Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) is generally regarded as the leading music theorist of the twentieth century. He was born of German-speaking, Jewish parentage in Wisniowczyk, Galicia, a small town in a Polish-, Ukrainian-, and German-speaking province that was part of Poland for four hundred years before its annexation by the Habsburgs in 1772. During the first half of the nineteenth century, that annexation produced the Germanized culture in which Schenker grew up; but the uprisings of 1848 unleashed a nationalistic fervor that led to a resurgence of Polish language and culture, to the extent that Schenker declared Polish his native language in the first seven out of his ten semester registrations at the University of Vienna. Surely one reason for his declaration is that between the ages of eight and sixteen, Schenker, two years younger than his cohort, was educated at three different Gymnasien in which the Polish language and its culture were dominant. After graduating from the Brzezany (English, “Berezhany”) Gymnasium in the spring of 1884, he moved in the fall to Vienna, the cultural center and capital of what was by that time the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to study law at the university (1884–88) and music at the conservatory (1887–90). Although Schenker took his Dr. juris at the university in 1890 and stayed in Vienna for the rest of his life, he never practiced law; instead, he devoted himself entirely to music, working in the 1890s as a composer, music critic, and piano accompanist, and, starting a decade or so later, as a music editor and teacher of piano and theory. It is for his extraordinarily productive career as editor and music theorist that Schenker is remembered today.

Though this project has grown considerably, it began as a book about a book—or, more accurately, a book about two interrelated books. Our first— Harmonielehre (“Theory of Harmony” and hereafter HL, when referring to the published German text)—is Schenker's first major work about music theory and his link with the most important music-theoretical genre of the past, the history of which we begin to explore in part I and will develop in greater depth in chapter 3 in part II.