Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

also a collection of articles devoted to Schubert that various music critics wrote in the 1920s, a
completion by Schenker himself of an unfinished Schubert song (D. 555), a letter from an
acquaintance of Schenker‘s, Otto Erich Deutsch, to Schenker, an article by Schenker, and a
conference report for the 1928 Schubert commemoration with some comments pencilled by
Schenker himself. By looking at this material, and evaluating Schenker‘s analyses in the context
of Schubert‘s reception as expressed in the various articles collected by Schenker, this paper will
discuss the role of Schubert in Schenker‘s analytical thought; but at the same time it will
evaluate a general and historical perspective on the role of Schenker‘s thought in the
interpretation of Schubert‘s music.
William Drabkin (University of Southampton)
Schenker’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony
Although most closely identified with the field of music theory and analysis, Heinrich Schenker
devoted much time to studying composers‘ autographs, sketches and letters, and to preparing
commentaries on these documents and editions of the works to which they refer. The corpus of
his editorial work begins with the earlier part of the eighteenth century (Handel, C. P. E. Bach, J.
S. Bach), then focuses on the piano sonatas of Beethoven: the Erläuterungsausgaben (1913–21); the
facsimile of the ‗Moonlight‘ (1921); and the edition of individual sonatas, later collected into
four volumes (1923–24). This represents, however, only a small portion of the music he had
hoped to make available in textually accurate editions free from editoria l interference: editions
of the Well-Tempered Clavier and the piano sonatas of Haydn and Mozart, mooted in
correspondence with his publishers, were abandoned.
One project that did come to fruition was a revision of Schubert‘s ‗Unfinished‘
Symphony, published under the imprint of the Wiener Philharmonischer Verlag. It does not
appear in any of the standard lists of Schenker‘s works, nor is Schenker‘s editorial involvement
acknowledged in the score itself. It is one of four miniature scores of the symphony p reserved in
his Nachlass (New York Public Library, Oster Collection): the other three have been annotated
by Schenker and his pupil Angi Elias, based on a study of the autograph score. They show the
theorist‘s characteristic attention to detail and his opp osition to editorial interference, whether
arbitrary or arising from practical concerns. Schenker‘s diary entries, together with the
surviving correspondence with Otto Erich Deutsch, shows that his edition of the ‗Unfinished‘
was an enterprise he took seriously, and valued highly.
David Bretherton (University of Southampton)
Learning from Schenker’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’
Schenker held the songs of Schubert in the highest esteem: fourteen are examined at varying
length in Schenker‘s published works, and many m ore feature in sketches, prose fragments, and
draft essay manuscripts in Schenker‘s Nachlass (see Drabkin, 2008). But arguably the most
fascinating of these unpublished items are several analytical sketches of Schubert‘s ‗Der
Doppelgänger‘ (Oster Collection, File A, Items 240–42), which date from July 1932. The sketches
were prompted by a letter from his loyal pupil Felix-Eberhard von Cube that included a
Schenkerian analysis of the song (Cube himself prepared a new analysis of ‗Der Doppelgänger‘
in 1952, which he included in the teaching manual that he used for many years, the Lehrbuch der
musikalischen Kunstgesetze).
The carefully typed out text of the song (Item A/ 242) is evidence of Schenker‘s
characteristic attention to the words and a further refutation of the claim that, in his song
analyses, he paid little attention to the poetry. Item A/ 240 appears to be an initial working out
in which Schenker interprets the song as one might expect (and as it is often analysed, e.g.