The invitation to Schenker to attend a meeting “to consider possible ways of setting up a society to sponsor the performance of ‘modern music’,” of which Schoenberg was a co-signatory, and the dispatch of an invitation to the event of the Ansorge Society on February 7, 1904, leave open the question as to how much of Schenker’s thinking about such music was known to those inviting him. The Society for Creative Musicians1 was duly established on April 23, 1904, but despite having Mahler as its honorary president—he also conducted Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica at one of the concerts—it lasted only until March 1905.

The subsequent letters from Schoenberg would appear to indicate that Schenker had not completely rejected all such overtures. But by February 5, 1907, and a concert at which Schenker heard the premiere of Schoenberg’s String Quartet, Op. 7, the scene was set for a definitive parting of the ways. Despite commenting in his diary that he found the quartet “a single long-drawn-out atrocity!”, Schenker returned three days later for the First Chamber Symphony, confiding to his diary only that it was “an embarrassing fiasco.”

That Schoenberg (or someone on his behalf ) was still sending invitations to Schenker in November of 1907 evidently does not mean that Schenker had expressed any enthusiasm for continuing to receive them; and even before the 1911 publication of Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony Schenker’s dislike of what the composer stood for was vividly apparent in his reaction to Universal Edition’s decision to publish Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, Op. 10, and Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11. Schenker wrote to Emil Hertzka on February 7, 1910, sarcastically noting the latter’s willingness to promote “anti-musical music.”

Arnold Whittall

Zemlinsky, Gutheil, and Schoenberg to Schenker (letter), January, 1904

OJ 14/15, [8]

Dear Sir,

The undersigned take the liberty of inviting you to a meeting at 8 pm on January 21 at Hopfner’s Restaurant, [Vienna] I, Kärtnerstrasse (private room). The aim of the meeting is as follows:

Anyone who compares the musical situation in Vienna with that in even smaller cities in Germany will be forced to recognize that for a long time the “city of music” has sadly lagged behind in the minimal progress that can be demanded these days even from those cultural centres that rest on the laurels of earlier times.