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Klara [Clara] Schiff [Hatschek]

died 1939

Documents associated with this person:

Younger sister of Jeannette Schenker [née Schiff; Kornfeld], thus also to Heinrich Schenker from 1919. Wife of Oskar Hatschek.

All five of Jeanette Schenker's sisters were younger than she, and Klara appears to have been the third daughter of Wilhelm and Emilie Schiff. She was married to Oskar Hatschek.

After Jeanette left her first husband, Emil Kornfeld, and the family home town of Aussig an der Elbe, she apparently did not see Klara ‒ or any of her other sisters or her three brothers ‒ until eighteen years later, in the summer of 1928, when Klara, her husband Oskar, and son Helmut, visited Heinrich and her at their summer refuge of Galtür in the Tyrol, arriving on July 30 and staying for most of August. Heinrich gives his impressions of her in his diary for August 3 (OJ 4/1, pp. 3238‒3239): My sister-in-law Clara is a splendid woman; she refuses here – sensibly – to preach in her innate way, and also takes care not to express her pacifist and world-blessing ideas (pazifistischen u. weltbeglückenden Ideen), since she knows that I am not comfortable with such things. I get the distinct feeling that the two of them are respecting my intellectual world, on account of which I willingly express my agreement to respect theirs.

On August 24 Heinrich and Klara went hiking in the Jam Valley, and Schenker reports their conversation: "We intentionally said farewell to all megalomania and communism in intellectual matters!" (OJ 4/1, p. 3245). In bidding farewell to the visitors on the 26th, Schenker records in his diary that in spite of their intelligence he could not live "in the pretentious world of my Lie-Liechen's siblings," with its provincialism. Klara and Helmuth took many photographs of Galtür and surroundings that they sent to the Schenkers in the October (OJ 4/2, p. 3270).

Correspondence

The diary gives evidence that Jeanette maintained correspondence with Klara, but no items are known to survive. One letter from Victor Schiff to Klara from 1925 survives in a transcript by Anna Schiff (OJ 14/8).

Contributor:

  • Ian Bent

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Correspondence

  • OJ 6/7, [39] Handwritten envelope from Schenker to Moriz Violin, postmarked July 22, 1928

    Schenker asks about Violin's breakdown, and comments on Halm's avoidance of fearful situations and on Cube's shop window exhibition.

  • OJ 6/7, [49] Handwritten letter from Schenker to Moriz Violin, dated July 10, 1930

    Acknowledging his recent letter to Jeanette, Schenker expresses his regret that Violin and his son Karl are still troubled by health problems and reports some recent news. Furtwängler's intervention with Breitkopf & Härtel on behalf of Weisse's Octet was in vain; he had also sought the same firm's agreement to publish the "Eroica" analysis, but this will now appear as the third Meisterwerk Yearbook. The Schenkers are expecting many visitors in Galtür, including Furtwängler, Reinhard Oppel, Schenker's nephew and his wife, and Jeanette's sister and family. Hoboken is prepared to fund the publication of a collected edition of the works of C. P. E. Bach (with financial support from the city of Hamburg), but Schenker is cautious about this because his paid involvement in the project might result in work that would jeopardize progress on Der freie Satz. He has been included in the latest edition of Meyers Konversations-Lexicon, and has received favorable citation in Romain Rolland's latest Beethoven book.

  • WSLB-Hds 191.567 Handwritten letter from Schenker to Deutsch, dated August 15, [1930]

    Schenker thanks Deutsch for his careful, helpful reading of the proofs to the third Meisterwerk yearbook. -- Tomay has assigned the autography of the foreground graphs for the second movement of the "Eroica" Symphony to an apprentice; these are full of mistakes and will have to be done again. But Tomay’s own work, on the third and fourth movements, is excellent. -- In a postscript, he comments on his entry in the most recent Meyers Lexikon, and on a review of the second Meisterwerk yearbook in the Deutsche Tonkünstler-Zeitung.

Diaries