Ernst Kurth and the Analysis of the Chromatic
Music of the Late Nineteenth Century
Patrick McCreless
Early in his best-known theoretical work, Romantische Har-
monik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan, Ernst Kurth writes,
"Practical harmony manuals (especially since Hugo Riemann)
designate a chord simply as Klang, but a chord is primarily
Drang." 1 In this rhyme Kurth encapsulates the central problem
of German music theory at the turn of the twentieth century:
neither the abstract, dualistic systems of the North Germans
such as Hauptmann, Oettingen, and Riemann, nor the more
empirical, yet still vertically-oriented fundamental bass theory
of the Viennese Simon Sechter was capable of elucidating the
Drang that so characterized much of the music written since
1850. Kurth considered it his task to bridge the abyss between
theory and the music of his time and to seek musical explana-
tion not in absolute, acoustically based systems, but in the em-
pirical examination of musical compositions and the psycholog-
ical forces underlying their creation. Kurth thus exemplifies a
trend in early twentieth-century German theory toward a rec-
ognition of the inadequacy of existing theories as explanatory
models, and, more specifically, toward analysis rather than
compositional pedagogya trend perhaps best exemplified by
'Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan
(Berlin: Hesse, 1919), p. 11.
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Heinrich Schenker but also apparent in the works of theorists
such as August Halm and Georg Capellen. 2
The present paper is intended neither as a summary of
Kurth's theories of nineteenth-century music and its psycholog-
ical basis, nor as an exegesis of a particular theoretical issue in
his work, nor yet as an evaluation of his historical position rela-
tive to other theorists of his time. Rather, it is a survey of se-
lected aspects of Kurth's perceptive but relatively unknown
contribution to the analysis of chromatic music. My survey as-
serts no claim to being exhaustive but will simply concentrate
upon those analytical principles which have proved most suc-
cessful in my own analysis of Wagner operas, Bruckner and
Mahler symphonies, and comparable literature, and which
were also articulated either explicitly or implicitly by Kurth. I
must thus confess at the outset that I approach Kurth's exceed-
ingly intricate and original works on nineteenth-century music
somewhat subjectively, rather as George Santayana once sug-
gested that a philosopher should view history: not as a collec-
tion of facts, but as a body of phenomena from which he might
"abstract . . . whatever [tends] to illustrate his own ideals, as he
2 Noted recently in Robert Wason, "Fundamental Bass Theory in
Nineteenth-Century Vienna" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1982), p. 233ff.

