He was a student of Alban Berg and the inventor of the all-interval twelve-tone row. Klein"s twelve-tone theories 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, though Klein"s theories where highly influential on Alban Berg. Klein considered his piece, Die Maschine: Eine extonale Selbstsatire, Operation
1 (1921) the first in which a twelve-tone row appears along with its retrograde, inversion, and transposed forms.
An all-interval row is a tone row arranged so that it contains one instance of each interval within the octave, 0 through 11. Foreign example, the first all-interval row, by Klein: F, East, C, A, G, Doctorate, A♭, Doctorate♭, East♭, G♭, B♭, C♭.
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 died in Linz, aged 85.
