Ernst Krenek - Musical Style

Musical Style

Krenek's music encompassed a variety of styles and reflects many of the principal musical influences of the 20th century.

• His early work is in a late-Romantic idiom, showing the influence of his teacher Franz Schreker.
• Around 1920 he turned to atonality, under the influence of Ernst Kurth's textbook, Lineare Kontrapunkt, and the tenets of Busoni, Schnabel, Erdmann, and Scherchen, amongst others.
• A visit to Paris, during which he became familiar with the work of Igor Stravinsky (Pulcinella was especially influential) and Les Six, led him to adopt a neo-classical style around 1924.
• Shortly afterward, he turned to neoromanticism and incorporated jazz influences into his opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up, 1926) and one-act opera Schwergewicht (1928). Other neoromantic works of this period were modeled on music of Franz Schubert, a prime example being Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen (1929).
• Krenek abandoned the neoromantic style in the late 1920s to embrace Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, 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 Renaissance.
• In 1955 he was invited to work in the electronic music studio at WDR in Cologne, and this experience motivated him to develop a total serial idiom.
• Beginning around 1960 he added to his serial vocabulary some principles of aleatoric music, in works such as Horizon Circled (1967), From Three Make Seven (1960–61), and Fibonacci-Mobile (1964).
• In his later years his compositional style became more relaxed, though he continued to use elements of both twelve-tone and total serial techniques.