Heinrich Schenker: A Contemporary Problem (1947)

Heinrich Schenker was a music theorist who died in the 1930s. In his youth he experienced the later years of Brahms and Verdi; he was contemporary with Richard Strauss, Pfitzner, Reger, Mahler, Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky and the young Hindemith. He merits our attention for he possessed a wideranging and deep musicality. It was because of his rich humanity that he was able to grasp the various worlds with equal dedication. He knew Wagner's Ring in no less detail than the Brahms symphonies or the B Minor Mass of Bach. He maintained an open view of Verdi and Debussy, knew Strauss, Reger and Mahler, but his main preoccupation was almost exclusively with German classical music. Schenker possessed a unique, sharp-edged intellect in the field of music theory. In the years following World War I he published in Vienna, his home town and the town of his work, a periodical entitled Der Tonwille. In it he expressed a passion for German music, up to and including Brahms and Wagner. In the years following World War I the Germans experimented with every kind of internationalism and Europeanism in art, but Schenker remained traditionally German. It was strange how a pure and passionate Jew – for this was Schenker – could feel so at ease in German culture. It was only later, when the first sinister rumblings of Nazism began to make themselves felt, that Schenker feared that his pro-German sympathies could be politically misunderstood so he thereafter refrained from comment.

The first work that became widely known was a monograph on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This book fell into my hands in Lubeck in 1911 when I was beginning my career as a Kapellmeister and immediately aroused my passionate interest. Whenever I disagreed with him in matters of detail, whenever the polemical position was questionable, the overview and cast of mind that formulated the answers to these questions was so unusual and expressed itself in a way which was so different from the usual style of musical writing, that I was deeply moved. Here for the first time there were no hermeneutics, no irrelevances, but the question was put, simply and directly, what really stands before us in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?