Arts and Letters

Ernst Krenek was born in Vienna in 1900. Among the Viennese who were already there we might mention Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Kraus, Musil, Zweig, Neurath, Webern, Hofmansthal, Berg, Kokoschka, Broch, Wittgenstein, Schiele, Werfel, and Joseph Roth. Roth, the youngest of these, made the demise of the society and culture that engendered this remarkable community the subject of his novels, The Radetzky March and The Emperor's Tomb.

Krenek was only fourteen when the First World War broke out, young enough so that his early career did not suffer from the disruptive effects of years of military service and the political and economic chaos of the immediate post-war years. In The World of Yesterday Stefan Zweig recalls "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of the German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power ... [as] an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914." By 1924 Krenek was already beginning to achieve recognition as the enfant terrible of contemporary music. That this prodigiously gifted young man was not just another "emerging composer," as the expression goes these days, was immediately evident from the earliest public performances of his music. In the Second Symphony, composed in just eight weeks when he was only twenty-one years old, he had staked out a claim for himself as the continuator of the great tradition of the Viennese symphonists from Haydn to Mahler. "I even put it down as a note in a diary I used to keep off and on," Krenek recalled fifty years later, "that I had decided to try to become the successor of Mahler in the field of the symphony."¹ But how does one succeed Mahler in continuing a tradition whose demise was the very subject of his own late symphonies? One might refuse to recognize the liquidation of the Viennese symphonic tradition in Mahler's Ninth Symphony but, quoting Krenek again, "a man who wades into the sea until he is up to his neck can, of course, insist that he remains on land for the simple reason that his feet still touch bottom; but in view of the situation he will soon be in if he continues wading it might be more correct to say that he is in the water."²

The young Krenek decided not to wade in any deeper. A two-week sojourn in Paris at the end of 1924 not only helped him to recover from the emotional trauma of the dissolution of his brief marriage to Gustav Mahler's daughter. "It caused," as he recalled in later years, "a complete about-face in my artistic outlook.... I was fascinated by what appeared to me the happy equilibrium, perfect poise, grace, elegance, and clarity which I thought I perceived in the French music of that period, as well as in the relations of French musicians with their public. I decided that the tenets which I had followed so far in writing 'modern' music were totally wrong. Music, according to my new philosophy, had to fit the well-defined demands of the community for which it was written. It had to be useful, entertaining, practical."³ By the spring of 1926 Krenek had completed what has been called the first jazz opera, though there is very little of anything that one can really call "jazz" in Jonny spielt auf, or Jonny Strikes up the Band, as it is known in its English translation. Composed to his own libretto, like almost all the others, it was already the fifth of his more than twenty operas. The serious composer, Max, communing with a glacier, is oblivious to the gaiety of the guests at the nearby mountain resort as they dance and sing to the happy music of the touring black American jazzman, Jonny. Jonny is playing an Amati violin that he has stolen from the virtuoso concert celebrity Daniello, whom we finally get rid of when he falls under the train that is to take Jonny, joined by all the other chief characters, including Max, to Amsterdam for embarkation on his return trip to America.

Jonny spielt auf was a huge and immediate success. It was translated into eighteen languages and performed in over 100 cities. But its parodistic and shallow musical language could only hold the young composer's interest very briefly. The three early symphonies had shown how deeply involved he was in the Viennese classic-romantic heritage. Now he turned to another component of that heritage, the German Lied from Schubert through Wolf. In his attempt to carry on the symphonic tradition beyond Mahler he had waded into the ocean until the water reached to his chin. With the Lied Krenek returned to shore and started all over again. His return to the past had nothing in common with the neo-classicism that was the dominant trend of the time, though it was motivated by a similarly anxious awareness of the dissolution of the common practice of Western music and a similarly determined rejection of the revolutionary response embodied in the atonal and 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples. But the disintegrative tendencies that culminated in the expressionistic atonality of the Schoenberg circle have their beginnings in Schubert and nineteenth-century romanticism. Krenek, like Schoenberg himself, gazing at the past, walked backwards into the future. By 1931, this fervent and articulate polemicist against the revolutionary concepts of the Schoenbergian movement had convinced himself of the exhaustion of the traditional tonal system and had accepted the 12-tone system as a viable response. Krenek was the first significant composer outside of the immediate circle of Schoenberg and his pupils to commit himself to the 12-tone system, and his conversion occasioned a good deal of excitement in musical circles, though not so much as another unexpected conversion about twenty years later, that of Igor Stravinsky.

