Krenek life

Facts of his life are not at all well known - although there is a book by John L Stewart (University of California Press) that tells you just about all you need to know. And it is worth getting to know.

If you wanted to write a novel based on the life of a fictional composer and at the same time making use of the major events and personalities associated with music in the twentieth century you would probably begin by having your hero born in the symbolic year of 1900 and in Vienna - where else? You might have chosen Paris, where musical impressionism and The Rite of Spring were still to come, but it was in Mahler’s Vienna - with Schoenberg just beginning to wield an influence - that modernism was boiling up. You wouldn’t have your hero study with Schoenberg, like Webern and Berg, because if you want to make him a hero with his own progressive ideas you put him in the charge of a teacher like Franz Schreker, who was no radical like Schoenberg but was progressive without being possessive and was a great teacher of counterpoint. The other advantage ofgiving Schreker a role is that in 1920 he went to Berlin to succeed Humperdinck as director of the Hochschule für Musik and took his four best pupils with him - which means that our hero can also absorb the influences of that other centre of German culture, getting to know Busoni, Scherchen and Artur Schnabel. It is while he is still a student in Berlin that you have him write, completely out of the blue - since he had produced nothing like it so far - a String Quartet so progressive that it anticipates developments still to come from Schoenberg. its first performance causes a scandal, attracting something like 50 reviews (few of them favourable) and a contract with Universal Edition, which could scarcely have been better.

At this point in the story some romantic interest is needed. So which historical figure do you link him with? Mahler’s daughter Anna seems a good idea, even though she is already married (at the age of 17) when she meets our composer at a fancy-dress student ball. They get married and after only a year or so they get divorced. She must have been very difficult to live with, as you might expect of the daughter of Alma and Gustav Mahler, but she is a talented artist and needs her own way of life. And it is through her that our composer gets to know members of the Alma Mahler circles, like Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka and Franz Werfel, to name only those closest to her.

It is in a state of shock after the failure of his marriage that our hero now goes to Paris - in 1925 at the height of the vogue for the Satie and Les Six - Milhaud, Honegger, Poulenc, Auric, Durey, Taillefer, lots more names to drop. He also gets to know Stravinsky and promptly falls out with him. He meets the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke who, though normally reluctant to have his work set to music, writes a set of poems for him. The new Parisian twenties aesthetic, with its admission of popular styles of music into the concert hall, inspires our composer to write a jazz opera, with a trendy title like Jonny spielt auf, or Johnny strikes up, Johnny being a black American jazz violinist. The score would sound something like this. As the narrator of the novel would point out, this was before Brech and Weill, before The Threepenny Opera

Although Jonny spielt auf is a great success, winning the composer his fortune in terms of both money and reputation, it is also the beginning of big troubles for him. We are now nearing the thirties and it is not long before fascists in German and Austria are accusing Krenek of both degrading both music and dishonouring the German race. In Vienna he gets to know Berg and Webern and writes an opera in - it is about time - twelve-note technique. Commissioned by the Vienna State Opera, it is politically impossible and is first performed in Prague in 1938. He is officially condemned as a protagonist of entartete Kunst - degenerate art - along with Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg, Schreke, Eisler and Weill and though not himself a Jew he is forced to leave Europe for America - like Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Weill and many others.

At this point the novel gets rather boring, getting bogged down with appointments in minor American universities and an extraordinarily abundant work list. Although he frequently returns to Europe - to teach at the Darmstadt summer School, to attend sixtieth birthday celebrations in Vienna (with an amusingly awful production of Jonny spielt auf) and although he is still of his time, anticipating total serialism in some pieces, working in an electronic studio, writing television operas, it is probably best to cut this part of the story short. Then of course your hero has to die - not in 2000 because that would be too neat and tidy but, since you want him to represent the twentieth century you keep him alive in 1991.