22 - Further Inroads into Germany: Felix-Eberhard von Cube

Summary

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as the Heinrich Schenker Academy, and it enjoyed mixed fortunes as a private music school for about fifteen years; an unpublished Lehrbuch der musikalischen Kunstgesetze, a kind of textbook, contains numerous voice-leading graphs of teaching works, “counter-examples” of bad composition,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.