For Ernst Krenek's Birthday Centennial

Even in his lifetime, Ernst Krenek who left an oeuvre of more than 240 works when he died at the age of 91, was seen as holding an extreme position in musical history: on the one hand, his versatility as a composer was frequently criticized as a repeated "change of style", on the tacit presupposition that a creative life ought to be distinguished by stylistic consistency; on the other, critics in the USA characterized him as a "one-man history of twentieth-century music", thus taking account of the unique and almost incredible fact that Krenek's oeuvre spans more than seven decades of the 20th century - from the late 1910s to the late 1980s. If it ist to be taken seriously, the point in question is not mere historical coincidence or keeping up with every modish trend, but rather Krenek's status as a companion of the century.

At the avant-garde festivals of Donaueschingen and Salzburg in the early 1920s when the young composer met early fame, he was considered a typical representative of the then "new" music - a kind of music that responded to the social upheavals after 1918 and rapid technical progress while playing down the high-flown aspirations of art with wit and topicality. The genre that is most typical of this attitude is the "topical opera" which Krenek, too, repeatedly tied his hand at. However he not only composed according to this model. Shortly before his sensational Jonny spielt auf, the "topical opera" par excellence, the première of his expressionist Orpheus and Eurydike, an opera after Kokoschka's play took place, and even earlier (years before Brecht's attempts) he was occupied with "epic" music drama (The Stronghold, 1922).

Younger than Alban Berg and Anton Webern by almost a generation, Krenek who did not belong to Schönberg's Vienna disciples made his approach to dodecaphony only gradually after 1930, doing so out of both compositional necessity and an aesthetic insight. This congruence of musical idea and intellectual analysis remained typical of Krenek's oeuvre. (In his first dodecaphonic work, Karl V, a "work for the stage, with music", this also had a political aspect which was unwelcome in Austria already in 1934 - which led to the cancellation of the premiere at the Vienna State Opera - and eventually caused Krenek to go into exile and emigrate 1938 to the USA.)

In the 1950s, contacts with the young European avant-garde encouraged him to concern himself with electronic music, with the strict serial organization of the musical material as well as with the opposite technique, the aleatory operation. This did not only have to do with his fascination with certain works of these types, but again by his wish to explore the new musical possibilities to the full, mentally and artistically.

In fact, he had already been experimenting with serial rotation techniques in the early 1940s in the USA. E.g. in his Sonata for Piano no. 3 (later one of Glenn Gould's favourite pieces) and the great a-cappella piece Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae - doing so, however, not to propel dodecaphony toward serialism, but to build a bridge to modal music. Significantly, this interest in historical embedding arose in the first years of exile when Krenek feared to lose touch with his own history through the loss of Europe and his home country. That same interest makes itself heard again, unmistakably, in his late work. What can be observed here is two things: the coexistence of different composing techniques and of different historical planes (marked by quotations or references, also to his own earlier works) and the disintegration of works into fragments. While he still sought to make sure of his personal history, he reflected on that history as irrevocably fragmented. Krenek thus signaled his refusal to gloss over that breach in history, one of the most incisive experiences that the 20th century imposed upon him and his contemporaries.

Claudia Maurer Zenck