Throughout the twentieth century, the Eroica Symphony – especially its opening Allegro con brio – attracted considerable interest from music scholars, especially theorists and analysts. This chapter surveys attempts to understand the movement as an organic whole, but it also explores several specific issues that were regularly aired during that period: ‘1’ the location of a ‘second subject’ within the exposition; ‘2’ the so-called ‘new theme’ in the development and its possible relationship to earlier themes; ‘3’ the horn player’s purportedly mis-timed entry at the end of the development, and its consequences for the start of the recapitulation; ‘4’ the status of the unusually long final section of the movement ‘is it simply an extended coda, or does it embrace a secondary development section?’; and ‘5’ the possible thematic significance of the two introductory chords.

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.

The framework for all Schenkerian historical and biographical studies—and of a great deal else besides—is provided by Heinrich Schenker’s own filing system, i.e. the folders in which he stored his ever-increasing mass of working papers, correspondence, diaries, and other materials at his apartment. This system was evidently a joint creation: the product of Schenker’s own legalistic mind, but also significantly of Jeanette’s organizational powers. How far back the two were acquainted is unknown, but she may have done secretarial work for him during the summer vacations that her family spent together with him between 1903 and 1909. It was in 1910 that Jeanette left her first husband, Emil Kornfeld, and their sons Erich and Felix in Aussig (Ústí nad Labem) to share her life with Schenker in Vienna.

In 1911 Jeanette started taking down the contents of Schenker’s diaries from dictation using her stenographic skills and copying them in her neat hand. At some point she organized the disparate-sized sheets and scraps of paper that constituted his early diaries and paginated them; and in 1912 she compiled an index of all the diaries from 1896 to September 1912 in a small, alphabetically tabbed book—an invaluable, but little-known, biographical resource. In later years, after the couple’s marriage in 1919, there are records of their purchasing folders, labeling them, and filing papers away. There are also records of their purchasing two boxes of index cards for the cataloguing of papers. Additionally, Jeanette took down Schenker’s lesson notes and copied them into “lessonbooks,” starting with January 15, 1912. She copied extracts from documents for his use and took down many important items of correspondence in shorthand, writing first drafts for Schenker to amend and copy out; on other occasions she made file copies of letters of which he needed a permanent record (there are examples of both situations in the present volume). She also helped draft his theoretical and analytical texts and thoughts. Schenker once declared that in addition to being an excellent cook Jeanette “stands fully equipped at my side intellectually”; and in a codicil to his will he stated: “Without her practical help down to the very last detail, it [Free Composition] would not be complete.”

One of the most celebrated vocalists of his day, the Dutch baritone Johannes Martinus Messchaert (1857–1922) enjoyed an illustrious career as a soloist, pedagogue, and choral conductor. (See Plate 24.) It was not as an opera singer that Messchaert made his name but as a singer of lieder and oratorio; above all, his performances of Schubert lieder and his role as Christ in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion earned him accolades in the German and Dutch press. Having studied with the Frankfurt-based vocal pedagogue Julius Stockhausen, Messchaert went on to collaborate with the pianist Julius Röntgen, with whom he established his solo career and helped co-found the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music in the 1880s. While Messchaert and Röntgen concertized throughout the Dutch- and Germanspeaking lands, no city received them as openly as Vienna, where Messchaert won the admiration of Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Mahler, among others.

Messchaert was by all accounts, then, a master of vocal technique and of song, and it is no wonder that Schenker too would laud him as one of the greatest singers of his age. While still in the early stages of his career as a music critic, Schenker reviewed at least two performances by Messchaert and Röntgen favorably in February of 1896 (“A deep feeling for the text and its tones makes [Messchaert’s art] true to both poetry and music, and with artistic truth beauty is achieved.” ). In that year Schenker had also become personally aquainted with the baritone, and in 1899 Schenker and Messchaert put together their own small concert tour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from January 8 to February 3), with Schenker as Messchaert’s accompanist. Although Schenker seems to have tired somewhat of the tour, the musical collaboration with Messchaert undoubtedly had left a lasting impression. Some twenty-nine years after their collaboration, Schenker wrote to Felix-Eberhard von Cube:

It was Anthony van Hoboken who, at Schenker’s urging, in 1927 founded the “Archive for Photograms of Musical Master Manuscripts” (Archiv für Photogramme musikalischer Meisterhandschriften). The goal of the “Photogrammarchiv” or “Meisterarchiv,” as it was also called for short, was to capture photographically the autograph manuscripts of famous composers from Bach to Brahms, so that they could be made generally available for the purposes of study and preparing editions, without the originals themselves being susceptible to damage. In addition, in the event that the original was lost, at least its photographic reproduction would survive for posterity. The administration of the Archive required a Board of Trustees in which Schenker and the music historian Robert Haas sat under Hoboken’s chairmanship. Haas was also the head of the Music Collection of the National Library in Vienna, to which the Archive was attached.

