Zwischen den Kriegen, zwischen den Künsten: Ernst Krenek—"Beruf: Komponist und Schriftsteller." by Rebecca Unterberger (review)

Not a few artists did productive work outside their best-known field. The painter Ingres was a talented violinist, and the composer Borodin, a chemist, considered music to be a hobby. Austria is unusually rich in multi-talented artists. Stifter and Gütersloh are only two writers who are also admired as graphic artists; all the members of the Second Viennese School produced autonomous literary works. Lebert was a professional opera singer as well as a painter and a novelist. Jelinek has conservatory training in organ, as did Jonke in piano. Rebecca Unterberger's title underlines this duality of effort, then, since it was Ernst Krenek himself who stipulated his two professions as "Komponist und Schriftsteller" (11).

Only an extremely thoroughgoing study could have done justice to an oeuvre as prolific as Krenek's. Unterberger's work is accordingly monumental, at over one thousand pages long, its introduction alone compassing forty-five pages. Even at that, Unterberger, an expert writing and publishing on Krenek for over a decade, aims at concentrating on the years between the two world wars, though she of course ranges wider. Krenek was so productive, however, both as composer (his musical works alone reach well beyond two hundred opus numbers) and writer (the list of "Beiträge aus der Zwischenkriegszeit in Sammelbänden" covers six pages, 990–995, and those are only the writings in periodicals and compendium volumes) that narrower dimensions could not have achieved even adequacy, let alone comprehensiveness.

Unterberger draws on Nicolas Slonimsky's famous lexicon of invective to show how Krenek was labeled a "biped calculating machine," "idiotic," a "pasteboard turkey," a composer glorifying the "vilest perversions of human nature" (11–14). So far, so standard, but his works are too challenging of easy audience expectations to justify one critic's view of him as "Gesellschaftsmusiker mit zeitgemäßer Drapierung" (14). Even disinclined listeners are almost uniformly struck by Krenek's authenticity, his flawless craft and focused vision. Perhaps no other composer drew on such a vast range of approaches—neo-Romantic/tonal, rigidly dodecaphonic, jazz- and pop-inflected, lush and austere, declamatory and florid, aleatory and prearranged—always creating radically different structures and sonorities. This flexibility earned him wide resentment for having "betrayed" various movements or schools he was too singleminded to have joined in the first place.

The totality of Krenek's intrepid engagement emerges as a main theme throughout Unterberger's work, a piece of outstanding traditional documentary research that presents a welter of primary sources and winnows a vast collection of materials. But Unterberger is no mere compiler. Instead, her whole endeavor is governed by a thesis to the effect that Krenek brought complete integrity to all his endeavors, never countenancing the slipshod or halfhearted. He considered artistic superficiality a moral flaw. "Ethos" is a concept Unterberger early identifies (92) as a key to Krenek's music and writing, which helps explain the earnest streak in his autobiography Jm Atem der Zeit, particularly its chiding of Hindemith and Korngold, among others, as intermittently facile.

There seems no topic—intellectual, aesthetic, political, religious—that Krenek did not address, and always as an alert participant assuming responsibility to advance commonwealth. Rejecting the hieratic or solipsistic, Krenek in all his pursuits illustrated the view expressed by Benjamin Britten in 1964 that the artist communicates directly with and works in service to the public. He did not shrink from taking positions on (to name a few topics): the dubious hegemony of Regietheater (eh. 2, 225–50); cultural pessimism vs. cultural optimism (ch. 5, 467–614); the "gefährliche Mitte," which upheld the "Kontinuität der europäischen Geisteskultur" while exploring new means of expression; the tension between "Tradition und Zukunftswille" (ch. 3, 261–386); attempts to build "eine katholische und österreichische Avantgarde"; various "Aufbauversuche, konservativ und radikal"; balancing the repressions of the Ständestaat against the coming depredations of National Socialism; and...