In the fall of 1972 Krenek wrote three Songs for Soprano and Piano op. 216, with lyrics by the Tylroean poet Lilly von Sauter. Krenek gently and discretely translates her images into flexible, transparent sound. The second poem (whose interior rhymes resemble the verses on peasant calendars) and the third text (with its explanatio of the night's astronomy) find their equivlent in the music's relaxed, clear part writing that nevertheless owes its simplicity to the multi-layered calculation. Due to the seemingly fleeting, but actually very elaborate mosaic-like way of composing, the vaguely remembered sounds of coherent motives dervied from tonal triades and dense twelve-tone figures never seem to take too much effort. Their search for the inexpressible is expressed insound at the threshhold of silence that circles through "fields of silence." Krenek was born in Vienna as the son of a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. Throughout his life, however, he insisted that his name be written Krenek rather than his father's Křenek, and that it should be pronounced as a German word. He studied there and in Berlin with Franz Schreker before working in a number of German opera houses as conductor. During World War I, Krenek was drafted into the Austrian army, but he was stationed in Vienna, allowing him to go on with his musical studies. In 1922 he met Alma Mahler, wife of the late Gustav Mahler, and her daughter, Anna, whom he married in March 1924. That marriage ended in divorce before its first anniversary. At the time of his marriage to Anna Mahler, Krenek was completing his Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 29. The Australian violinist Alma Moodie assisted Krenek, not with the scoring of the violin part, but with getting financial assistance from her Swiss patron Werner Reinhart at a time when there was hyper-inflation in Germany. In gratitude, Krenek dedicated the concerto to Moodie, and she premiered it on 5 January 1925, in Dessau. Krenek's divorce from Anna Mahler became final a few days after the premiere. Krenek did not attend the premiere, but he did have an affair with Moodie, which has been described as "short-lived and complicated". He never managed to hear her play the concerto, but he did "immortalize some aspects of her personality in the character of Anita in his opera Jonny spielt auf". In 1924, Krenek also dedicated his Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 33 to Alma Moodie, and his Kleine Suite, Op. 28 (1924) to Reinhart. His journalism was banned and his music was targeted in Germany by the Nazi Party beginning in 1933. On March 6, one day after elections in which the Nazis gained control of the Reichstag, Krenek's incidental music to Goethe's Triumph der Empfindsamkeit was withdrawn in Mannheim, and eventually pressure was brought to bear on the Vienna State Opera, which cancelled the commissioned premiere of Karl V. The jazz imitations of Jonny spielt auf were included in the 1938 Degenerate art exhibition in Munich. Nonetheless, despite protests by conservatives and the fledgling Nazi party, that work was a great success in Krenek's lifetime, playing all over Europe and becoming so popular that even a brand of cigarettes, still on the market today in Austria, was named "Jonny". In 1938 Krenek moved to the United States of America, where he taught music at various universities, the first being Bassar College. He later taught at other institutions including Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1942-1947. There he met and married his third wife, his student and composer Gladys Nordenstrom. He became an American citizen in 1945. He later moved to Toronto, Canada where he taught at The Royal Conservatory of Music during the 1950s. His students included Milton Barnes, Lorne Betts, Samuel Dolin, Robert Erickson, Halim El-Dabh, Richard Maxfield, Will Ogdon, and George Perle. He died in Palm Springs, California. In 1998 Gladys Nordenstrom founded the Ernst Krenek Institute and in 2004 the private foundation Krems die Ernst Krenek in Vienna, Austria. Krenek abandoned the neoromantic style in the late 1920s to embrace Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique,[8] the method exclusively employed in Krenek's opera Karl V (1931--33) and most of his later pieces. His most uncompromising use of the twelve-tone technique was in his Sixth String Quartet (1936) and his Piano Variations (1937). In the Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae (1941--42) Krenek combined twelve-tone writing with techniques of modal counterpoint of the Middle Ages.

• published: 30 May 2011
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