Music Immutable: Heinrich Schenker’s ‘Der Tonwille’ in Translation

It was Elliott Zuckerman who, back in 1964, pointed out that the ‘dangerous’ mania for Wagner that swept Paris at the end of the nineteenth century could have been based on very little direct experience of the music: just to name ‘Wagner’ was liberation enough. So too, perhaps, with the Anglo-American craze for Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) that gathered pace in the second half of the twentieth century: apart from the authors of seminal articles, books, and manuals—Allen Forte, Adele Katz, Oswald Jonas, Carl Schachter, Felix Salzer, Hedi Siegel, Maury Yeston, and Larry Laskowski—how much of the real thing did the new band of Schenkerians actually know? When the admittedly dense German originals were available they weren’t on the whole read, and aficionados had to depend on the sometimes rough and ready translations by Elisabeth Mann Borgese (Harmony (1906)), Theodor Howard Krueger (Der freie Satz (1935)), and a clutch of research students (the simpler bits of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925–30), parts of which also appeared in the Music Forum and the Journal of Music Theory): all of these were copiously and illegally photocopied. True, in 1945 Universal Edition had already reissued Schenker’s remarkable edition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas (1921–3)—Schenker being a pioneer of the Urtext and autograph facsimile—and in 1969 Dover put out the wordless Five Graphic Music Analyses (1932). But the emphasis, quite understandably, was on technique and Schenker ‘now’: here, after all, was a theorist who treated pieces in their entirety, and integrated line, harmony, and tonality in unprecedented ways. Historians gasped in dismay (‘toxic chemicals!’ cried Hugh Macdonald to a British conference) and tabloid academics took time out from the insoluble case of Wagner to finger a shrill nationalist who happily annexed the music of Poland (Chopin), Italy (Scarlatti), and Bohemia (Smetana) to proclaim the triumph of the German ‘tone-will’ (which in truth owes much to France and Italy). Only a few saw the bigger picture: ‘I have no problem with Schenker’, murmured Charles Rosen to this reviewer over lunch some years ago, ‘it’s the Schenkerians who bother me.’

More credit, then, to those who have stayed loyal to ‘the real Heinrich’ when the vultures have long since departed and the theorists have either adopted ‘multi-faceted approaches’ (bringing Formenlehre, rhetoric, genre, semiotics, kinetics, hermeneutics, psychology et al. into a synthesis sans frontières) or regressed to the factitious but not negligible Riemann. Fortunately, the loyalists have included musical scholars of the highest calibre. In recent years Hedi Siegel has translated the monograph on J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (1910), John Rothgeb the study of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1912), John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym the massive, two-volume Counterpoint (1910 and 1922), Ian Bent, William Drabkin, and others the three volumes of The Masterwork in Music (Das Meisterwerk), and Ernst Oster a definitive edition of Free Composition (Der freie Satz). There have also been other, smaller translations. To this William Drabkin has now added an English edition of Der Tonwille, elegantly translated by Ian Bent, Joseph Dubiel, Timothy Jackson, Joseph Lubben, William Renwick, Robert Snarrenberg, and himself.¹ (The title, though, stays resolutely in German.) It is issued in two landscape volumes of roughly A4 size comprising 400 pages of text in all.

It must be said at once that this appearance in English of Der Tonwille is a monumental contribution to musicology and a publishing achievement of the highest order. There is no theory, analysis, or criticism worth its salt that doesn’t furrow its past, and in view of Schenker’s enduring significance these volumes deserve a place in any half-decent music library. The work gathers together essays that (roughly) followed the second volume of Counterpoint but preceded those that make up the not dissimilar Masterwork; it also continues with issues raised in Schenker’s study of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, the (alas) still untranslated Erläuterungsausgabe of 1915–21. Appearing first in pamphlet form (Tonwille 1–6, 1921–3), it continued as part of a quarterly publication that...