Ernst Krenek

Two challenges complicate any attempt to understand the oeuvre of Ernst Krenek: its sheer scale and its extraordinary stylistic range. Krenek was a prolific composer, producing a catalogue of nearly 250 numbered opuses, in addition to several hundred unnumbered works, some incomplete. His career also spanned more than seventy years and placed his artistic activity in dialogue with many of the aesthetic movements of the twentieth century. Krenek moved through a remarkable variety of styles: from the last echoes of expressionism to neoromanticism, from neoclassicism to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, and later to 1950s serialism and mixed pieces for instruments and tape. His exceptional openness was supported by a strong command of counterpoint and orchestration. Incontestably, though, his versatility and stylistic diversity prevented his life’s work from achieving any real unity.

Krenek tried his hand at nearly every established genre of his century, and he returned to many of them throughout his career. He wrote seven sonatas for piano, eight string quartets, five symphonies, multiple concerti, a major body of lieder and choral pieces, and some twenty operas, for which he supplied most of the libretti. Better than any other type of composition, his eight string quartets, written between 1921 and 1980, illustrate the successive phases through which his writing passed, including free atonality (nos. 2 and 3), neoclassicism (no. 4) and neoromanticism (no. 5), as well as various applications of twelve-tone and serial techniques (nos. 6-8).

Despite this panoply of compositions, Krenek remains best known for the opera Jonny spielt auf, whose success in the 1920s brought him international fame. His reputation solidified around this one piece, which is more important historically than it is musically. As a result, Krenek is often invoked today by those with little real knowledge of his music or his career. His nearly five decades of twelve-tone and serial composition produced many pieces worthy of further interest, along with a body of writings on composition comparable to those of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg.

The 1920s — eclecticism

Over the course of his studies with Franz Schreker, which he began in Vienna and pursued in Berlin, Krenek pulled away from his teacher’s Romantic style, in particular after discovering Ernst Kurth’s Grundlage des linearen Kontrapunkts (Foundations of Linear Counterpoint, 1917). Kurth’s treatise upended Krenek’s approach to composition, making him realize that music need not arise from sentiment and instinct, but could instead depend on “an autonomous system of streams of energy materialized in carefully controlled tonal patterns” [Krenek, “A Composer’s Influences,” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn-Winter 1964), pp. 36-37]. This idea helps explain Krenek’s lasting interest in dense and prolix polyphony, as well as his attraction to a more abstract dimension of music. These qualities appear in most of his output. As he explained, it was this realization that allowed him to step away from Schreker’s post-Romanticism and to embrace the “radical tenets” of Ferruccio Busoni, Eduard Erdmann, Artur Schnabel, and Hermann Scherchen. After arriving in Berlin, his contact with these composers led him toward atonalism.

Krenek’s early compositions, such as the String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 and his Symphony No. 1, are ornate, large-scale pieces that develop over time. Symphony No. 2 (1922), one of his densest compositions from this period, expands this tendency to imposing proportions. Around this same time, he took his first forays into drama, notably with the operetta Der Sprung über den Schatten, whose foxtrot rhythms and turbulent jazz idioms point toward the eclecticism that would characterize Jonny spielt auf.

Inspired in equal parts by Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, the insouciant music of Les Six, and the cheery bandstand jazz of Paul Whiteman, Krenek developed a brilliant and agile style of composing. Yet its polish could sometimes seem more superficial than subtle, particularly as it shifted toward Puccini-esque vocality and trending jazz idioms. When Jonny spielt auf premiered in 1927, it met with tremendous acclaim and was followed by some fifty productions across Europe. The opera became a model for the Zeitoper, or opera “of its time,” placing such modern technologies as radios, telephones, and trains alongside counterpoint influenced by fashionable dances such as the shimmy and the Charleston. The plot portrays the existential ponderings of Max, a classical composer who is overshadowed by Jonny, a Black violinist in a jazz band. With its use of film projection and cinematic montage, Jonny reflects the innovations of contemporary cinema, such as Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. These elements make the opera a vivid and exhilarating expression of the Weimar Republic’s utopian aspirations. As for Krenek’s use of fashionable jazz — an attempt, as he put it, “to find a widely intelligible means of communication” — it contributed as much to the opera’s popularity as it did to rooting it in the everyday life of its time, a world that now feels unmistakably dated. Ten years later, by the late thirties, the same musical language that helped make the opera famous would land Krenek on the Nazi Party’s infamous list of “degenerate composers.”

