With around two hundred pieces and a total duration of four and a half hours, Georg Kröll's Diary is one of the largest piano cycles in music history. And the work in progress, which began in 1987, continues to grow. All pieces already composed and any further possible pieces are based on the basic series of Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25. Schoenberg's series is permuted 42 times. Each note of this permutation, 42 x 12 = 504 notes, becomes the fundamental and starting note in the sense of a code that generates the material of the piece in question. Right at the beginning of 1987, for example, Kröll wrote the piece Parodia ad A. Sch. based on the starting note 82, following the prelude of Schoenberg's suite. Just as this first purely dodecaphonic work, composed between 1921 and 1923, combines the new pitch organization with old types of movement from the French suite, Kröll combines innovation and tradition in Tagebuch through numerous references to music from the past and present. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Born in Linz am Rhein in 1934, the composer and long-time lecturer in composition and music theory at the Rheinische Musikschule Köln develops an incredible variety of characters from Schoenberg's germ cell. As with Beethoven's late bagatelles, these are not entertaining trifles, but highly concentrated miniatures ranging in length from a few seconds to five minutes, often incorporating only two or three distinctive elements: repetitions, lines, intervals, passing notes, appoggiaturas, trills, melodies, chords, staccatos, legato slurs. The variety of playing styles, tempos, and gestures is immediately apparent. In contrast, the serial unity of all the pieces has an underlying effect. For partial performances, pianists can make any selection they wish, but they should then play the pieces in numerical order so that the structural principle of the whole is also reflected in the partial cycles.
Initially, Kröll composed diary entries 1 to 44 in sequence. He omitted only a few numbers and composed them later. Others he preferred, including the aforementioned 82 Parodia ad A. Sch. or 148 Poco Rubato (Laudate Dominum). In 1987/88 alone, he wrote 41 pieces, about one-fifth of all those he would go on to complete by his 90th birthday in 2024. His choice of code seems arbitrary, but follows clear intentions: on the one hand, Kröll's compositional thinking is sparked by specific tone sequences and interval structures; on the other hand, he seeks specific tone sequences that are suitable for the realization of ideas he has already conceived. His free handling of the systematically generated tone material follows its own artistic logic in each piece.