While Schenker acted merely in an advisory capacity, Haas took over the main responsibility for the organizational work. To assist him in this task, Hoboken engaged the services of Julius Kromer, who was responsible for arranging the photograms, and for the bookkeeping and other paperwork. Hoboken himself restricted his involvement largely to providing financial backing, but did so from a position of leadership. He made important decisions and established priorities. In addition, he used his frequent trips abroad and his worldwide contacts to promote the interests of the Archive outside of Austria. Hoboken’s private librarian, Otto Erich Deutsch, played an important part also, giving the project his active support from the very beginning.

After the official inauguration of the Archive on October 21, 1927, Hoboken and the Board of Trustees sent out an Appeal (Aufruf), in three languages, in order to publicize their intentions.1 All official research libraries and archives, antiquarian dealers, and private owners of manuscripts were asked for their cooperation in making the manuscripts in their possession available for photographing. The Appeal was followed by several articles in various magazines, which called attention to the new institution.2 One of the high points of this publicity campaign was the broadcast over Vienna Public Radio (“Radio-Wien”) on February 4, 1928, of a twenty-minute lecture by Deutsch, about the goals and intentions of the Archive.

The invitation to Schenker to attend a meeting “to consider possible ways of setting up a society to sponsor the performance of ‘modern music’,” of which Schoenberg was a co-signatory, and the dispatch of an invitation to the event of the Ansorge Society on February 7, 1904, leave open the question as to how much of Schenker’s thinking about such music was known to those inviting him. The Society for Creative Musicians1 was duly established on April 23, 1904, but despite having Mahler as its honorary president—he also conducted Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica at one of the concerts—it lasted only until March 1905.

The subsequent letters from Schoenberg would appear to indicate that Schenker had not completely rejected all such overtures. But by February 5, 1907, and a concert at which Schenker heard the premiere of Schoenberg’s String Quartet, Op. 7, the scene was set for a definitive parting of the ways. Despite commenting in his diary that he found the quartet “a single long-drawn-out atrocity!”, Schenker returned three days later for the First Chamber Symphony, confiding to his diary only that it was “an embarrassing fiasco.”

That Schoenberg (or someone on his behalf ) was still sending invitations to Schenker in November of 1907 evidently does not mean that Schenker had expressed any enthusiasm for continuing to receive them; and even before the 1911 publication of Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony Schenker’s dislike of what the composer stood for was vividly apparent in his reaction to Universal Edition’s decision to publish Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, Op. 10, and Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11. Schenker wrote to Emil Hertzka on February 7, 1910, sarcastically noting the latter’s willingness to promote “anti-musical music.”

Arnold Whittall

Zemlinsky, Gutheil, and Schoenberg to Schenker (letter), January, 1904

OJ 14/15, [8]

Dear Sir,

The undersigned take the liberty of inviting you to a meeting at 8 pm on January 21 at Hopfner’s Restaurant, [Vienna] I, Kärtnerstrasse (private room). The aim of the meeting is as follows:

Anyone who compares the musical situation in Vienna with that in even smaller cities in Germany will be forced to recognize that for a long time the “city of music” has sadly lagged behind in the minimal progress that can be demanded these days even from those cultural centres that rest on the laurels of earlier times.

The correspondence between Schenker and his pupil Anthony van Hoboken comprises 114 letters and postcards written from 1924 until shortly before Schenker’s death in January, 1935. Of these items, seventy-four are by Hoboken, fifty-six by Schenker. The letters here selected span the period beginning with Hoboken’s enthusiastic acknowledgment of Schenker’s acceptance of him as a pupil until 1932. They provide insight into the character and interests, both professional and nonprofessional, not only of the correspondents but also of other members of the wider Schenker circle.

Regarding Anthony van Hoboken himself, the letters document above all his quest for photographs of manuscripts for the Photogram Archive, which he established at the Austrian National Library—a quest that took him to most of the major cities of Europe. A “side-trip” is documented here as well: Hoboken at one point sought the services of Professor R. M. Breithaupt, a piano pedagogue in Berlin, who prescribed therapy for the hand- and arm-pain that Hoboken experienced in playing the piano. Schenker’s response to Hoboken’s report reveals much about his own view of the relation of piano technique to masterworks of the keyboard repertory.

