Heinrich Schenker and Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna

Description

Although there has recently been a significant rise of interest in late nineteenth-century music criticism, the early essays of Heinrich Schenker, one of the most prominent Viennese music journalists, have previously received little scholarly attention. In this dissertation, I examine Schenker’s critical writings— 100 essays and reviews published between 1891 and 1898 in five journals—for the insight they provide about both the early stages of Schenker’s thinking and the critical culture of Vienna and surrounding cities during this period. I argue that Schenker’s critical writings are especially valuable for our understanding of late nineteenth-century criticism in that they introduce us to several forms of journalistic reporting, including the analytical review and the biographical portrait, that have previously been overlooked in studies of the subject. Such essays, I suggest, in turn encourage us to examine the ways in which critics drew upon a wide array of ideas discussed and debated by figures active in a number of other branches o f the intellectual discourse on music, including analysis, philosophical aesthetics, and the study of music history. In order to illustrate this point, I describe how Schenker makes use of analytical means to defend the effectiveness of Brahms’s vocal music; how his discussions of both musical coherence and the creative process draw upon the ideas of Eduard Hanslick, Friedrich von Hausegger, and other important nineteenth-century writers on music aesthetics; and how his biographical studies confront some of the same methodological problems debated by Guido Adler and other pioneering music historians. I conclude by arguing that Schenker’s early writings introduce us to the previously unacknowledged intellectual richness of the critical discourse in this time and place, and by suggesting that a detailed examination of the work of his many neglected peers may likewise enhance our understanding of this field.