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The Editor and the Virtuoso, or Schenker versus Bülow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Nicholas Cook
Nicholas Cook*
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
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Extract

It so happens that almost all the music which Schenker edited had previously appeared in editions by Hans von Bülow. On each occasion, Bülow's edition provoked from Schenker what he himself described as his ‘frequent and energetic criticism’. Examining the basis of these criticisms may lead us to a better understanding of Schenker's own editorial work – work which had an importance within Schenker's total output that theorists, if not musicologists, have tended to underestimate. For Schenker, editing meant restoring the masterworks of the past to their authentic state (the title-page of his edition of the Beethoven sonatas describes it as a ‘reconstruction’) and thereby ensuring their survival in a world that, in Schenker's eyes, had lost the capacity to appreciate their significance. And such editing called for respect for the masterworks and a profound understanding of them; hence the extraordinary virulence with which Schenker attacked editors such as Bülow, who in his view lacked these qualities. In his study of the G minor Symphony, Schenker wrote: ‘Editions of Mozart's works no longer have anything in common with the original manuscripts.’ And he added: ‘Then is Mozart dead?’ This extreme sense of the editor's responsibility – a responsibility that extended to the life and death of the masterworks – informed everything that Schenker did. I would go so far as to say that Schenker's theory of levels was conceived as, more than anything else, a decisive contribution to editorial method. And to say this entails a considerable revision of the image of Schenker prevalent today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 116 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 78 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1991

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References

I am indebted to my former postgraduate student, Susan Chan Siu Ying, who brought several of the examples cited in this article to my noticeGoogle Scholar

1 The list of scores in Appendix 1 below provides bibliographical information on the editions referred to In addition, both Bulow and Schenker edited the Beethoven sonatasGoogle Scholar

2 ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, trans Hedi Siegel, The Music Forum, 4 (1976), 1–139 (p 102)Google Scholar

3 ‘Mozart Symphony in G minor’, trans Sylvan Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays from the Three Yearbooks Das Meisterwerk in der Musik by Heinrich Schenker An Annotated Translation’ (Ph D dissertation, Northwestern University, 1973), ii, 325Google Scholar

4 J S Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue Critical Edition with Commentary, trans and ed Hedi Siegel (New York, 1984), 46Google Scholar

5 For further details see Hedi Siegel's annotations, ibid., 71–5Google Scholar

6 Though the philological method was nineteenth-century in its origins, its use came later in musical circles, in the case of the ‘Chromatic’ Fantasy and Fugue, the first detailed philological study of the sources, involving the reconstruction of three hypothetical manuscript versions, dates from 1926 (Hans T David, ‘Die Gestalt von Bachs Chromatischer Fantasie’, Bach Jahrbuch, 23).Google Scholar

7 Quoted by Siegel, J S Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, 78Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 26–7Google Scholar

9 Good examples of this, in which Bülow is again the culprit, may be found in Schenker's essay ‘Domenico Scarlatti Keyboard Sonata in G Major, [L 486]’, trans Ian Bent, Music Analysts, 5 (1986), 171–85 Bülow eliminates Scarlatti's ‘parallel fifths’ in bars 45–7 because he does not see that they are nonstructural in voice-leading terms, he does not see the middleground motifs in bars 52–3 and 71, he does not see the tenths between the outer parts in the middleground of bars 78–84 (p 176)Google Scholar

10 Kalib, Trans, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 102Google Scholar

11 C P E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, trans William J Mitchell (New York, 1949), 129, quoted by Schenker, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 22Google Scholar

12 See Schindler, Anton, Beethoven as I Knew Him A Biography, ed Donald MacArdle (New York, 1972), 415 (Beethoven), Arnold Whittall, Romantic Music A Concise History from Schubert to Sibelius (London, 1987), 62 (Berlioz), Schenker, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 20–1 (Mendelssohn, Brahms)Google Scholar

13 Wagner on Music and Drama, ed Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (New York, 1981), 327Google Scholar

14 Beethoven Neunte Sinfonie (2nd edn, Vienna, 1969), 357–8Google Scholar

15 Weingartner, Felix, ‘On Conducting’, trans Ernest Newman, Weingartner on Music and Conducting (New York, 1969), 232Google Scholar

16 Wagner on Music and Drama, 314Google Scholar

17 Wq 57/2Google Scholar

18 Quoted in Schenker, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 17Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 19Google Scholar

