KRENEK AT 85--SAN DIEGO PAYS ATTENTION

“A composer cannot afford to retire,” Ernst Krenek says, delivering the line in that dry, portentous way that marks all his public statements these days.

In a three-day minifestival at UC San Diego, Dec. 6 through last Sunday, Krenek was the focus at eight events marking a belated birthday celebration.

Besides concerts of his music by a passel of performers expert in it, this celebration on the La Jolla campus also produced a seminar on “Krenek as Teacher”; a video presentation, including a showing of his 1961 television opera “Ausgerechnet und Verspielt”; a banquet and a musical Festschrift at which brief compositions written in his honor by colleagues and former students were performed.

At 85, the veteran composer, who has now lived in Southern California for the better part of 40 years, remains the subject of, as a leading critic once put it, “universal respect but limited adoration.” In his native Vienna, Krenek is regularly lionized; his birthday in August was the occasion of a weeklong festival in southern Austria. In this country, except for extraordinary events--Long Beach Opera will produce “Jonny Spielt Auf” this spring--he is largely neglected.

After early notoriety in the 1920s--his Second Symphony caused riots, and “Jonny Spielt Auf” was hailed as the jazz-opera of the future--Krenek settled into a quiet professionalism. Fleeing Germany, where his works were denounced by the Nazis, he came to the United States and taught at East Coast and Midwest colleges until 1947, when he moved to California.

Since then, Krenek has continued to produce music in abundance; as of 1980, the New Grove credited him with 20 operas, three dozen major choral pieces, more dozens of orchestral works, and a variety of chamber music, songs and tape-pieces.

As a child of this century--he was born Aug. 23, 1900--Krenek has written in a succession of styles paralleling historical practice and trends, from post-Romantic tonality through atonality, jazz, neo-Classicism, dodecaphony, serialism and electronics.

One of his recent works, the Eighth String Quartet, heard here the evening of Dec. 6, attests the continuing vigor of his craft. Indeed, the anger, belligerence, even bitterness in that work surprises a longtime Krenek-watcher. These are, after all, characteristics one expects in a young composer, hardly in a mature one.

Nodding his head in agreement at this description of one of his most recent works, Krenek seems pleased. “So much the better,” he says, wickedly.

At the Santa Barbara Krenek Festival in 1979, Krenek acknowledged that, as a prolific composer living in this country--and a citizen of it since 1945--he felt greatly neglected. “But I am reconciled to it,” he added.

In 1985, he expresses mystification at small attendance at the UCSD events. “In San Diego, we usually see more people attending concerts of my music. Yes, I still feel neglected. At least in these surroundings (Southern California). Generally, there are more performances of my music, and more interest in it, in Europe, than here.”

That is an understatement, says Gladys Nordenstrom, Krenek’s wife, from their home in Palm Springs, three days after the festival closing.

“In Vienna (Krenek’s hometown), where we were in October, there was a three-day festival of his chamber music, played by members of the Vienna Philharmonic. The performances were the first and third days, and on the second, there was a large gathering of musicologists from all over Europe, all of them brought there by the City of Vienna.

“And for Ernst’s birthday in August, there was a weeklong Krenek celebration in Ossiach. The City of Vienna has also created a prize for poets and librettists, in the amount of 100,000 Austrian schillings, in Ernst’s name.

“Of two recent works, the Cello Concerto and the Organ Concerto, there have been numerous performances. Also, the production of ‘Karl V’ was revived at the Staatsoper in June.”

This latest Krenek Festival was two years in the planning, said John Stewart, provost of UC San Diego and one of the forces who made the celebration happen.

Stewart, Krenek’s biographer and the man who created the UCSD fine arts departments in 1964, credited the generosity of individuals, as well as certain university programs, for making the three-day celebration possible--and relatively inexpensive. The total budget for the event came in “under $10,000,” he reported.

Most, if not all, of the festival events were underattended--as, indeed, were most events at the 1979 Krenek Festival in Santa Barbara.

At the video presentation last Sunday morning, the great majority of the 20 or so people in attendance were somehow involved in the celebration: festival participants, members of the press or close friends of the composer. At the Festschrift on Dec. 7, when 25 different performers took part in presentation of 20 short pieces, the small confines of the university recital hall were well occupied, though not to capacity.