might look over a crowd to find his friends. 3 In adopting such a
" on melodic rather than purely harmonic processes in the devel-
strategy I trust that the structure that I impose upon Kurth's
ideas, while undeniably not his own, will nevertheless bring
into relief those concepts of his that are most palpably relevant
to the analysis of the late nineteenth-century repertoire.
Because of the unfamiliarity of Kurth's ideas, and because
of the absence of a firm current consensus as to the theoretical
bases of chromatic music, I shall not proceed immediately to a
discussion of Kurth's analytical work but shall approach that
work indirectly from two sides: first, through a brief outline of
those elements of his broader musical theories that will be es-
sential to an understanding of his analyses; and second,
through a survey of recently developed principles for the analy-
sis of such musica survey which, it is hoped, will bring Kurth's
contributions into clearer perspective.
Kurth was a contemporary of Heinrich Schenker, with
whom he shared a number of important aspects of music-
theoretical and philosophical background, artistic values, and
intellectual purpose. Both Kurth and Schenker were educated
in Vienna, which at the turn of the century was a seedbed of
new ideas in music theory, just as it was in musicology, music
composition, art, and philosophy. Although Kurth moved in
1912 to the Swiss town of Bern to teach at the university there,
the Viennese music-theoretical tradition remained influential
in his thought throughout his career. Ironically, the nineteenth-
century Viennese theory which he and Schenker inherited from
Sechter and Bruckner was as conservative as their own early
twentieth-century theories were revolutionary. Yet it was an
aspect of this very conservatismin particular, a linear orienta-
tion from figured bass theory preserved more in Austria than in
North Germanythat may have led Schenker to his concern
with scale-steps and voice-leading, and Kurth to his emphasis
3 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 2d ed., 5 vols. (New York: Scrib-
ner's, 1935), 5:58. 4 Wason,
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 57
opment of chromatic harmony. 4 It is thus natural that both the-
orists rejected the acoustically determined, dualistic systems of
Riemann and the other North Germans as useless and utterly
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contrary to the nature of musical experience.
Although they both developed their theories empirically out
of their extensive knowledge of the repertory in which they
were most interestedSchenker in the diatonic tonal music of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kurth in the more
chromatic tonal music of the late nineteenth centuryboth
also reveal their indebtedness to the rationalistic German phil-
osophical tradition. Such an influence is unmistakable in
Schenker's appeals to the natural state of things and to "or-
ganic" process, and in Kurth's adaptation of Schopenhauer's
concept of the "Will" to the psychological and aesthetic func-
tions of music. However, the two theorists differ in the degree
to which their philosophical biases color their musical theories.
It is to Schenker's credit that his philosophical views and his his-
torical valuesno matter how polemical his essays may
becomestill can be filtered out so that what remains is an es-
sentially self-sufficient, if not entirely formalized, theory of mu-
sic stated in musical terms. Such is not the case with Kurth. His
philosophical assumptions and his unremittingly psychological
orientation permeate every aspect of his work, down to the very
terminology with which he describes musical phenomena.
Kurth's dependence upon an analytical terminology which is
psychological and metaphorical in character, and which indeed
constitutes a personal and almost mystical language unique to
his theories, was an obstacle to the acceptance of those theories
in his own day and remains so for us now. Furthermore, the
purpose of Romantische Harmonik was more to define the Ro-
mantic style-psychology and trace its realization in the details
of chromatic harmony than to develop an analytical under-
pp. 3-5.
58 Music Theory Spectrum
standing of individual works of art. There is thus deeply embed-
ded in Romantische Harmonik a tension between his rational
philosophical background and his keen empirical understand-
ing of music. The former determines the general tenor and line
of argument in the book, while the latter comes to the fore in
his demonstration of specific musical points. Accordingly,
while what is most important to Kurth himself is his elaboration
of the sources and manifestations of the Romantic psychology,
what is most interesting to us now are the analyses that he ad-
duces as musical evidence to buttress his stylistic, psychologi-
cal, and historical hypotheses.
Kurth's theories, then, are, to employ a rather topical meta-
phor, one level further removed from our experience than are
Schenker's, and to understand his musical theories will require
a grasp of their philosophical and psychological underpinnings.
For Kurth, music is psychological in origin, and to analyze it we
must take cognizance of the psychic forces that shape it into its
existing form. "Music," writes Kurth, "is a natural power in us,
a dynamic of impulses of the will. " 5 Kurth's view of music is
thus in many respects, as Lee Rothfarb has pointed out in his
translation of Kurth's first theoretical treatise, Die Vorausset-
zungen der theoretische Harmonik (1912), similar to the aes-
thetic premise articulated by Friedrich Schiller, that works of
art are created "out of an indefinite impulse to release feeling of
striving. " 6 The concept of psychic tension as a creative force is
central to Kurth's thought, and he writes in Romantische Har-
monik, "To observe the transformation of tension-processes
into [actual] sound is the fundamental task of all music the-
ory. 7 "
Like Schopenhauer, Kurth believes music to be a product of
5 RomantischeHarmonik, p. 3.
6 Ernst
Biicken, "Kurth als Theoretiker," Melos 4 (1924-25): 358-64;
quoted in Lee Allen Rothfarb, "Ernst Kurth's The Requirements for a Theory
of Harmony: An Annotated Translation with an Introductory Essay" (M.M.
thesis, Hartt College of Music, University of Hartford, 1979), p.14.
7 Romantische Harmonik, p. 2.
the "Will," although, as Rothfarb has pointed out, he does not
consider it to be an actual embodiment of the will, as did the
philosopher, but only an external result of the psychic force of
the will. 8 The most primitive realization of this force in music is
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the "will toward movement" (Wille zu Bewegung), which is
most immediately manifested in melody. 9 The essence of mel-
ody thus involves not merely tone-succession, but rather psy-
chic motionthat tension which gathers individual tones into a
single gesture and connects them into a comprehensible unity.
A theory of melody, in consequence, must from its very incep-
tion take into account the psychological origin of the tones as
well as the tones themselves.
Absolutely fundamental to Kurth's theory of melody are the
metaphors of tension and motiontwo concepts that, whatever
their theoretical value, have nevertheless shaped the musical
experience of most of us from an early age. 10 His attempt to use
such words as theoretical rather than metaphorical terms con-
stitutes the single most problematic feature of his work, for not
only are they underexplicated in the extreme, but alsoand
perhaps more seriouslythey bring into the domain of musical
discourse the whole realm of psychology, a science in its infancy
in Kurth's day and one hardly equipped, even now, to deal with
the creation, perception, or analysis of works such as Tristan or
the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler.
Kurth's psychological tone and his concern with music as
Wille zu Bewegung also permeate his views on harmony. The
first sentence of Romantische Harmonik reads, "Harmonies
are reflexes out of the unconscious." 11 The role of physical
sound and the harmonic series, he claims, have been greatly
overestimated in the theory of harmony. "The source of har-
8 Rothfarb, p. 16.
p. 17.
1 Allen Forte credits Kurth with the popularization of the idea of "tension"
in music theory, in "Theory," Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music, ed.
John Vinton (New York: Dutton, 1971), p. 754.
11 Romantische Harmonik, p. 1.

