ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to evaluate the claim by exploring the contexts of some of H. Schenker’s most virulent polemics, and in particular those directed against the figure whom Schenker saw as the most formidable of all his opponents: Richard Wagner. As Schenker puts it, ‘Even at the risk of doing an injustice to the masters, as dispensers of the most splendid musical excellences, everybody nevertheless worships only his own “sensibility”, his own “naivete”’. In the opening bars of the Ninth Symphony, says Schenker, the double basses must create the sense of a continuous crescendo despite the fragmentation of their parts; ‘the crescendo-breath must somehow waft hotly across into the subsequent rest’. For Wilhelm Furtwangler as for Schenker, the opposed but equally false approaches of hermeneutics and formalism represented the Scylla and Charybdis of analysis, and in the Ninth Symphony monograph they are represented by the figures of Hermann Kretzschmar and Hugo Riemann respectively.