Stewart says he was “of course disappointed that more people did not take the opportunity to hear Ernst’s music. There is always the problem of competing events. And, at this particular time of year, when half the students are still taking exams, and the other half have already left the campus, you can’t count on them to go to concerts.

“But that is our usual problem. As a university, we are committed to new music, and to neglected older music. We don’t expect to draw huge crowds, or to be the most popular place for hearing music. It is our business to do the things that are not for everybody.

“The critical thing here is Ernst. He was pleased with the quality of the performances and the enthusiasm of those who came.”

Those hundred and more who attended the concert by the Thouvenel Quartet, the evening of Dec. 6 in cavernous Mandeville Center Auditorium on the La Jolla campus, heard the Eighth Quartet in rapt silence.

It is heavy stuff. In one continuous movement, it proceeds, in what the composer refers to as “free atonality,” toward a release that never comes. Tortured, bitter and unrelentingly abrasive, it ends as angrily as it begins.

After this premiere performance, Robert Erickson’s Quartet No. 2 (1957) seemed tame, though it also partakes of abrasiveness and a belligerent atonality.

Then, looking back on an earlier, more innocent time, the reconstituted Thouvenel ensemble--violinists Eugene Purdue and Edmund Stein, violist Sally Chisholm and cellist Keith Robinson--rediscovered the post-Romantic longueurs of Krenek’s touching Fifth Quartet (1930). It remains a work of sensibility, craft and poignancy, and the four players gave it its due.

The next morning, another small but devoted group gathered for the seminar on Krenek as teacher. Here, Stewart became moderator, and introduced former students of Krenek from three different periods in his relatively brief career as pedagogue.

Mildred Kayden studied with him at Vassar, beginning in 1939. Will Ogdon, an original member of the UCSD faculty two decades ago, was a student of Krenek at Hamline University in St. Paul, in the mid-1940s. Beverly Grigsby, who now teaches composers of a younger generation at Cal State Northridge, worked with Krenek in Los Angeles in the early 1950s.

Each praised and detailed the composer’s broad musical interests, his fluency in several languages, including dead ones, the depth of his historical and musicological knowledge. Most important, all three said, was Krenek’s willingness to let the student find her/his own way.

Performers from UC Santa Barbara dominated the matinee recital Dec. 7 when baritone Michael Ingham, with pianist Carolyn Horn, presented “Spaetlese” (1973); Horn played the Piano Sonata No. 4; mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Mannion, with pianist Dale Dictert, sang “Durch die Nacht” (1930), and violinist Janos Negyesy, the lone UCSD representative, played the Sonata No. 2 for violin solo (1948).

All of these proved stylish and idiomatic in their tasks; for intensity and conviction, however, Mannion, Dictert and Negyesy in the second half held our interest best. Mannion’s communicativeness linked words and tone inseparably, while Dictert supported that linkage handsomely, if sometimes roughly. Negyesy scaled all hurdles and made musical statements out of all knotty passages in the terse and dense solo sonata.

Good fun and no farewells--as can happen at a tribute to an aging veteran--marked the Festschrift on Dec. 7. Some of the 20 represented composers, whose pieces were solicited and coordinated by Garrett Bowles, UCSD music librarian and curator of the Ernst Krenek Archive, actually went over the three-minute time limit. No matter. The minipieces themselves, wildly varied in style and impact, were proof that Krenek, in the words of John Stewart, “created no followers, imitators or school.”

Among the little works providing the most amusement were those by David Burge, Mildred Kayden, Aurelio de la Vega, Beverly Grigsby, Roque Cordero and Marc-Antonio Consoli. Thomas Nee conducted the students-and-guests ensemble authoritatively.

Last Sunday morning, the attraction was the 24-year-old television opera, shown on videotape, “Ausgerechnet und Verspielt.” In nine scenes, and lasting 85 minutes, it is a cautionary tale of chance, luck and gambling, with a title the composer has called untranslatable. Written in Krenek’s serial style of that day, it is conversational in tone, extremely short on charm.

An unfinished documentary film, 17 minutes in length, on “Krenek at UCSD,” concluded the presentation.