Review of Ian Bent, David Bretherton, and William Drabkin, Eds. Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence (Boydell Press, 2014)

[1] In this age of digital humanities, how does engagement with an online clearinghouse of documents influence a beautifully curated book of primary source documents? Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence, edited by Ian Bent, David Bretherton, and William Drabkin, represents one outcome made possible by digital humanities. It builds upon Schenker Documents Online to accomplish more than the website, yet only through the twelve contributors' participation in the online project could this volume have come to fruition.(1) Additionally, the act of collecting items for Schenker Documents Online and the possibilities for labeling and linking documents on a website has enabled and possibly inspired the enterprise of choosing a subset of Schenker's 7000+ known documents to publish.[2] Published by The Boydell Press and meticulously edited, Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence presents twenty-six narratives, or storylines, from Schenker's writings with translations, when available, from Schenker Documents Online, and with added commentary, interpretation, and insight from the contributors.(2) For this print volume of correspondence, Bent, Bretherton, and Drabkin have chosen and organized approximately 450 documents, spanning 490 pages, into twenty-six chapters that are grouped into six broad sections: The Early Career, Schenker and his Publishers, Schenker and the Institutions, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Contrary Opinions, and Advancing the Cause. They provide forty-four prefatory pages that include information on editorial method, abbreviations, and biographical notes, as well as a general introduction that sets the context for the work and describes the challenges inherent in engaging with Schenker's massive output. Thirty-three pages of bibliography, transcription and translation credits, and index conclude the volume; the entire enterprise is supplemented by forty-three plates collected into two sets of unnumbered pages.[3] Selected Correspondence and Schenker Documents Online share editorial styles, labels for cataloging Schenker's correspondence, and English translations (identical except for a comma or two), yet the connections between these resources include some surprises. For example, the documents presented in this volume are not completely represented on the website. Although the documents published in Selected Correspondence have been transcribed and translated, many have not yet been uploaded to Schenker Documents Online. One hopes and assumes that eventually all of the documents in Selected Correspondence will find their way onto Schenker Documents Online.(3) The website also offers no way to read the documents in the print volume as a narrative. Finally, the electronic medium of Schenker Documents Online offers the following benefits: side-by-side translation; easy navigation to encyclopedia-like entries on persons, institutions, works, and places; and the potential to add newly discovered materials to Bent, Bretherton, and Drabkin's storylines.(4)[4] In both the website and the book, the editors translate documents in a way that allows their English-speaking audience to develop a sense of the ideas, persons, and relationships in Schenker's life. Three editorial decisions in support of this translation philosophy stand out. First, they prioritize idiomatic English over literal translation. To accomplish this, they occasionally allow themselves poetic license to "enlarge slightly" upon the text, though to be sure they meticulously document such liberties (xvii). Second, they provide the complete texts of letters, even when they include discourse tangential to the chapter's main thread. The editors believe that the comprehensive text "enables the reader to get a fuller sense of the interchange between correspondents and a better feel for the psychology of the writer (and the recipient)" (xvii). Finally, they represent missing pieces of correspondence as completely as possible. …