Paul August von Klenau was a Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

-born composer who worked primarily in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

.

Klenau was born and died in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

. His teachers included Otto Malling

Otto Malling

Otto Valdemar Malling was a Danish composer, from 1900 the cathedral organist in Copenhagen and from 1889 professor, then from 1899 Director of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen....

, Max Bruch

Max Bruch

Max Christian Friedrich Bruch , also known as Max Karl August Bruch, was a German Romantic composer and conductor who wrote over 200 works, including three violin concertos, the first of which has become a staple of the violin repertoire.-Life:Bruch was born in Cologne, Rhine Province, where he...

, Ludwig Thuille

Ludwig Thuille

Ludwig Thuille was a German composer and teacher, numbered for a while among the leading operatic composers of the 'Munich School', whose most famous representative was Richard Strauss.-Biography:...

 and Max von Schillings

Max von Schillings

Max von Schillings was a German conductor, composer and theatre director. He was chief conductor at the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925....

.

Klenau was among Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

's advocates during the 1920s, and Schoenberg attended a concert of his music conducted by Klenau in 1923 in Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the extreme south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg. Historically, the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain...

.

Also according to Schoenberg, Klenau once defended his use of the twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...

as the basis of an opera (Klenau's output includes three twelve-tone-based operas in all, the first from 1932-3) as an example of National Socialist art, making an analogy of the row with the leader that everything else in the piece needed to follow. (This, and a political analogy made by Socialist composers, Schoenberg equally derided as "nonsense." He refers to Klenau as "the German composer, Paul von Klenau".)

Klenau's musical output, some of which is undergoing recording revival, includes nine symphonies, three string quartets, and a setting (1919) of Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Kornetts Christopher Rilke among other works.

External links