String Quartet No.1, Op.6

Ernst Krenek (1900-1991)

String Quartet No.1, Op.6

Lento - Allegro, ma non troppo - Adagio molto - Presto - Andante, quasi adagio -Allegro vivace - Fuga: vivace - Lento come prima

When it was first performed, at a new-music festival in Nürnberg in 1921, Krenek’s First String Quartet caused a sensation. Many members of the audience, some of whom walked out, were upset by its uncompromising attitude and the majority of the critics declared against it too. But, whether they liked it or not, they had to agree that it was an astonishingly assured score from a composer of little experience and even less reputation. While they might have known Krenek as one of the particularly promising students Franz Schreker had recently brought with him from Vienna to Berlin (on taking up his post as director of the Hochshule für Musik there), they could scarcely have expected anything so radical and at the same time so accomplished and, on its own terms at least, so convincing.

Krenek’s First String Quartet is, in fact, a remarkable achievement - not so much because of its exclusion of romantic sound and sentiment or even its sustained contrapuntal resourcefulness as because of its highly original construction. Daringly cast in eight continuous but widely contrasting movements, most of which contain several changes of tempo, it is held together by a kind of serial technique. It is nowhere near as elaborate or as rigorous as the twelve-note system Schoenberg was developing at the time - Krenek draws much of his material from variants of the familiar BACH (B flat, A, C, B natural) motif - but the idea behind it is much the same. Radical though the work is, however, it does have precedents in late Beethoven, above all the Grosse Fuge which is similarly cast in several continuous and contrasted movements and which is also largely but not exclusively fugal in texture.

Another Beethoven work that comes to mind is the Quartet in A minor, Op.132, the Assai sostenuto opening bars of which are echoed at the very beginning of the opening Lento. The BACH motif makes its first entry on first violin and reappears several times at different levels in the texture both before and after the change of tempo to an aggressive Allegro vivace. Exposed in quietly sustained high-lying chords in the more lyrical second movement (Allegro, ma non troppo), it is less prominent but still present in the Adagio molto and the percussive Bartok-influenced Presto scherzo. BACH is heard again in the middle of the expressive Andante, quasi Adagio and, after a very short Allegro vivace, performs a heroic role in the fugal seventh movement: the motif enters on viola about half-way through to become the subject of a second fugue which, in a climax of contrapuntal virtuosity, is eventually combined with the first. The closing Lento come prima recalls the opening of the work and, while making oblique references to the BACH motif, quietly proceeds to a C (neither major nor minor) ending.