Heinrich Schenker, Walter Dahms, and the Music of the South

Abstract

In recent years scholars have made great strides in contextualizing the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868−1935) within the politics and culture of the interwar period. Many of Schenker’s closest pupils and disciples have now also come under investigation. Few present as bewildering a story as Walter Dahms (1887−1973), a music critic and one of Schenker’s fiercest advocates in the German press. Though they met on just one occasion, Dahms and Schenker corresponded extensively over a period of eighteen years (1913−31), revealing a mutual concern for the social and political climate of interwar Germany. In some cases their correspondence served as a springboard for many of the extra-musical ideas Schenker published in his analytical pamphlets of the 1920s, Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. In other cases it demonstrated Dahms’s and Schenker’s bitter disagreements about the Great War and its main perpetrators. Along with an array of articles he wrote on Schenker, Dahms published two books that brought Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “Music of the South” into contact with Schenker’s developing theories of musical structure. Dahms further proposed a concept of “vocality” that he saw as the key to restoring the notion of musical genius in Western music. Schenker’s analysis of Mendelssohn’s Venetianisches Gondellied in F-sharp minor, op. 30, no. 6, published in issue 10 of Der Tonwille, unearths Schenker’s own take on the South and on Dahms’s vocal principle. In the end, this case study exemplifies the intermingling of aesthetic, performative, and analytical concerns within Schenker’s work at this time, and it exposes the many ideological tensions between Schenker’s and Dahms’s outlooks on music, culture, and politics.