Pupil of Hans Weisse and Heinrich Schenker.

Career Summary

In Vienna, Trude Kral was a piano pupil of Anka Bernstein Landau, the assistant of Richard Robert. She emigrated to the United States, where she joined the piano faculty of the Third Street Music School in New York.

Kral and Schenker

Trude Kral studied with Hans Weisse from probably as early as 1924 (when under his encouragement she took out a subscription to Schenker's Der Tonwille: OC 52/651). In 1925 she was living on the Langegasse, in the 8th district of Vienna (Josefstadt). After Weisse's emigration to the United States in summer 1931, she became a member of Schenker's "Friday seminar" with Greta Kraus, Felix Salzer, and Manfred Willfort. In Schenker's informal notes on the 1931/32 season of the seminar (OC 16/39‒42), she is mentioned specifically in connection with the J. S. Bach C-major Prelude, Well-tempered Clavier, Book I, which would later appear as the first item of the Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln (1932).

As to the 1932/33 season, a conversation between Kral and Schenker is recorded in the latter's diary at OJ 4/5, p. 3775, September 22, 1932, which Schenker reported to Salzer in a letter of the same date (FS 40/1, [13]), concerning seminar plans for the new season. Kral did not attend the opening meetings, and finally gave notice of withdrawal on November 7 (OJ 4/6, p. 3789).

There is no known surviving correspondence between Kral and Schenker.

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