‘ … nur ein Gleichnis’: Heinrich Schenker and the Path To ‘Likeness’

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces to Schenker scholarship a virtually unknown, unfinished text, ‘Der Weg zum Gleichniss’ (‘The Path to Likeness’). I date it to the decade following 1895, and more specifically to 1902–4: thus, between ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’ and Harmonielehre (1906). ‘Geist’ has for more than thirty years been repeatedly re-examined for its negative account of organicism in music; I show that the ‘Gleichniss’ text both reiterates Schenker’s position and argues that, through the controlling concept of ‘likeness’, music succeeded in elevating itself to the level of ‘a distinct, second, artificial and higher nature’. In short, this text may represent the ‘missing link’ between ‘Geist’ and the more positively organicist Harmonielehre. Finally, I ponder the context of ‘Geist’ and the background to Schenker’s idiosyncratic use of the term ‘Gleichniss’: this leads both forwards to the 1933 article ‘Was wird aus der Musik?’ and backwards to the Old Testament.