Austrian composer and brilliant conductor Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) taught all three members of the New Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg, only a few years his junior, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. As a composer he did not take the twelve-tone path his pupils followed. In his youth he steered a middle course between Wagner and Brahms and not even did his late Romantic style stretch tonality to its limits. His entire output of church music consists of three psalm settings of which Psalm 83, Israel against its foes, is the earliest, composed in 1900. Rather than setting the entire text, Zemlinsky chose the following three passages, dividing the work in three parts: 1. ‘Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.’ 2. ‘O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire; so persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.’ 3. ‘That men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth.’