mony," he says, "is not the external nature and entire structure
of physically manifested basic forms, but the inner, psychic nat-
ure, which produces sensual expression of the powerful shaping
force of the will in the fantasy of sound." 12 Or, in a statement
that echoes his Klangl Drang polarity: "Der Klang ist tot; was in
ihm lebt, ist der Wille zum Klang. 13
" mony that incorporated the concept of leading-tone tension. 15
Essential to this theory of harmony is yet another metaphor,
this one derived from physics rather than metaphysics or psy-
chology. Melody, he writes, involves kinetic energy, for it arises
from tension-processes that externalize the movement of the
musical will through tones. Harmony, however, involves po-
tential energy, for a chord in a sense "freezes" the kinetic or
melodic possibilities of each of its tones, so that there is, on the
one hand, an identifiable structure of pitches, and on the other,
a sea of contexts and possibilities for motion that the chord can
realize once it is activated. Thus, even in a major tonic triad,
which for theorists as diverse as Riemann and Schenker em-
bodies absolute rest, there is for Kurth potential energy, since
the third scale degree of this triad is in fact the leading tone of
the subdominant. It is this concept of a psychic, kinetic, me-
lodic energy (especially leading-tone energy), inherent in all
chords, that inspires, informs, and, for those of a positivistic
turn of mind, infects all that he has to say about harmony. In
Kurth's evolutionary historical view, the leading tone was the
"seed of destruction" embedded within the tonal system, so
that its use beyond the traditional diatonic constraints became
the primary factor in the chromaticization and eventual demise
of the system.
Before we proceed to more analytical points, it will be useful
to examine a number of aspects of Kurth's differentiation of
"kinetic" and "potential" energy and of his concern with
"leading-tone tension" as a determining factor in harmonic
theory. First, Kurth does not claim to have developed the idea
12 Ibid., p. 2.
13 Ibid., p. 3.
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 59
of what he calls "tension-processes" (Spannungsvorgange)
himself but attributes the idea to August Halm's Harmo-
nielehre of 1900; 14 as Rothfarb has observed, Halm
developedafter a number of hints in nineteenth-century Vi-
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ennese theory, beginning with Abbe Voglera theory of har-
Second, it is easy not only to see how appropriate it is to apply
such a dynamic theory to nineteenth-century harmony, with its
conventionally described "longing for resolution" and unre-
solved dissonance, but also to see how such a theory carries the
psychological metaphors of tension and motion directly into
the descriptive language of musical phenomena. Indeed,
throughout Romantische Harmonik Kurth paints a highly
conventionaland sometimes rather tritepicture of the mu-
sic of the period, from his chapter 2 on Romantic music as a
bursting forth of demonic forces out of the inner tension within
the creative artist to his final 150-page chapter on an old saw,
unendliche Melodie, a phrase that Wagner himself lived to re-
gret having coined. Third, although Kurth's linear concept of
kinetic and potential energy is to some extent defensible from
an intuitive point of view, and although it is certainly a vital and
welcome contrast to Riemann's sterile verticalities, it does
present a problem of logic. For if harmonies have potential en-
ergy by virtue of the contextual possibilities hidden within
them, so should a single tone of a melody have potential energy
as well, since as Kurth himself insists, we should consider it as
part of a whole gesture, not just as an isolated tone.
That Kurth's basic premises and lines of argument are psy-
chological rather than theoretical in character dictates that we
leave his work for the present, in order to establish a solid theo-
retical framework for our own analyses of chromatic tonal mu-
14Ibid., p. 12.
15Rothfarb, pp. 29-30; for the nineteenth-century theoretical background,
including the work of Vogler, see Wason, pp. 26,38,41,113-15.
60 Music Theory Spectrum
sic. We shall then be able to return to Kurth and determine the
extent to which he, despite the psychological and metaphorical
