Im Atem der Zeit: Erinnerungen an die Moderne by Ernst Krenek (review)

This fat brick of a paperback book, a reprint of the 1998 cloth edition of the memoirs by Ernst Krenek, the important, if minor, Austrian composer whose life spanned the twentieth century almost exactly (1900–1991) offers an engaging and deeply personal view of the lively arts in such diverse European metropolises as Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, and Paris just before the First World War to Krenek’s emigration to America in the late 1930s. Each of the six sizable chapters, which are organized in chronological order, is informed by Krenek’s genuinely flowing conversational writing style. As he states at the outset, he began to pen his memoirs in 1942 in his newfound American home to evoke a Central European cultural world that no longer existed.

Krenek’s self-effacing honesty about his development as a composer, his loves and his wives (he was married three times), and his contradictory comportment in private and in public reveal a genuine candor that makes this discursive tome a veritable page-turner. (It should be added that the original English-language text has never been published.) Krenek’s honesty about the varying quality of his prodigious output is credible—his respect for his first symphony and its importance as a calling card at the beginning of his career, as promoted by the avant-garde conductor, Hermann Scherchen, is contrasted with his mixed feelings about the varying qualities of his second symphony and his out-and-out rejection of his third symphony. He is also blistering in his criticism of his one-time mother-in-law, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, for her venal eagerness in compelling Krenek to edit two movements of Mahler’s final and incomplete tenth symphony. Throughout the first half of the memoirs, Krenek is honest about his personal psychological awkwardness in his early twenties versus his public stature as a maturing composer. His dependent closeness to his parents as an only child is a leitmotif throughout the book. Finally, his depiction of his frighteningly insecure single attempt to prove publicly his Aryan status at the onset of the Nazi dictatorship to have his musical works performed in the first musical seasons of Nazi Germany, is frank and totally at odds with his consistently philo-Semitic behavior, evidenced by his official remarks during the funeral of Karl Kraus, his favorable book reviews of the middle volumes of Thomas Mann’s biblical Joseph tetralogy, his mourning of the suicides of Walter Benjamin and Gustav Brecher, and his deep personal loyalty to Joseph Roth in his final alcoholic years.

As a musical son of Vienna, Krenek uses his memoirs to return repeatedly to his own native roots. As a composer eventually of twenty operas, he found his operatic home as a youth not at the expensive Hofoper but in the more progressive neighborhood Volksoper. Here he was moved by the first Vienna performances of Richard Strauss’s Salome, guest-conducted by the composer himself, and of Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal. At the conservatory level, Krenek studied with the technically proficient Franz Schreker (and moved with him to Berlin after the First World War), and in his late twenties he befriended Alban Berg and became a major champion of Berg’s Wozzeck, also giving the official introductory lecture for the posthumous premiere of Berg’s Lulu at the Zurich Opera in 1937. Krenek met Schoenberg on several occasions, and he writes frequently of his respect for Webern’s striking music. One of the most moving extended passages of the final chapter of the memoirs deals with the literal run-around Krenek was accorded when he was preparing his own first twelve-tone opera, Karl V, for the Vienna State Opera. Clemens Krauss, the opera house’s chief conductor, strung Krenek along while cozying up to the Nazi authorities across the border and then canceled the planned Vienna premiere of the opera.

Throughout the memoir, Krenek...