20 For instance, despite his frequent and minute attention to the master composers' notation of slurs in their autographs, Schenker writes ‘As to the discrepancies in their handling of slurs in parallel places, they are due for the most part to oversights Very often extraneous obstacles, such as the thickness of a line, a figured bass numeral, a too large note head, etc., make it impossible for them to begin or end a slur at the point they should have and would have wanted to’ (‘Let's Do Away with the Phrasing Slurl’, trans Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 73, see also Free Composition (Der freie Satz), trans Ernst Oster, New York, 1979, i, 111) Where the composers should have, and would have wanted to, put their slurs is, of course, to be decided through analysis of the musical content There are many similar examples in Schenker's writings, dealing with misplaced note-heads, omitted accidentals, etc A famous instance is the dissonant e♭ in the left hand of Chopin's G minor Ballade, bar 7 (see Free Composition, i 66)Google Scholar

21 Bülow was also well known for his programmatic interpretations, see for instance ‘Chopin's Préludes, Op 28 Analyzed by von Bulow’, The Musician, 16 (1911), 88Google Scholar

22 Trans Sonia Slatin, ‘The Theories of Heinrich Schenker in Perspective’ (Ph D dissertation, Columbia University, 1967), 482Google Scholar

23 Harmony, ed. Oswald Jonas, trans Elisabeth Mann Borgese (Chicago 1954), 60Google Scholar

24 ‘Schenker's Theory of Music as Ethics’, Journal of Musicology, 7 (1989), 415–39Google Scholar

25 ‘Clarifications’, trans Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 160Google Scholar

26 Harmony, 69Google Scholar

27 ‘Chopin, Etude in G flat Major, Op 10, No 5’, trans Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 128Google Scholar

28 Except when referring to the archaeological editions of Bischoff and others.Google Scholar

29 Such an interpretation can be heard in Paderewski's 1926 recording (available in the collection ‘Ignace Jan Paderewski “78s” Transcribed from Disc’, Pearl IJP 1) But this is not true of Paderewski's 1912 recording of the same work (available in the same collection), in which the passage is played more or less the same each timeGoogle Scholar

30 Fleischmann, Tilly, Aspects of the Liszt Tradition, ed. Michael O'Niell (Cork, 1986), 12–13Google Scholar

31 Weingartner says something similar of Bülow's conducting. ‘The impression given was that not the work but the conductor was the main thing’ (‘On Conducting’, 18) But other observers said just the opposite, particularly in relation to Bülow's piano playing.Google Scholar

32 Though most editions have a single slur over the first four semiquavers of bars 2, 3, etc., one important autograph source (in the Institut Fryderyka Chopina, Warsaw, see the commentary in the Paderewski edition of this Study) has two short slurs, in the manner of bars 14, 15, etc But it is the length of Billow's slurs, and not just the point of articulation between them, that makes them look so oddGoogle Scholar

33 Preface to Bülow's edition of the ‘Chromatic’ Fantasy and FugueGoogle Scholar

34 ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 63Google Scholar

35 See, for example, ibid., 98Google Scholar

36 ‘Resumption of Urlinie Considerations’, trans Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 132Google Scholar

37 ‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 46 (taken from Bach's Essay, 150), See also Schumann's remark that it is possible to play musically only ‘when you have music not in your fingers alone, but also in your head and heart’ (trans Edward T Cone, The Composer's Voice, Berkeley, 1974, 122)Google Scholar

38 In general, this meant preserving the master composers' original notation, because of the subtle (and generally unappreciated) manner in which they used notational details such as slurs to express musical structure (see for instance Schenker's preface to his edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas) In ‘Let's Do Away with the Phrasing Sluri’, Schenker contrasts the phrasing slurs used by editors like Bülow with the legato slurs employed in their autographs by the master composers The difference, he says, is that whereas the phrasing slur simply tells the performer what to do, the legato slur expresses ‘the desire for a specific effect without openly stating the corresponding means of execution’ In other words, the legato slur presents the structure of the music, much in the manner of the analytical slur in a voice-leading graph (Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays’, ii, 56) It is this belief in the unity of the masters' musical conceptions and their notation, not any source-critical principle as such, that explains the particular significance which Schenker attached to autographs, he was ready enough to override autograph readings when they conflicted with what he considered to be the musical logic (see note 20 above)Google Scholar

39 Counterpoint, trans John Rothgeb and Jurgen Thym (New York, 1987), i, pp xviii–xx In his C. P. E Bach edition, however, Schenker took a more accommodating line if I have added (in parentheses) a few of my own dynamic signs to Bach's inspired indications, it was because I feared the performer, who might find the organization of the musical material difficult to grasp, would find Bach's signs insufficient and would wish for more This would be especially true if he were used to the large number of dynamic indications so patronizingly offered him in present-day editions' (‘A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation’, 31–2)Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 21Google Scholar

41 Quoted ibid., 22Google Scholar

42 ‘Mozart Symphony in G minor’, 325Google Scholar

43 See Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, ‘The Role of Ideology in the Study of Western Music’, Journal of Musicology, 2 (1983), 1–12 (p 11)Google Scholar