You could say that Eine Florentinische Tragodie ( ''A Florentine tragedy'') is a truer successor to Salome than anything Richard Strauss himself wrote. Its plot, to begin with, takes decadence to the point of gaminess and beyond (it concerns the power of murder to awaken lust) and Zemlinsky's music goes to similar extremes. Strauss turned back from the abyss that Salome led to; Schoenberg built a bridge across it; Zemlinsky danced on its very brink, exulting in the danger. It is an astonishing balancing-act, a foolhardy one if you like (and some will always reproach him for not using his brother-in-law's ingenious bridge) but courageous and headily exciting. And you can see why Zemlinsky opted for it: the vast resources of late Romantic chromaticism are available to express the extremes that the plot calls for (and those that are unspoken within it, which are just as important) but they provide a context in which simple diatonicism itself can seem exotic, extreme, subtly ambiguous.
The young wife Bianca is tired of her middle-aged merchant husband Simone, and infatuated with Guido, a young nobleman, but when husband and would-be lover fight it is Guido who is killed. Bianca turns adoringly to Simone, exclaiming ''Why did you tell me you were so strong?'', and the brief postlude leaves one in no doubt of the aphrodisiac properties of violence. At one point Simone, overhearing his wife speaking of how she wishes for his death, tells her and Guido that death should only be spoken of in homes already destroyed by the stain of adultery; Guido, he tells him, is too innocent and honorable to understand this, but he, Simone, is older and wiser in such matters. Irony, obviously, but why is his music here touched with nobility, why the gravely beautiful horn phrase that concludes this passage? And at the end of the opera, when Bianca and Simone gaze at each other with rising passion over the corpse of the man they have both used for their own ends, why is their ardour expressed with such simple, chorale-like sincerity? It is almost chaste.
These moments, and there are others like them, gain their force from the opulent splendour of their surroundings, from the ornate, densely chromatic music in which Simone almost lustfully describes a richly embroidered robe of state that he would like to sell to Guido, from the urgency of Guido's and Bianca's brief duet scene (he, in an ecstatic passage that is characteristic of Zemlinsky's responsiveness to Wilde's imagery, imagines her feet moving towards him on a staircase of scarlet silk, ''like snow on roses'').
But it is Simone who is the real subject of the drama; he is Wagner's Hunding, Hindemith's Cardillac and Puccini's Michele in Il tabarro all rolled into one, and his every utterance adds to his disturbingly impressive larger-than-lifeness: even an apparently casual remark about the unfair trading of British merchants has a supressed intensity that catches fire a moment later when he speaks of his room as a microcosm with but three inhabitants, whose lives ''are the stakes God plays for''. He is a triumphant justification of the perils of brink-skirting, and Guilermo Sarabia sings him for all he is worth, darkly and sonorously, taking a few risks himself with exposed high notes, but bringing him to life with great force.
Soffel and Riegel have easier tasks (though there is nothing easy about Guido's leaping, dangerously high-lying music) and they evoke, respectively, sultry frustration and youthful warmth with effective skill. The other real protagonist in the drama, the orchestra, plays splendidly for Gerd Albrecht: all the kaleidoscopic colours of Zemblinsky's score, the subtle as well as the lurid, are there. They need focusing on at times, since the voices are played distinctly forward (to the point, at times, of sibilants catching the microphones unawares) but anyone who has heard this alluringly fascinating opera over the radio, or has seen the much-travelled Hamburg production (featuring two of these singers and this conductor and has been impatiently awaiting a recording of it will not be disappointed. '