In February 1939 they moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side, where they would live for a year. Artur Bodanzky acted as an impresario for Zemlinsky, who was unknown in the U.S. Bodanzky obtained a contract for him with the music publisher Chappell & Co. in June 1939, and acted as his interpreter for an interview published by the New York Times with the resounding title “Zemlinsky Comes to Live Here”. In the interview the composer described the new opera he had been writing since 1935 as “ultra-modern”. The work, an adaptation of a play by André Gide (1869-1951), Le Roi Candaules, which Luisa had probably suggested to him, was never completed.

Bodanzky promotional skills were insufficient, however, and he was also seriously ill, a fact he hid from Zemlinsky. And when Bodanzky died on 24 November 1939, the news was also hidden from the composer. A letter from Schönberg that Louise read to him the same day caused a stroke, and it was thought that the news of Bodanzky’s death would prove fatal.

Zemlinsky was now quite feeble. In 1940 he moved with great difficulty to the couple’s new house in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York. When he had to fill out a series of forms for the American administration in September, he was unable even to provide his fingerprints, and Luise’s were used instead.

It is not known whether Zemlinsky heard the radio broadcast in December of a concert given at Carnegie Hall. The program included his Sinfonietta, written in 1934 and conducted on this occasion by Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960), another foreigner, who was the musical director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra at the time. Alexander Zemlinsky died on 15 March 1942.