nature of his theories and his terminology, did in fact develop
similar principles and analytic methods. Because I believe that
many late nineteenth-century works reveal a deep level of
structural coherencethat, as Edward T. Cone would say,
they lend themselves to a "synoptic" kind of comprehen-
sion' 6I shall proceed, not as Kurth does in Romantische Har-
monik, from the bottom up, from the isolated chord to broader
aspects of harmonic structure, but rather as Schenker does in
Der freie Satz, from the top down.
The Wagner scholar Robert Bailey and the theorist Gregory
Proctor have independently articulated a number of harmonic
principles that obtain in chromatic music, and I shall draw upon
their ideas here. First, as Bailey has shown, in the late nine-
teenth century we have moved from a tonal universe in which
there are twenty-four diatonic major and minor keys to one in
which there are twelve keys with interchangeable mode. 17 Al-
though a given passage can be, of course, diatonically in either
the major or minor mode, it may also incorporate elements of
both. More importantly, the modes are functionally equiva-
lent: a tonic performs the same role, regardless of modal
choice. What we have here is essentially Schenker's principle of
mixture, plus the explicit acknowledgment that neither mode
needs to be designated as taking precedence over the other.
16 Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York:
Norton, 1968), p. 88. It should be noted that Cone (p. 96) questions the possi-
bility of our hearing whole Wagnerian acts and similar works "synoptically."
17 Robert Bailey, "Form and Musical Language in Brahms's Fourth Sym-
phony," in Papers of the International Brahms Congress, April 1980 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). See also Gregory Proctor,
"Technical Bases of Nineteenth-Century Chromatic Tonality: A Study in
Chromaticism" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1978), p. 131. Proctor also
notes that in chromatic tonal music the twelve-note equal-tempered scale sup-
plants the diatonic major and minor scales as the structural basis at deeper lev-
els.
Second, within a piece keys are not chosen by virtue of their
diatonicor even modally-mixed diatonicrelationship to a
central tonality, as in earlier tonal music. Rather, structural
keys are chosen from the available twelve in order to work out a
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complex of contextually determined relationships. Such rela-
tionships frequently involve simply two keys a third apart, but
they may involve a whole complex of interconnected keys.
Since there are no diatonic constraints for key choice, the ulti-
mate result of the above procedures is the chromaticization of
the tonal system at a deep structural levela change, as Proc-
tor has noted, from a system that is asymmetrical at deeper lev-
els to one which is symmetrical. 18
Accordingly, the positioning of a key within a tonal context,
a place-finding function fulfilled so well and so long by the
asymmetry of the diatonic scale, must now be accomplished by
other meansmeans that work in a symmetrical system. Bailey
has suggested three ways that may be used to establish a coher-
ent large-scale tonal structure in such a system. The first he calls
the "associative" use of tonality, or the linking of a particular
key to a character, object, or location in an opera. 19 I would
expand the principle to include instrumental music, since what
it involves is making a tonality cross-referential or motivic.
Thus, in an operatic context, we cringe at the El , minor triad
that opens Wagner's GOtterdtimmerung (Example 1) because
we know what has now happened to the "natural" state of the
Rhine, as introduced in El, major at the beginning of Das
Rheingold. Or, in the context of purely instrumental music, the
tonicizations of C major and F major in the development of the
final movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony take on
added structural meaning because of the extensive use of the
same two keys in the introduction and development of the first
movement. In both dramatic and instrumental music, the prin-
18Proctor, p. 149ff.
19Robert Bailey, "The Structure of the Ring and Its Evolution,"
Nineteenth-Century Music 1 (1977), p. 50.
 Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 61

