Klengel, August Stephan Alexander, *29 June 1783 Dresden, †22 November 1852 Dresden, German pianist, organist, and composer. In 1803, as a concert pianist, he became a student of M. Clementi and accompanied him on a concert tour in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Leipzig to Berlin, and in 1805 in Saint Petersburg. He was active there for six years as a pianist and private piano teacher. From 1811to 1813 he made concert tours to Paris, London, and Italy. In 1817 he was appointed court organist in Dresden. Becoming less and less active as a pianist, apart from short trips to Italy, Paris, and Brussels, he no longer left Dresden. Klengel was an accomplished virtuoso, and he made a significant contribution to the dissemination of Bach’s music, including his fugues in his repertoire as early as 1814 and preparing Das wohltemperierte Klavier for publication. As a performer and composer, he avoided the new currents in music, valuing above all the transparency and clarity of the works of the old masters. Among his contemporaries, only Chopin’s music excited him. In his youth, he composed piano pieces, including concertos, fantasies, rondos, variations, and sonatas, where the influence of Clementi is evident, as well as chamber music and songs. In the last years of his life, he turned to counterpoint forms, in which he proved to be a true master. His canons were so ingenious that he was given the pseudonym “Kanon-Klengel”. Published in 1841 in Dresden, Les avant-coureurs for piano is a collection of 24 canons. His major life work Canons et Fugues (posthumously published in Leipzig, 1854), containing 48 canons and 48 fugues, in all major and minor keys, draws on the canonical technique of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and is an example of neo-Baroque counterpoint.
Literature: R. Jäger August Alexander Klengel und seine “Kanons und Fugen”, Leipzig 1929.
