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

For more than thirty years, Schenker scholarship has been challenged by Schenker’s apparent repudiation, in ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’ (1895), of the possibility of organicism in music. The present article seeks to reconsider the issue—and particularly the shift from Geist’ to the much more organically-charged thinking of Harmonielehre (1906)—by introducing an unpublished and unexamined essay by Schenker: ‘Der Weg zum Gleichniss’ (‘The Path to Likeness’). It is argued that this undated essay, which draws heavily upon examples from Beethoven’s piano sonatas, was written between ‘Geist’ and Harmonielehre, and is intimately related to the latter text while it yet explicitly repeats the earlier essay’s position on organicism. Despite this, ‘Der Weg zum Gleichniss’ asserts that in music ‘a new art was established artificially, as it were a distinct, second, artificial and higher nature’, and that nature herself was ‘elevated’ through music’s ability to be created in its own likeness rather than in a likeness to nature, as is the case for the other arts. Likenesses are primarily purely musical (essentially, they are motivic imitations), though these, once established, can be supplemented by the ‘second, secondary likeness of the poetic’, namely programmatic likeness. An investigation of possible sources for Schenker’s unusual use of the word Gleichnis leads forward to his 1933 newspaper article ‘Was wird aus der Musik?’ and back as far as the Old Testament.