Example 1. Wagner, GOtterdtimmerung, opening measures

massig langsam

Will1=#.1 enrier

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Tr
cresc.
7 .

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. A
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ciple is the same: the establishment of structural tonal coher-
ence by means of cross-reference.
A second means of tonal coherence involves what Bailey
calls the "expressive" use of tonality, or progressive shifts of
structural tonalities up or down by half-step or whole-step. 2 To
return to our example from GOtterdiimmerung, another reason
why we are seized with tragic "pity and fear," as Aristotle
would have it, when we hear the first two chords of the opera
(El, minor and 09 major) is that it was precisely the same pro-
gression, a half-step higher (E minor to C major), that articu-
lated the joyous waking of Briinnhilde in the final act of the pre-
ceding opera, Siegfried.
"Ibid.
The third structural use of tonality Bailey calls "direc-
tional," for it concerns the familiar late-nineteenth-century
phenomenon of using a different tonic at the end of a piece than
was employed at the beginning. 21 In such works the structural
process in question concerns not so much prolongation of a to-
nality as the gradual turning from one key to another. Gener-
ally, in such works, the initial and final tonalities are "associa-
tive" or "cross-referential" in their own right. Structural depth
is achieved by cross-relating these keys at a number of levels
at the level of large sections or scenes, or of subsections, or of
21 Robert Bailey, "From Song to Symphony and Back Again: Form and
Tonal Language in Mahler's Fourth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde,"
Nineteenth-Century Music (forthcoming).
62 Music Theory Spectrum
brief passages, or even individual chords. Thus, to continue
with our same example, the entire prologue and act 1 of
GOtterdiimmerung progresses from El, to B, and this large-scale
progression is reflected in (or foreshadowed by) the first two
chords, El, and ci . 22
To the above three principles I add a fourth, which we might
call "classical" tonality, for many passages in late nineteenth-
century musicSiegmund's song in act 1 of Die Walkiire, for
exampleare essentially diatonic and function according to
the tonal and linear constraints comparable to those found in
an earlier periodindeed, in a manner comparable to those
elaborated by Schenker. The interaction of cross-referential,
directional, and chromatic late nineteenth-century principles
and linear, prolongational, diatonic ones constitutes one of the
most fascinating and at the same time most elusive theoretical
aspects of the music in question.
At structural levels closer to the musical surface, all four
principles can obtain. Within a given passage, individual
sonorities may be motivated by cross-reference to large-scale
structural tonalities, they may arise as part of a local "expres-
sive" ascent or descent, they may be chosen because they can
effect the directional move from one tonality to another, or
they may simply function within the context of a diatonic pro-
22 Bailey notes this point in "The Structure of the Ring," p. 59.
Example 2. Wagner, Siegfried, act 1, piano reduction and voice-
leading sketch
gression. It is also at the more "foreground" levels that linear
considerations come strikingly to the fore. Linearthat is,
Schenkeriananalysis of late nineteenth-century music has
long been a controversial issue, and the application of
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Schenker's theories to music for which they were not intended
has given rise to an extensive, if not uniformly distinguished,
subliterature of contemporary theory. For use in late
nineteenth-century music we can profitably view linear analysis
as being comprised of two separable componentsfirst, that of
scale-degree function; and second, that of voice-leading.
While, as has been suggested above, many of the more diatonic
passages in late nineteenth-century works involve both compo-
nents, more chromatic passages often involve only the latter,
inasmuch as the rate of tonal fluctuation frequently renders
diatonic scale-degree considerations in any single key point-
less. Thus, ironically, a passage such as that given in Example 2,
which may initially seem to be a particularly "Schenkerian"
swash of chromatic harmony, is really "Schenkerian" only in
the latter of the two senses defined here.
An excellent example of the interaction between Schenker-
ian, diatonic, prolongational principles and late nineteenth-
century, chromatic, cross-referential ones is the prelude to act 1
of Wagner's Parsifal. Figure 1 shows both the formal and tonal
structure of the prelude, and it makes clear that, if the piece is
"about" anything musically, it is about different ways of arpeg-
 Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 63

