The century was only twenty-one years old, and so was Ernst Krenek, when his Serenade op. 4 was premièred on 31 July 1921 at the newly launched “Donaueschingen Chamber Music Performances for the advancement of contemporary music.” The event soon came to be known as Donaueschingen Festival, now one of the oldest specialized music festivals worldwide: Krenek’s music has occasionally been heard there since then – albeit as a series of utterly contrasting works one would hardly ascribe to the same composer.

In March of 1908, 27-year-old Johanna Senfter went “on a pilgrimage” to visit Max Reger in Leipzig. Having studied piano and violin at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, she now wanted to learn composition. Reger, only six years her elder, had been in charge of a masterclass for musical composition at Leipzig Royal Conservatory for only a year.

The years between 1900 and 1914 are perhaps among the most exciting in European music history. It was during these years that what is now commonly referred to as musical modernism emerged. It is the time when the great European "schools" of the musical avant-garde take shape in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and especially in Vienna, and when music fans out into a variety of aesthetics, styles and genres that are reflected in the set of terms we use today to try to get to grips with the art of this era: Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Neoclassicism, Folklorism, Late Romanticism / Post-Romanticism, Symbolism, etc.