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Lifesaver

The art of performance by Heinrich Schenker

Reviewed by Susan Bradshaw
Herbert Esser (ed), Irene Schreier Scott (trans)
Oxford UP (New York & Oxford, 2000); xxvii, 101pp; £35. ISBN 0 19 512254 2

Tantalisingly, this is the book that never was. For despite the efforts of a whole team of editorial hands, his own initially included, it remains in essence the monograph which musicologist Heinrich Schenker first drafted in July 1911 – together with the later addition of material drawn from a boxful of more or less scrappy aides-mémoire dating from 1914–32 and posthumously catalogued (as Fragments and notes) by the author’s widow and his friend and former student, Oswald Jonas.

But with no publisher ready to hand, another twenty years were to pass before Universal Edition showed sufficient interest for Jonas’s stepdaughter and heir, Irene Schreier Scott, to propose herself as translator in conjunction with the conductor Heribert Esser as editor; it was he who, perhaps wisely, decided to jettison the earlier idea of a lexicon in favour of a fully integrated text, leaving himself the recreative freedom ‘to produce a practical, usable edition’ which would draw on as much of Schenker’s original wording as possible. Without going into details of omissions/additions or the innumerable small decisions taken along the way, the result as presented here can hardly be faulted as a salvage exercise. It is nonetheless curious that a project begun with such enthusiasm barely into the second decade of the twentieth century should have been allowed to lie largely fallow for the last twenty-five years of its author’s life and for many more beyond, until the approach of a new millennium brought it eventually to posthumous publication.

Motivated at least in part by his admiration for CPE Bach’s On the true art of playing keyboard instruments, it was the urgent completion of a still larger and more ambitious undertaking, Free composition, that seems to have taken precedence over The art of performance as Schenker’s life drew to a close in 1935 – although the need for performers to understand compositional procedures was so central to his thesis that he could well (even better?) have run the two together as ‘Free composition and the art of performance’. With these indecisions preying on his mind, it is no surprise to find that he continued to juggle with ideas that could have found a place in either book.

He begins by urging performers to search for meaning behind the notational sybols, in order to realise that ‘our great masters were as inspired in their notation as they were in the actual composing’, hence the need for texts based solely on manuscripts and first editions. Alas, the music examples given here were chosen not by Schenker (who included only two notated examples among the many listed references in his original MS) but, presumably, by the editor; without editorial explanation, it is difficult to separate instances taken direct from the Urtext from those culled from Schenker’s own symbolic analyses; it might have been wiser to give them all in their Ur-state, as well as to ensure their comprehensibility through a properly professional proofing. In addition to a notable absence of time signatures (except where examples are taken from the start of a piece), many of the extracts are so short – often with so much information missing and with so many printing errors (including at least one totally wrong bar reference) – as to verge on the inscrutable.

Readers with a good knowledge of the (mainly) keyboard repertoire discussed here should be able to overlook such textual irritations and to profit by the genuinely good advice with which the book abounds. Even the transatlantic curiosities of our mutual misunderstandings give pause for thought sufficient to generate positive mental endeavour: ‘tone’ is always a problem, especially when it becomes ‘the extended tones aiming at individual notes’; diminution too, especially in the plural as ‘the diminutions’ – until a footnote in Free composition explains that ‘The term diminution means embellishment in a general broad sense. It has nothing to do with diminution meaning repetition in smaller note- values.’ So that’s all right, then.

Words do however tend take on new and often puzzling meanings as soon as they cross the Atlantic; take ‘proximity’, as in ‘Proximity of the Piano to the Orchestra’ which, according to the context, seems to mean ‘how to make the piano sound like an orchestra’. Like the performer’s arm, which ‘must be used as a tool in its entire length in such a way that it passes the instructions of the nerves on to the fingers without interference’, so the book itself must be used as a tool for searching out nuggets of information: ‘Thus all fortes are no more alike than all pianos’, and ‘rhetorical accents refer to metric organization’. These are things worth remembering in the context of a book that elsewhere talks almost exclusively about touch at the expense of motif and phrase, of ‘pressing’ the keys rather than articulating pitches. All in all, Schenker’s practical advice has the old-fashioned ring of his English contemporary, Tobias Matthay, with its ‘gliding elbows’ and ‘elastic, swaying motion’ of arm and hand – including the injunction (placed here by way of conclusion) to each and every pianist to employ ‘the greatest variety of hand and arm motions’ and ‘the most manifold gradations’, in order ‘to infuse the tones with genuine life’. In other words, it’s necessarily a bit of a hotch-potch.

Susan Bradshaw is a pianist and writer