Though Krenek insisted on the autonomy of the language of music, he always found an ideological rationale for the significant changes in his style. The overriding social and political circumstance of the time was the growing power of the Nazis and the threat to Austria of the party's pan-Germanic ambitions; it was a source of satisfaction to him that in aligning himself with Schoenberg he had "adopted the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all."⁴ Of Czech parentage, son of a career officer in the Imperial Army, he responded to the continuing crisis by reasserting his faith in Catholicism as a supranational religion and in Austria as a supranational state. He saw an analogous universalism in the 12-tone system, and the "first work in [his] newly acquired technique was the opera Charles V, explicitly anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian, and Catholic."⁵ The opera simultaneously divides the action between Charles's dialogue with his confessor, after his abdication and retirement to a monastery, and flashbacks to the events of his long reign as Holy Roman Emperor. "The questions that I put in the mouth of the monk," said Krenek, "are, of course, those I feel a contemporary audience might ask, wondering why we should be concerned with these bygone affairs."⁶ Though Krenek lived for fifty-eight productive years after completing Charles V, he continued to regard it as his chef d'oeuvre to the end of his life.

Charles V was completed in May 1933, two months after the Reichstag fire and the firm establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. Though the work had been commissioned by the Vienna Opera and was already in rehearsal, the influence of Hitler's supporters in Vienna was sufficient to compel cancellation of the scheduled 1934 premiere. It was staged for the first time four years later in Prague, only three months before the Munich Conference and the resultant dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and three months after Hitler's arrival in Vienna on March 14, 1938. Had it not happened that Krenek was elsewhere at the time, he would undoubtedly have been among the 76,000 persons on Hitler's "enemies list" who were immediately arrested.

The following August he emigrated to the United States. With the Nazis in power in Vienna he no longer had a publisher. There were no more royalties from Jonny spielt auf, or from anything else. In America he found himself under the same necessity of making a living from something other than the composition of music that his American colleagues had always taken for granted, with the difference that for him a position on the music faculty of a college the only feasible solution if one were still to remain in the profession, "meant a way of living that was still untried."⁷ He would be trying it for the first time at the 1939 summer session of the University of Michigan.

I met Krenek for the first time the preceding January, when he was in Chicago for a performance with the Symphony. I had made my first connection with the Second Vienna School about a year-and-a-half earlier through a chance encounter with Berg's Lyric Suite, which showed me for the first time that there was a way out of the impasse I had reached in my own work. I tried to discuss the overwhelming impression that this music had made upon me with my teacher, but he responded with an embarrassed silence, and I never brought it up again. When I introduced myself to Krenek backstage at Orchestra Hall in Chicago I did not yet know anyone with whom I could share the discoveries I had made in my intensive study of this music in the interim. I was only twenty-three and Krenek was thirty-eight—I should say "only thirty-eight" in view of the scope and variety of his career by this time and the extent of his reputation. I had the impression that Krenek, in his new environment, felt as isolated as I did in my old one. He suggested, rather shyly and hesitantly, that we should meet at his hotel the next day and that I should bring some of my compositions with me. At this second meeting he invited me to see him for occasional private lessons during his guest professorship at the University of Michigan the following summer. Ann Arbor, fortunately, was a convenient hitch-hiking distance from the family farm near LaPorte, Indiana. I brought with me, to my first lesson, the beginning of a string quartet that I supposed to be in the 12-tone system. Krenek stared at it with considerable puzzlement until I explained what I was doing. It turned out that I had misconstructed a fundamental premise. But he did not say, "You have made a mistake." What he said was, "You have made a discovery."

In the two weeks that elapsed before our next meeting I investigated the implications of my misconstruction of Schoenberg's system. When I showed Krenek the symmetrical arrays that I had come up with, he responded with a parable. There was for a time in Vienna a craze for more and more complicated and elaborate cigarette lighters, which culminated in an extraordinary ingenious invention—a little disposable piece of wood tipped with a chemical substance that ignites when rubbed against a rough surface. I have been reinventing the match ever since, in the musical language I call “12-tone tonality." Krenek himself was eventually to move in a diametrically opposed direction when he adopted the "integral serialism" of the post-war avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen, et al), but again and again, in the more than half a century since those first meetings with him during his first teaching engagement at an American, or for that matter any university, I have had occasion to recall, in the course of my professional life as a composer, as a writer, and as a teacher, the generosity, comprehension, and collegial interest with which he responded to my "discovery." The only regret I have as I recall my "lessons" with him (he himself never referred to them as such), was that he was so disinclined to talk about himself apart from showing me his own "discoveries" in the 12-tone system. The Norton bilingual edition of a selection of Rilke's poetry had only recently been published. This was a salient event in my literary experience and I set two of the poems, in the original German, to music. I'm sorry that Krenek didn't go on, after correcting an error in my prosody, to tell me something of what I have only just now learned—of how as a young man he had met the poet at the Château de Muzot, of how Rilke read from and commented on the Duino Elegies, of their conversations on the feasibility of setting Rilke's poetry to music, of Rilke's subsequent composition of the O Lacrymosa trilogy specifically for Krenek to set, of the pencilled note of appreciation that he received only a few days before the poet's death, in response to Krenek's telegram informing him that he had completed the songs.⁸