Figure 1. Wagner, Parsifal, prelude to act 1

1 2 3 4

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Thematic material:

A A B A

Tonality: Eb Eb
(V/Ab ) D (V/Ab )

- c6

Ab Ab

Measure numbers:

1 - 19 20- 38 39 - 78 78 - end

Thematic material:
Sehr langsam
se& ausdrucksvoll

V V v V
V v V
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n

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64 Music Theory Spectrum
giating up in thirds from the initial Abboth in the symmetri-
cal, chromatic sense and in the asymmetrical, diatonic sense. In
addition to functioning as a musical analogue to the central
spiritual issue of the drama, Parsifal's quest for the Grail, these
ascending arpeggiations also bear a purely musical meaning,
especially with respect to the tonal principles outlined above.
Each arpeggiation, of course, has something of the quality of an
"expressive" ascent, although the movement is in thirds rather
than seconds. The Al C El motion in sections 1-3 of the
, ,
prelude, on the other hand, involves a more conventional ar-
peggiation to the dominant. In addition, the juxtaposition of
Ab and C in the first two sections of the prelude is reminiscent
of the opening of Giitterdiimmerung, since this initial harmonic
motion, which is suggested even in the surface of the first mea-
sures of the piece, foreshadows the directional progression of
the first act as a whole. Both these keys have associative con-
nections as well, for in the drama At is the key of the Grail,
, ply. The harmonies that are there are carefully chosen for their
while C is associated with the suffering of Amfortas.
The most interesting aspects of the work with respect to lin-
ear analysis, however, involve section 4a section which,
while functioning as a return of sorts, is nevertheless the most
complex of them all. The opening of the section (Example 3)
presents a threefold statement of the initial theme of the
preludea statement in Al (at m. 80), then one in 09 (at m.
, smoothly connecting the structurally determined chords,
85), then one in D (at m. 90). Again, these arpeggiations in-
volve both "expressive" and "associative" factors: the expres-
sive ones should by now be obvious, while the associative ones
concern not only the Ab of the Grail, but also the B of
Klingsor's magic castle in act 2, and the D of the structural re-
frain, "Der reine Tor," in act 1. Despite the chromatic com-
plexity of the section, a remarkably straightforward scalewise
upper line spans across it. The line begins with the Eb of m. 82,
ascends to the Bil of m. 92, then descends through the remain-
der of the prelude. While the primacy of this line can hardly be
denied as a crucial organizing featureindeed, an immediately
aurally perceptible onemost of its pitches cannot be consid-
ered in a single diatonic context. Yet, at the end, in spite of the
prevailing chromaticism of the harmonic progressions, the
whole motion converges on a structural dominant, with the
"obligatory" S 4 3-2 scale-degree descent in the melody
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and diatonic harmonic support in the bass. Two considerations
are of the utmost importance here. First, while the passage is
essentially nondiatonic, it projects an underlying diatonic
structure, so that in a sense it articulates a melodic descent from
Eb at the beginning to Bb at the end, with diatonic support, as
shown in Figure 2. On the other hand, no purely Schenkerian
methodology can explain why the more chromatic passages
proceed as they do. Simply to classify the notes of the upper line
as chromatic passing tones with harmonic support is to miss the
meaning of the passage. For not just any harmonic support will
do, as relegating most of the verticalities to the class of passing
chord or harmonization of chromatic passing tone would im-
associative or cross-referential resonance: not only the Al , 09,
,
and D of the initial arpeggiation, but also the echoes of D that
remain through the first half of m. 97, the brief return to Ab in
m. 98, and the reinvocation of C in mm. 99 and 102. Indeed, so
important is the cross-referential function of chords in the pas-
sage that one could argue that the line is worked out as a way of
rather than that the chords arise to harmonize the structurally
determined line. Both the chords and the line are determinant
for the structure of the passage, and to ignore either at the ex-
pense of the other would do violence to the intent of the music.
With these principles and a sample analysis in mind, we may
now return to Kurth in order to gain a perspective on what he
understood about such music and what he did not. Unfortu-
nately, we must begin with a negative point. Implicit in our dis-
cussion of the analysis of late nineteenth-century music was the
concept of structural levelsnot Schenker's Schichten, to be
sure, but nevertheless some means of uncovering the large-
scale tonal logic of a composition and of articulating the rela-


Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 65

Example 3. Wagner, Parsifal

J J =J J 80. pp (trem.)
\
W1P 'MO /i . MO
VII gOWW111111 AMY imartsnsr

Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015

' mina. am ul 0111
unig 1 . 1i.rr NNE mom,- .mi Ln
EalnW MIK J1W AllIr allIMINIIINIIIIINET
n1AM1 IIIV.. AI/ Asir low BW Ur EWE' AM =1.MM M MI III IM M =
UM , MWM111/.1111MIW // MEW Ward MIN OW M MI MI = 11111.E.-__
nNow MINN 1........-
IP -- -- -............- -
---....-.........--..-

sem e ausdrucksvoll
Vn111111
Mal fill r.W
EWAN :10
1E. 41'

(trem.) -43-

: CiltiEll
/ 4.Wall11111 1 n :11111.: MI tea' JIW AM" -
nI I n:11nial=.1.
NepT/M111111 I Mini

MP n1, A:M=111n11111n 01111:311111.1M:

A.W:111111.n ?I IMP7MIII iiiklIOMIM:71:11.11/n-
n ItILAIralima MLA AIM ..77n In 111! I W
1n_
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I .
6 : WI.
:P LIN1111:12n 111.1/1MIMIW:V
/MIMI =MEW NMI M .1111 :J r/MO MMil 11W.I7. 7 17 .:11.2 MI; 0
If n MOW Ml 11M 111.--IMIWW41W.INI n n WA.41141M.IIMAII
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irn 4ff: il MIMEO nim mow wi
I/ I MOM I n111./: 75.111r MIP .1111./WINIEre - Cif MEW art OMNI : ar-mmormicanirium
I IIIM MENNIPMMW IA c41111=I.' AWN= COW Aling= :ry AWIr trnMn n

IrE
continued
66 Music Theory Spectrum
Example 3 continued
mingirmil .......-1
Num....
inuom
___,..___ _______mmill
tionship between the broader structure and various levels of de-
tail. It is this very concept of levels that is lacking in Kurth. As
we shall see, he had a rudimentary grasp of levels with respect
to certain limited aspects of late nineteenth-century practice.
Yet, like the German Formenlehre theoristsof whose ossified
conceptions he was, by the way, thoroughly informed but ad-
Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015
ifiriarilielarli-M-'2====a176""
Miter az ....,
etwas gedehnt
. ._
mirably independenthe proceeds from the detail to the
whole, becoming less and less precise along the way, and never
realizing, as did Schenker, the clarifying power of using the
whole to illuminate the parts. Thus, Romantische Harmonik,
which adopts Tristan as the model of his so-called Romantic
style and which discusses the work in some detail, never man-

