s life. It was written at the request of another overshadowed musical great in Vienna at the time, Franz Schreker. Schreker, also a composer and conductor, in 1907 founded a chorus, the Vienna Philharmonic Chorus – for the record, not connected with the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra – and he asked his friends to write works for it. Among those he received were Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth) and the massive Gurrelieder from Schoenberg and Psalm 23 from Zemlinsky.