An interesting perspective on Schenker’s view of his own teaching—which aspects he considered indispensable to it, and what else could possibly be handled with more leeway—emerges from his correspondence with Hoboken concerning the latter’s comparative study of Brahms’s Three Intermezzos, Op. 117. Hoboken concedes in one letter (September 27, 1931) that he has not studied the works extensively in terms of the Urlinie, “which requires so infinitely much more inner peace of mind and concentration” than piano playing. Schenker’s response advises his pupil not to take matters about the Urlinie all too seriously; it is only the linear progressions that cannot be neglected, for without them, there is no hearing, no performance.

Finally, Schenker’s high esteem for his pupil must be noted. His praise of Hoboken’s ear and general musicality is expressed too often in the correspondence to be regarded as merely idle flattery.

John Rothgeb

Hoboken to Schenker (letter), June 10, 1925

OJ 11/54, [3]

Paris

Dear Professor,

Your cordial lines of June 4 reached me here, and I thank you very much for their content.

The idea of a monograph on the Ninth Symphony came about in part fortuitously. On October 16, 1909, Schenker reported to Emil Hertzka that Wilhelm Bopp, Director of the Vienna Academy, wished to arrange a “historical” concert for January or February 1910, the program comprising:

• 1) Concerto for keyboard and orchestra by C. P. E. Bach

• 2) Concerto for two keyboards and string orchestra by C. P. E. Bach

• 3) Cantata by J. S. Bach.

And there might in addition, at my suggestion, be as a fourth work a concerto by Handel for harp and orchestra.

Preparations for this event continued, for in February Schenker visited Hertzka with Moriz Violin to deliver the latter’s “modest little manuscript […] intended to serve as a prelude to, but also as the program booklet for the historical concert” (letter to Hertzka, February 15, 1910). Four months later came a howl of rage:

In early July Schenker traveled to the Karer Pass, in the Dolomites, for a summer vacation during which he evidently hatched a new project, provisionally dubbed “Pocket Library.” From his hotel he wrote to J. G. Cotta, publisher of his New Musical Theories and Fantasies, describing his plan and explaining its relationship to that series. Included in the plan from the start was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and within a month a monograph of this work had taken pride of place in his plans.

Was it Bopp’s change of heart from the Bach family to Beethoven’s Ninth that diverted Schenker into writing his monograph?

The present volume brings together some 450 pieces of correspondence to and from the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker. These have been arranged in six sections, each concerned with an aspect of Schenker’s long and wide-ranging career in music. Each section contains several individual chapters that cover the correspondence relating to a specific topic or episode: the publication of a single work, the negotiations with a publisher over a series of publications; an exchange with a particular correspondent at a particular time, a musical work that became a focal point in Schenker’s life, and so on. Broadly speaking, the chapters are arranged in chronological order, as are the larger sections themselves.

The title of this volume avoids the word “letters” so common on the title pages of editions of correspondence. While letters may be in the majority in the Schenker correspondence, many other formats are found therein too, including postcards, picture postcards, telegrams, calling cards, printed announcements and invitations, bank documents, and so on. Nor is this the only sense in which our volume is more inclusive than some other editions of composers’ correspondence. The editors treat the “Schenker correspondence” as not just those items emanating from Schenker’s pen but rather as the whole, two-sided exchange of communications. There are several reasons for making this decision.

The first is a practical one: despite what has been said in the Preface, there are still many instances of correspondence for which only the “other” side is available—those of Dahms, Dunn (with the exception of one item), and Weisse (with five exceptions), for example. It should be said immediately that the Schenker correspondence is in general not a trivial one; on the contrary, it is a substantive body of material, long on discussion of deep and important issues, short on appointment-making and small talk. And that holds true for both sides of the exchange of letters; thus where Schenker’s side is absent, there is value still in presenting the incoming communications, from which in any case some of what Schenker has previously said can be retrieved.

Felix-Eberhard von Cube (1903–87) was the son of a Munich-based architect who had married into the Sternheim family. For a time Gustav von Cube’s family lived on the estate of his brother-in-law, the poet and playwright Carl Sternheim, for whom he had built Schloss Bellemaison. It was here that young Felix studied the piano with Sternheim’s private librarian Otto Vrieslander, on whose recommendation the boy went to Vienna in 1923 to study with Schenker. (It was after one of his first lessons with Schenker that Cube made a pencil drawing of himself seated at the piano, while Schenker ranted about “Litfasskreaturen” who ought to be locked away: see Plate 10.)

Although the lessons lasted for just two and a half years—Gustav was unwilling to provide his son with further financial help, and Schenker had to chase him for unpaid fees—they had a lasting effect on Cube, who raised the Schenkerian flag wherever he taught, occupying himself with voice-leading analysis and tonal composition for the rest of his life.