Meanwhile Krenek had also explored opera through a trilogy of one-act pieces, which follow in the footsteps of Puccini and Hindemith while also anticipating Darius Milhaud’s miniature operas and Hindemith’s later operas. The trilogy comprises Der Diktator (The Dictator, 1926), Das geheime Königreich (The Secret Kingdom, 1926), and Schwergewicht oder Die Ehre der Nation (Heavyweight, or the Glory of the Nation, 1927). Together the three intertwine themes of political power and eroticism. The Dictator, for example, is explicitly based on Benito Mussolini. This new political turn is striking, given that up until this point Krenek had supported legitimism and Habsburg rule. At the same time, the trilogy also illustrates his ability to move fluently between sharply contrasting theatrical worlds. He gave each operetta its own thematic subtitle: “tragic opera,” “burlesque operette, and “fairy-tale opera,” respectively. With a virtuosic turn of his stylistic kaleidoscope, Krenek developed a more melodic vocal language and made his music more broadly accessible. He then sought greater dramatic unity in Leben des Orest (The Life of Orestes, 1928), a five-act “grand opera” whose Greek mythological subject imposes a cohesive dramatic structure.

Krenek’s brief neoromantic period is best illustrated by Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen, op. 62, a cycle of twenty lieder heavily influenced by Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. Arguably the least original phase of Krenek’s career, it marked a temporary return to simpler writing and transparent tonality, though not without a measure of irony. This return was a kind of antidote to the works he had written until then, a pause before plunging into twelve-tone composition.

Krenek maintained close relationships with Alban Berg and Anton Webern, whose sketches he later published in a collection in 1978. He also avidly read Karl Kraus and corresponded with Theodor Adorno. These influences were decisive in his choice to anchor his music in the social and aesthetic demands of his time. His correspondence with Adorno also reveals how deliberately he aligned his approach with Schoenberg’s. Adorno, for his part, did not fully endorse Krenek’s work: in his own letters to Walter Benjamin, he was often critical of Krenek.

Adopting twelve-tone serialism

Krenek’s twelve-tone writing first took definitive shape in two works: the opera Karl V, op. 73 (1933), and the Sixth String Quartet (1934). The quartet, cast in five linked movements, shows the strong influence of Webern and Berg. Réné Leibowitz later examined the work in his Introduction à la musique de douze sons. Together, the opera and quartet mark a crucial stylistic turning point in Krenek’s oeuvre.

Probably Krenek’s most significant stage piece, Karl V responds to the rise of National Socialism. Written while Schoenberg was composing Moses und Aron, it became Krenek’s first stage work composed entirely with twelve-tone technique. Its philosophical framework draws in part on Benjamin’s writings on the Trauerspiel, or German tragic drama, which Krenek later engaged with in his own 1935 article “Künstlerische und wissenschaftliche Geschichtsbetrachtung” (“Artistic and Scientific Views of History”).

The opera stages the Emperor Charles V, a sung role, alongside his confessor, a spoken role. The stage is divided into two distinct areas, so that the action and commentary can be presented simultaneously. Through fragmented accounts of historical events, the opera traces the emperor’s life up to his abdication. Krenek’s use of flashbacks shows the influence of cinematic editing on his theatrical imagination. The cast brings together many of the era’s most illustrious figures, including Martin Luther, François I, Francisco Borgia, the Sultan Suleiman, and Pope Clement VII. A monk acts as intermediary between the audience and the historical events depicted on stage. Through the figure of Charles V, Krenek sought to awaken political and spiritual awareness in his audience. More specifically, he hoped to persuade Austrians to renew their commitment to Catholicism, which he saw as the only viable political alternative to National Socialism. Krenek selected the subject in 1930, in response to a commission from the Vienna Opera. His inspiration was Milhaud and Paul Claudel’s Christopher Colombus (1928), whose title character embodies a similar mission of Christian pacification.

Krenek completed the score in 1933, but Vienna banned its performance, and it did not reach the stage until June 1938, in Prague (it did eventually premiere at the Vienna Opera, in 1984). By the time of the Prague premiere, however, Krenek had already left Europe for the United States, departing immediately after the Anschluss.

Krenek’s theoretical writing

In parallel to composing music, Krenek published extensively as an author. His writings describe the composition techniques he would try in the future, as well as clarify procedures he had already used in earlier works.

