Schenker’s correspondence with Universal Edition spanned thirty years, from 1901 to his death in 1935, and involved all UE’s principals—Josef Weinberger, Josef Wöss, Barbara Rothe, Alfred Kalmus, Hans Heinsheimer, Hugo Winter, and Ernst Roth. But it was with one person that Schenker primarily dealt: Emil Hertzka. Soon after his arrival as UE’s director in 1907, Hertzka gave Schenker his personal attention: of the approximately one thousand surviving items of correspondence between Schenker and UE, no fewer than six hundred are with Hertzka. Schenker’s periodical Der Tonwille, a decade in the planning and full of promise, ultimately proved an impediment: it soured the relationship, and brought about the move to another publisher.

The crisis over Der Tonwille was not the first in that relationship: there had been periods of dissension and temporary breakdown before. But that which began in 1922 and raged until its tumultuous end in 1925 was of a different order. It laid bare Schenker’s distaste for commerce, his suspicion of the business world’s perceived deceitfuness and sharp bookkeeping practices; it brought out Schenker’s fiercely guarded intellectual autonomy, his resistance to editorial encroachment, and his paranoia at what he saw as UE’s reluctance to publicize his work and ultimately its active concealment of that work from the public. At a personal level, it exposed the conflict between Schenker’s brand of Jewishness—assimilationist, German-nationalist, politically and socially conservative—and the cosmopolitan, internationally minded, democratically inclined Jewishness that Hertzka represented. On the other hand, it reveals the respect, one could even say affection, that Hertzka had for Schenker, and the apparent decency with which he struggled to communicate with him.

The sixteen letters and two telegrams offered here, selected from over four hundred surviving items of correspondence from 1922 to 1925, trace the deteriorating relations between Schenker and Hertzka to the point at which communications were broken off and dealings were placed in the hands of lawyers.

The seeds of the crisis go back to the fall of 1920. By September Schenker had already submitted a certain amount of copy for Der Tonwille, and from this UE produced samples of typography and music engraving.