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Harmonielehre

Theory of Harmony

Documents associated with this entity:

Volume I of Schenker's series of theoretical works entitled Neue Musikalische Theorien und Phantasien (New Musical Theories and Fantasies), first published by J. G. Cotta of Stuttgart in 1906, and later published by Universal Edition of Vienna.

With Harmonielehre, Schenker laid the foundation of his entire theoretical construct. This is not to diminish the significance of his Beitrag zur Ornamentik of 1903, in which ornamentation emerged as fundamental to his way of viewing music, and his indebtedness to C. P. E. Bach's Versuch became clear. But it was in Harmonielehre that he set forth for the first time the central concepts of Stufe (harmonic scale-degree) and Auskomponierung (literally "composing-out," i.e. elaboration), along with the notions of tonicization and chromaticization. It was also in Harmonielehre that he began to distance himself from certain trends in contemporaneous music, and that his polemical vein began to show itself.

Publication History

First Edition

Half-title-page:

NEUE | MUSIKALISCHE THEORIEN | UND PHANTASIEN | VON | EINEM KÜNSTLER | ERSTER BAND: HARMONIELEHRE | [publisher's device: MDCXL] | STUTTGART UND BERLIN 1906 | J. G. COTTA'SCHE BUCHHANDLUNG NACHFOLGER

Ttle-page:

HARMONIELEHRE | VON | EINEM KÜNSTLER | [publisher's device: MDCXL] | STUTTGART UND BERLIN 1906 | J. G. COTTA'SCHE BUCHHANDLUNG NACHFOLGER

Chronology:

Schenker's Foreword is undated, but was submitted on October 17, 1906. Having failed during 1905 to secure publication by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig, Universal Edition Vienna, and Max Brockhaus of Leipzig, and having initially been turned down by J. G. Cotta of Stuttgart, Cotta were persuaded through the intervention of Eugen d'Albert to take it on in their commission publishing house. Schenker dispatched the manuscript of the work to Cotta on November 22, 1905; the contract for the work stipulated a print-run of 1,100 copies at a retail price of 35 Pfennigs per gathering, with Schenker earning 75% of the net receipts. The eventual volume price was 10 Marks.

At first, Schenker planned to add an "Nachwort" (Afterword) of one gathering, but the latter assumed such large proportions that eventually in discussion with Cotta he opted to issue it as a separate publication. In the event, it was never published, and remained a typescript entitled "Über den Niedergang der Kompositionskunst: eine technisch-kritische Untersuchung" ("The Decline of the Art of Composition: A Technical-critical Study"). Proof-correcting began in the summer of 1905 and continued into 1906, and the book was published on November 10, 1906. Alphons von Rothschild paid the publishing and marketing costs of 4,300.30 Marks.

In 1909, Schenker agreed, having by then submitted his Kontrapunkt 1, that the title-page of Harmonielehre should at last bear his name, and for the remainder of the first edition new half-title and title-pages were supplied that substituted "HEINRICH SCHENKER" for "EINEM KÜNSTLER."

Second Edition

Universal Edition of Vienna agreed in 1920 to take over from Cotta the publication of the first edition of Kontrapunkt 2, and with it also the stocks of Harmonielehre and Kontrapunkt 1. A second edition of Harmonielehre was published on February 21, 1921, in a print-run of 531 copies. A new edition was released in August 1978, and subsequent releases in 1992 and 2003.

English Translation

After several attempts, dating back to c. 1930, to promote an English translation, that by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, from an edited and annotated text by Oswald Jonas, was issued in 1954 by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Bibliography:

  • Wason, Robert W., "From 'Harmonielehre' to 'Harmony': Schenker's Theory of Harmony and Its Americanization," in Essays from the Fourth International Schenker Symposium, vol. I, ed. Allen Cadwallader (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2008), pp. 213–58
  • Drabkin, William, "Schenker's 'Decline': an Introduction," Music Analysis XXIV/1–2 (March–July 2005), 3–31 [German text, pp. 131–232; Eng. transl., pp. 33–129]

Contributor:

  • Ian Bent

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