One of his central concerns was a relationship between music and mathematics. He explores this connection in Über neue Musik (1937, later translated and revised in 1939 as Music Here and Now), where he considers the possibility of an axiomatic theory of music. His writings on twelve-tone composition, which extend Berg’s own reflections on the subject, examine the many remarkable properties of tone rows, especially properties based on mirror forms or symmetry. Most of his understanding of serial composing, however, rests on pattern. In a section titled “Series and Scale,” he compares serial procedures with Gregorian chant, where he identifies a similar use of pattern and inversion. Such comparisons are a leitmotif in Krenek’s thinking: he repeatedly turned to historical references, even remote ones, to justify modern approaches to composition. This is what Adorno refers to when, in a letter to Benjamin dated 25 April 1937, he praises Krenek’s technical excellence but objects to his aesthetic ideas, complaining that he “appropriates in his own fashion certain things that belong to us.”

By this point, Adorno and Krenek had discussed writing a treatise on twelve-tone music together, but Krenek eventually pursued the project on his own in Studies in Counterpoint, Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique, an essay published in 1940. The study begins from Schoenberg’s conception of the Idea as the principle that gives unity to the work: the tone row supplies the core motif and assures the piece’s coherence. Inspired by his reading of Kurth, Krenek reaffirms the primacy of linear writing over harmony. At the same time, he stresses the value of older contrapuntal discipline, warning that “the mastery of strict counterpoint (Palestrina) is recommended, even indispensable.” Characteristically, he includes an appendix with examples of all-interval series and symmetrical series, the latter organized in two six-note groups, the second of which is a transposed inversion of the first. Although he does not cite them directly, these two examples point to Berg and Webern, respectively. Although Krenek’s friendship with both composers from the early 1930s onward, as well as his in-depth study of their works, clearly informed this important text, his reference to Palestrina signals a new interest in early counterpoint that would deepen in the years that followed.

Richard S. Hill’s article “Schoenberg’s Tone-Rows and the Tonal System of the Future” (in Musical Quarterly, 1936) prompted Krenek to reflect on further links between older polyphonic writing and twelve-tone composition. Citing the difficulty of understanding Schoenberg’s serial compositions through relationships among rows, Hill recommends instead a modal approach that would maintain the audible presence of a fundamental. He sees this principle at work in the music of Béla Bartók and Stravinsky, but not Schoenberg. Drawing on Jefim Golyscheff, Herbert Eimert, and Josef Matthias Hauer’s Tropen, Hill points out the tone row’s “lack of functional organization.” He argues that the row should establish a “functional mode” that can “be used to establish the contrapuntal lines (as in medieval times).” Alternatively, he suggests devising “a series of ‘chords’ or segments of the row,” whose notes would remain continually associated with one another. Schoenberg himself responded to this article later the same year in “The Twelve-Tone Series,” published in Style and Idea.

The idea of polarity, emerging from a modal understanding of serialism, clearly prompted Krenek to reflect on the coherence of twelve-tone material. In 1943, in “New Developments in the Twelve-Tone Technique,” he began developing his theory of “rotation,” which he later continued in “Extents and Limits of Serial Techniques” (1960). As he explains, “By rotation we understand a procedure in which the elements of a given series systematically and progressively change their relative positions according to a plan which in itself is serially conceived […].” As an example, he points to the series in Lamentatio Jeremiæ Prophetæ (for mixed a cappella choir, 1941-1942), which consists of two hexachords. By rotating the order of the notes, he generates new material and produces a roster of six modes, which he qualifies as “diatonic” because each mode contains the same six tones. In each hexachord, the first tone moves to the end, while the remaining tones shift forward:

An important aspect here is the “modal dimension” created by the recurring motifs, reinforced by the predominantly stepwise motion within each hexachord. In the “Series and Scale” section of Music Here and Now, Krenek describes the tone row as a succession of motifs giving character to the texture as a whole. He identifies the same phenomenon in Gregorian chant, pointing to patterns of three and four tones and the use of inversions — another example of his interest in the historical continuity of certain musical forms that he hoped to recover in twentieth-century music.

Krenek pursued the parallel between Gregorian chant and twelve-tone composing in other writings, notably in relation to his Lamentatio Jeremiæ Prophetæ cycle. In particular, he points to canon and cantus firmus, connecting his own twelve-tone writing to the composing of Johannes Ockeghem, to whom he devoted several lectures and an acclaimed study (1953). Early in that study, he addresses the “overdose of intellectualism” of which modern composers were often accused:

When he notices that one of the venerable masters of the past is exposed to the same kind of attack, he feels a certain solidarity with his long-departed colleague and tries to find out how the distant friend has incurred the adverse label.

