21 - Hamburg and Moriz Violin

Summary

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.