Fritz Heinrich Klein (2 February 1892 – 12 July 1977) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

Life and music

Klein was born in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

. He was a student of

Alban Berg Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively sma ...

and the inventor of the

all-interval twelve-tone row In music, an all-interval twelve-tone row, series, or chord, is a twelve-tone tone row arranged so that it contains one instance of each interval within the octave, 1 through 11 (an ordering of every interval, 0 through 11, that contains each ...

.Arnold Whittall: ''The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), (hardback) (pbk), p. 68. He studied with Schoenberg from 1917 to 1918, with Berg from 1918 to 1924, and prepared the piano-vocal score for Berg's ''

Wozzeck ''Wozzeck'' () is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama ''Woyzeck'', which the German playwright Georg Büchner left incomplete at h ...

'' and the piano score of Berg's '' Chamber Concerto''. Klein's twelve-tone theories, which he refers to as "extonal", appear to originate independently of Schoenberg's as with Josef Matthias Hauer's, and these claims as well as frequent stylistic changes helped to exclude him from the

Second Viennese School The Second Viennese School (german: Zweite Wiener Schule, Neue Wiener Schule) was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. ...

, though Klein's theories where highly influential on Alban Berg. Klein considered his piece for two pianos, ''Die Maschine: Eine extonale Selbstsatire'' 'The Machine: An Extonal Satire'' Op. 1 (1921) the first in which a twelve-

tone row In music, a tone row or note row (german: Reihe or '), also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets ar ...

appears along with its retrograde, inversion, and transposed forms. This piece was printed in 1923 before Schoenberg's Op. 25 or writings on the twelve-tone technique. "The most interesting of the Berg students heard here is unquestionably Fritz Heinrich Klein." An all-interval row is a tone row arranged so that it contains one instance of each interval within the octave, 0 through 11. For example, the first all-interval row, by Klein: F, E, C, A, G, D, A, D, E, G, B, C. In integers this row is represented as 0 e 7 4 2 9 3 8 t 1 5 6 with the interval between each note being e 8 9 t 7 6 5 2 3 4 1 This row was also used by Berg in his '' Lyric Suite'' and in his second setting of the Theodor Storm's poem '' Schliesse mir die Augen beide''. Klein used the mother chord in his ''Die Maschine'', Op. 1, and derived it from the pyramid chord: 0 0 e 9 6 2 9 3 8 0 3 5 6 difference e t 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 by transposing the underlined notes (0369) down two semitones. The pyramid chord consists of every interval stacked, low to high, from 12 to 1 and while it contains all intervals, it does not contain all pitch classes and is thus not a tone row but shares properties with the all-interval tone row. For example, since the sum of numbers 1 through 11 equals 66, an all-interval row must contain a tritone between its first and last notes (as does the Pyramid chord).Slonimsky (1975), p. iv. Klein died in

Linz Linz ( , ; cs, Linec) is the capital of Upper Austria and third-largest city in Austria. In the north of the country, it is on the Danube south of the Czech border. In 2018, the population was 204,846. In 2009, it was a European Capital of ...

, aged 85. He described his approach to the twelve-tone technique in "Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt" The Boundary of the Semitone World" ''Die Musik'' vol. 17 (1925) no. 4, pp. 281–286. His ''Die Maschine'' and ten ''Extonal Pieces'', Op. 4, appear on

Steffen Schleiermacher Steffen Schleiermacher (born Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Halle, 3 May 1960) is a German composer, pianist, and conducting, conductor.MDG The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were eight international development goals for the year 2015 that had been established following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, following the adoption of the United Nations Millenniu ...

613 1475-2), along with music by

Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( , ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical t ...

and

Hans Erich Apostel Hans Erich Apostel (22 January 1901 – 30 November 1972) was a German-born Austrian composer of classical music. From 1916 to 1919 he studied piano, conducting and music theory in Karlsruhe with Alfred Lorenz. In 1920 he was Kapellmeister and R ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Klein, Fritz Heinrich 1892 births 1977 deaths 20th-century classical composers 20th-century Austrian composers 20th-century Austrian musicians 20th-century Austrian male musicians Austrian classical composers Austrian male classical composers