Krenek continued to argue in favor of twelve-tone composition, notably in his analysis of the motifs in Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata (“Is the Twelve-Tone Technique on the Decline?,” 1953), where he links Boulez’s permutation technique to his own theory of rotation. In “Extents and Limits of Serial Techniques,” he comments on Gyorgy Ligeti’s analysis of Boulez’s Structure Ia. He also compares Karlheinz Stockhausen’s use of six-tone series in his first Klavierstücke to his rotations for Lamentatio Jeremiæ Prophetæ. Through these analyses, Krenek positions himself within — and even as a pioneer of — the historical advance of serialism, despite the fact that many younger composers did not recognize him a such.

Krenek’s work did draw the attention of Stravinsky, with whom he regularly spent time in Los Angeles after Stravinsky, too, embraced serialism. It would be remiss not to mention the relationship between Krenek’s Lamentatio Jeremiæ Prophetæ — whose score, which Stravinsky studied closely, was published in 1957 — and Stravinsky’s Threni, composed the following year using the same texts from the prophet Jeremiah.

Continuations and new horizons

The late 1950s saw Krenek still reflecting on serial rows and perfecting the principle of rotation. Spiritus Intelligentiæ, Sanctus, op. 152 (Oratorio for Pentecost, for voice and electronics, 1955-1956), uses a thirteen-tone row, a technique he explains in “Extents and Limits of Serial Techniques” in a section titled “Premeditated, but Unpredictable.” Similarly, the temporal mechanism in Sestina, op. 161 (for soprano and orchestra, 1957), is built around the relationship between the twelfth-century poetic form of the sestina and its corresponding music. Krenek argued that this form was “a serial form of poetry” based on the “essential formative principle of rotation”: six stanzas of six lines each, featuring six key words that reappear, in a different order, at the end of each line. In Krenek’s sestina, these words evoke current, measure, chance, form, time, and number. These key words, as well as a six-tone row, go through six rotations moving from the edges to the center: 1 2 3 4 5 6 / 6 1 5 2 4 3 / 3 6 4 1 2 5 / 5 3 2 6 1 4 / 4 5 1 3 6 2 / 2 4 6 5 3 1. A hypothetical seventh rotation would return to the original order, 1 2 3 4 5 6. In this way, the lines in each stanza end with …Strom …Mass …Zufall …Gestalt …Zeit …Zahl / Zahl …Strom …Zeit …Mass … Gestalt …Zufall / etc.

In a theory of generalized serialism, such rotations would also affect rhythmic proportions and density. Krenek pursued just this in his Motets after Franz Kafka (1959). He continued to apply temporal serialism in Sechs Vermessene (for piano, 1958). The title is a play on words: in German, vermessen means both “to measure” and “to presume” (Krenek). Use of the Fibonacci series to determine “speed zones” in Quaestio temporis (for orchestra, 1959) also bears mention [see “Extents and Limits of Serial Techniques”].

Krenek’s experiments with electronic music in Cologne in 1955, working with Eimert, inspired him to compose for tape and, more notably, for mixed media. These pieces include Instant Remembered, op. 201 (for soprano, narrator, orchestra, and tape, using a compilation of texts by Krenek, Seneca, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Karl Kraus; 1967-1968), Tape and Double, op. 207 (for two pianos and tape, 1970), and Orga-Nastro, op. 212 (for organ and tape, 1971).

Krenek was often a pioneer in his own way, whether in the Zeitoper genre or with Karl V, the first twelve-tone opera. Even more significant were his theoretical writings: well before the 1950s, he had conceived of the row as two hexachords with a modal character and had developed rotational permutations that enrich the music harmonically. Like Hindemith’s theories in Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937), which establish the possibility to polarize a fundamental within any aggregate, Krenek’s ideas shaped the thinking of the generation after 1945, as composers sought a form of harmony within serial music.

Yet Krenek’s position between modality and serialism was never an easy one, nor was it ever fully recognized. As he put it,

To my knowledge I am the only one of the composers of my generation who has thoroughly and consistently practiced what is called ‘serialism,’ and I have been blamed a) for doing it at all, b) for doing it too late, and c) for still being at it.

[“Circling My Horizon,” in Horizons Circled: Reflections on My Music (University of California Press, 1974), p. 75]

Incontestably, the stylistic diversity that defined Krenek’s music worked against him, and he is mostly remembered as a rebellious composer from the Weimar Republic.