Cube obtained a secure position at the Rhineland Music Seminar in Duisburg in 1927, where his father was now working. He stayed there for five years, also giving guest lectures in the nearby cities of Düsseldorf and Cologne; in 1927 he visited the Schenkers in Galtür, where he made photographic portraits of Heinrich and Jeanette (see Plates 12, 18). The following summer he persuaded the owners of the Duisburg bookseller Scheuermann to mount a shop-window display of Schenker’s writings and editions, on the occasion of his teacher’s sixtieth birthday; he also wrote a vivid appreciation of Schenker’s life and work, which was published in two local newspapers.

In September 1931 Cube left the relative security of Duisburg to become the theory teacher at Moriz Violin’s newly founded Schenker Institute in Hamburg (see chapter 21). Although the Institute closed down in 1934, barely a year after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Cube reopened it after World War II as the Heinrich Schenker Academy, and it enjoyed mixed fortunes as a private music school for about fifteen years; an unpublished Lehrbuch der musikalischen Kunstgesetze, a kind of textbook, contains numerous voice-leading graphs of teaching works, “counter-examples” of bad composition, and of Cube’s own works.

Composer and conductor Paul von Klenau (1883–1946: see Plate 37) was Danish but studied mostly in Germany, his composition teachers being Max Bruch (Berlin), Ludwig Thuille (Munich), and Max von Schillings (Stuttgart). His conducting career took him first to the Civic Theater in Freiburg, next to the Bach Society in Frankfurt, then back as the chief conductor in Freiburg. He spent World War I in Denmark, where in 1920 he co-founded the Danish Philharmonic Society, which he conducted until 1926. From 1922 to 1930 he served as conductor of the Vienna Concert House Society. It was during this period of residency in Vienna that he became acquainted with Schenker. Their correspondence covers September 1923 to December 1924, with one further letter from 1927 (not included below), and there were numerous meetings and other contacts during this period. Although only Klenau’s side of the original correspondence is known to survive, two of Schenker’s letters and one other document are preserved in fair copies (some indication of the importance Schenker attached to them).

In Schenker’s eyes perhaps the most significant act on Klenau’s part was his historical reconstruction of the concert that took place in the Kärntnertor Theater on May 7, 1824, at which Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first performed, together with the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei of the Missa solemnis, and the Overture The Consecration of the House. This reconstruction was held in the Vienna Concert House on the centenary date, May 7, 1924, in advance of which Schenker was consulted on performance issues. Schenker published a favorable account of this first performance as part of a polemical article on the symphony’s historical reception.

Initially Schenker was skeptical of Klenau’s abilities to follow his ideas. Ever a hard taskmaster, he readily criticized aspects of Klenau’s performances. However, he gave time generously to correcting these, to showing him photographs of autograph sources, and to explaining editorial issues. In the Ninth Symphony performance, he conceded, Klenau had achieved the ultimate goal: that of demonstrating Beethoven’s “synthesis.” How did Klenau compare in his mind with Furtwängler? In 1924, Furtwängler still stood high in Schenker’s estimation, and was regarded as a vehicle for the promotion of Schenker’s theories. Moreover, he was prestigious and influential, so had power to promote Schenker’s work in official circles.

Of all Schenker’s pupils and disciples, none was as important for the dissemination of his teachings as Hans Weisse. Weisse seems to be at the forefront of every initiative to promote his teacher’s work, whether as a private tutor, a public lecturer, or an ambassador of music theory. It was Weisse who created a little seminar in analysis at his home in the late 1920s, which Schenker himself was later to take over. He introduced American musicians to Schenker’s approach to musical structure and gave the first public lectures in Schenkerian theory to the German and Austrian music-pedagogical establishment in the winter of 1930–31. His projected Die Tonkunst, a monthly periodical dedicated to Schenkerian concepts but authored mainly by Schenker’s pupils, never got off the ground; nonetheless it provided the model for Der Dreiklang of 1937–38, edited by Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer, a precursor of the Music Forum. And, famously, he was offered and accepted a teaching post at the David Mannes School of Music in New York (and, later, at Columbia University), and so planted the seeds of Schenkerism in America.