In the fall of 1939, Krenek assumed his first full-time teaching position at Vassar College. The letter offering him his appointment emphasized that "music at Vassar is taught as a subject within the liberal arts, not as a professional study." Krenek thought that a course in contemporary music should be part of such a curriculum, but the chairman didn't agree. Moreover, he thought it prudent to warn Krenek against infiltrating any "intensified study of the 12-tone system" into his undergraduate theory courses.⁹ The suspicion that a composer with a special interest in the work of the Second Vienna School might introduce a subversive element persisted for some years, and in my applications for a teaching position ten years later I still hesitated to include any titles in my publications' list that would indicate such an interest. Krenek, the only member of his department with a significant reputation in the music world, learned that his appointment, due to terminate in the spring of 1942, would not be renewed. Ironically, it was while he was still at Vassar that he composed what is perhaps the finest work of his American years, The Lamentations of Jeremiah, influenced by a serious interest in Renaissance polyphony that he developed in the course of his browsings in the "magnificent music library" at Vassar.¹⁰

He was trying desperately but without success to find another faculty position in time for the new academic year, when he received a letter from a college he had never heard of, inviting him to assume a professorship in music, the chairmanship of the department, and the deanship of the school of fine arts. That the same person could simultaneously fill these three posts at Hamline University, an undergraduate college in St. Paul, Minnesota, gives us some indication of its dimensions. The music department was housed in the men's dormitory and there was no library to speak of. But Minneapolis, directly across the river, with a major university symphony orchestra, was a far more interesting cultural and musical center than Poughkeepsie had been, and in Dimitri Mitropoulis, conductor of the Symphony and an enthusiastic supporter of advanced contemporary music with a special interest in Krenek's work, and Louis Krasner, the Symphony's concertmaster, who had given the world premieres of both the Berg and the Schoenberg violin concertos, he found natural allies of the sort that had been so conspicuously absent at Vassar. At the college, he built up a microfilm library that enabled him to offer graduate courses in musicology; these were integrated with the work of the advanced composition students who came to St. Paul to study with him. Krenek was always recognized as a brilliant writer and some of his occasional talks to the college community have been published in selections of his writings. One of these, "The Ivory Tower," is an elegant example of the essayist's art, and ought to be brought to the attention of anthologists of the genre.

There was, however, a serious disadvantage in the St. Paul environment that he could do nothing about: the weather. After a few years he moved to California, and in 1950 he settled, for the remainder of his life, in the Los Angeles area, where Schoenberg and Stravinsky had already been living for many years. To his disappointed associates in St. Paul he explained, "I did not leave because I was mistreated or abused, but ... because I wanted to see roses and violets blossoming at Christmas time."¹¹

His compositions continued to be neglected in this country, but with the elimination of the Nazi dictatorship, and the post-war recovery, there was a revival of interest and new opportunities in Europe. Though Krenek's vast output embraces every musical genre, even including electronic music, he was above all a composer of operas, the one medium in which he could simultaneously profess both his literary and his musical gifts. It is in Germany, far more than in any other country, that one finds the established and traditional institutions upon which operatic culture depends, and German opera companies not only revived his earlier works but commissioned new ones. And Vienna remembered, and honored him with a whole series of medals and citations, most importantly with the long overdue production, in 1984, of the opera that the Vienna State Opera House had commissioned more than fifty years earlier, Charles V. He was invited to take up residence again in the city of his birth, and the sincerity of the offer was affirmed when the government of Austria presented him with a furnished apartment, in the very same building on the outskirts of Vienna where Schoenberg had once lived.

"On a mild and sunny January day in 1983 he stood in front of his Palm Springs home with friends who were congratulating him on having two such agreeable places as Mödling and Palm Springs in which to live. He made no answer at first. Then his eyes filled with tears and he said sadly, 'I don't know where I belong.’"¹² Ernst Krenek has returned to Vienna now, as the first occupant of a newly opened section of the Zentralfriedhof, the famous old cemetery where he now joins so many of Vienna's honored dead.

1. Ernst Krenek, Horizon's Circled: Reflections on my Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 22.
2. Ernst Krenek, Music Here and Now (New York, W.W. Norton, 1939), p. 139.
3. Ernst Krenek, "Self-Analysis," New Mexico Quarterly 23 (Spring 1953), p. 14f.
4. Ernst Krenek, "A Composer's Influences," Perspectives of New Music 3/1 (Fall/Winter 1964), p. 38.
5. Ibid., p. 39.
6. Ernst Krenek, Horizon's Circled: Reflections on my Music, p. 44.
7. Ernst Krenek, "America's Influence on its Emigré Composers," Perspectives of New Music 8/2 (Spring/Summer 1970), p. 113.
8. John L. Stewart, Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 99f.
9. Ibid., p. 221.
10. Ernst Krenek, "A Composer's Influences," p. 40.
11. John Stewart, op. cit., p. 257.
12. Ibid., p. 373.