The correspondence shows that Weisse had a facility for engaging with people, something which his teacher could only have envied. He was on friendly terms with Wilhelm Furtwängler, and sometimes escorted the conductor to the theorist’s apartment. He had enormous success in raising money and was able to keep Schenker from relying entirely on the patronage of Anthony van Hoboken in later years: it was as a result of Weisse’s intercession that Furtwängler offered 3,000 marks toward the costs of printing the “Eroica” Symphony analysis, i.e. Masterwork 3; and this was soon followed by a second sizeable donation, from the husband of one of Weisse’s piano pupils. He made every effort to ensure that the early success of Schenkerian theory in America brought some financial reward to its originator; and, as late as 1935, he successfully implemented a scheme whereby many of his American pupils contributed to a kind of pension fund for Schenker’s widow.

The ease with which Weisse made friends is reflected in a number of his earlier letters to Schenker.

The letters that Moriz Violin and Schenker exchanged between the years 1922 and 1933, when Violin was living in Hamburg, are of special significance because they record the activity of both musicians in considerable detail and also document Violin’s extensive involvement in Schenker’s cause. Violin’s letters paint a portrait of Hamburg as a pleasant but culturally conservative city; they also describe aspects of the political situation in Germany, including the “Jewish question.” A considerable stretch of letters and postcards from 1923–24 are directly related to Schenker’s controversy with Emil Hertzka over the content, publication, and distribution of Der Tonwille; around the time of his legal dispute with Universal Edition, Schenker enlisted Violin’s help in boosting the sales of the publication beyond Austria’s borders.

Not only do Schenker’s letters to Violin refer to events and people also mentioned in his diaries, they often expand upon them in greater detail, including character portraits—often unflattering ones—of members of Schenker’s close circle, including Otto Vrieslander, Anthony van Hoboken, and Hans Weisse.

One thread that runs throughout this part of the correspondence is the childhood illness of Violin’s son Karl (1913–31), and of his vain efforts to have it treated successfully. For a time (1927) Violin was hoping for a position in a newly created Hochschule (Music Hochschule) in Frankfurt, partly to spare his son the extreme dampness of Hamburg; Schenker wrote to acquaintances to enlist their help in this endeavor, but to no avail.

The correspondence also reveals Violin’s efforts to keep pace with the latest developments in Schenkerian theory by reading all of his friend’s publications as soon as they appeared. While his remarks on Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata show considerable musical sensitivity, his efforts at a voice-leading sketch of Bach’s Two-part Invention in C major fall far short of what the new theory was capable of showing. Nonetheless, Schenker’s letters to Violin include two middleground reductions of Bach inventions (in C and E b), and a sophisticated reading of the introduction to Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet. The latter appears in a letter with numerous briefer analytical notations, all intended as the basis for a refutation of Schoenberg’s apparently fraudulent invocation of the works of the great German masters as harbingers of musical modernism—a response to a journal article which Schenker had hoped his friend would write.

Georg Dohrn (1867–1942) was a conductor working in Flensburg, then Munich (1898–1901), then with the Breslau Orchestral and Choral Societies (1901–36). He was an admirer of Schenker’s writings, and in 1926 sought the latter’s advice, raising points of interpretation on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Schenker answered in close detail.

Some time after this correspondence took place, Hellmut Federhofer, while browsing in a bookstore, happened on a used copy of Schenker’s Beethovens neunte Sinfonie, which he purchased. When he later opened the volume, Schenker’s holograph letter to Dohrn fell out of its pages. Federhofer had no way of identifying the addressee, but he nevertheless wrote about the letter, and kindly sent me a copy.

I recognized the text, for Schenker had retained a copy of his own letter, in Jeanette’s hand, and I had many years earlier seen this document in the Oster Collection,1 together with the original letter of inquiry from Dohrn. Through correspondence between Federhofer and myself, we were able to solve certain puzzles: the identity of the recipient was established, and a word in Schenker’s letter that had been obscured by an ink-blot in the holograph was revealed by the aforementioned copy to be not molto, as in Federhofer’s published transcription, but rather marcato.

Schenker’s reply to Dohrn is, typically, full of the finest artistic touches. A good example is his observation that “at the arpeggiation through kettle drums and horns after the ‘ritmo di Quattro battute’ [i.e. mm. 248–51 (and 256–69)] the effect approaches that of a legato of the head-tones.” Perhaps most important of all, however, is Schenker’s insistence on the importance of the manuscript as an indispensable source for an accurate text: comparison of the manuscript of this very movement against the scores available in Schenker’s time (and most of those still in use) will amply illustrate.

John Rothgeb

Dohrn to Schenker (letter), April 2, 1926

OC 82/27–28

Breslau Orchestra Society

Breslau, Steinstrasse 4/6

Dear Dr. Schenker,

Permit me, please, as one who knows and highly values several of your publications—especially your “Presentation of the Musical Content” of Beethoven’s “Ninth”—to pose a question to you to which your answer would be of really special interest to me.