Example 3 continued
*T Tr 4 7rf
- '".
ages to articulate certain elementary and indispensable facts
about that opera: that act 1 progresses from A to C, act 2 from
Bb to D, and act 3 from F through A6 to B, and that the tonal
structure of the entire work grows out of these fundamental re-
lationships. Instead, Kurth progresses painstakingly from an
exhaustive (and by no means unassailable) analysis of the Tris-
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 67
-0-
p
P P
M
66
Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015
tan chord and its functions, through a whole catalog of surface
harmonic phenomena that he regards as characteristic of the
style, without ever addressing the larger question of what holds
such an immense piece together from a purely musical point of
view.
Here Kurth must, paradoxically, take second place to Al-
68 Music Theory Spectrum
Figure 2. Wagner, Parsifal, prelude to act 1 (mm. 78end), linear
analysis of underlying diatonic structure
A A A A A
5 4 3 2
78 r
98 A.
99 100
214___,
I ii vi ii V
fred Lorenz, who published the first volume of his Das Geheim-
nis der Form bei Richard Wagner in 1924, five years after the
appearance of Romantische Harmonik. 23 Lorenz's work is
hardly of the quality of Kurth's; his analyses of Wagner's music
are habitually wrongegregiously wrong, to the extent that
they are hardly worthy of serious consideration. 24 Neverthe-
less, he deserves credit for his realization that Wagner's operas
work as whole, coherent structures, both at the large-scale level
and at the level of individual sections, and that it is tonality that
controls the progression of the whole as well as the logic of the
detail. Though his analyses usually abandon this tonal principle
in favor of the most superficial and prescriptive "Leitmotif"
analysis, still this single insight, if it had been combined with
Kurth's more formidable musical instincts, could have ad-
vanced the analysis of Wagner's music fifty years.
However, that Kurth did have a clear sense of the impor-
tance of cross-reference in chromatic music, and that he had at
least a dim recognition of what has here been called "associa-
23 Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner, 4 vols.
(Berlin: Hesse, 1924-33), vol. 1: Der musikalische Aufbau des Biihnenfest-
spieles Der Ring des Nibelungen.
24 See Patrick McCreless, Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Mu-
sic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 88, 105-07, 189.
2
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103 _...--
tive tonality" is evident from a number of passages in both Ro-
mantische Harmonik and his later study, Bruckner. 25 Charac-
teristically, his observation of such relationships is couched in
harmonic and motivic, rather than tonal or structural, terms.
For example, he was one of a number of early twentieth-
century theorists to realize that the Tristan chord is itself moti-
vic and cross-referential; and he was the first theorist to discuss
extensively the dramatic force of the chord's harmonic reinter-
pretation in different tonal contexts throughout the opera. 26
Yet the Tristan chord is not tonality-defining; its very use-
fulness depends in fact on its adaptability to a wide range of har-
monic contexts. Does Kurth recognize the possibility of tonali-
ty's becoming motivic and cross-referential? I think that we
may respond with a qualified answer in the affirmative
qualified because of his orientation in both thought and lan-
guage to harmonic detail, and because he certainly failed to re-
alize the broader structural implications of such a discovery. In
his discussion of how chords can be motivic, he points to two
telling examples before Tristanthe Samiel chord (the dimin-
ished seventh F11 A C El , ) in Weber's Der Freischatz,
25 Kurth, Bruckner, 2 vols. (Berlin: Hesse, 1925).
26 See Romantische Harmonik, pp. 46-96.

and Lohengrin's A-major triad in Wagner's opera of the same
name. 27 It is, of course, a tribute to Kurth's knowledge of the
literature that he chose probably the two clearest examples of
the associative use of tonality in the entire first half of the nine-
teenth century; and his comments show conclusively that he
recognized the practice of making sonorities cross-referential.
In the case of Lohengrin he even takes the further step of notic-
ing that it is the tonality itself, not just the triad, that is
associativeor, as he states it, "symbolic." But he is unable to
take the final step of seeing the structural ramifications of the
chord in Der Freischatz and the tonality in Lohengrin: that the
Samiel chord is not only a referential chord with a dramatic as-
sociation, but that it literally determines the tonal structure of
the Wolf s Glen scene, which is based on the tonicization of the
four pitches F11 , A, C, and El, 28 and that in Lohengrin the tonal
, psychologically-based theories which he takes such pains to
structure of the opera arises from the interaction of Lohen-
grin's tonality of A and other associatively determined keys.
Kurth comes closer to realizing the cross-referential and
structural use of tonalities in his book on Bruckner. Here he
states explicitly that harmony is the basis of musical structure in
that composer's worksand not just of the grammar of chord
succession but of the larger tonal dimension as well. 29 He occa-
sionally makes observations that show the use of a triad at one
time as a harmonic detail and at another as a large-scale tonal-
ity. In an analytical discussion of a passage near the beginning
of the first movement of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, he
commentsin a footnote, where his best analytical insights fre-
quently appearthat the choice of an E-major triad within the
firmly established diatonic context of D minor foreshadows the
p. 90; Bailey refers to the same two examples in "The Structure of
the Ring," p. 50.
28 Robert Bailey, "Visual and Musical Symbolism in German Romantic Op-
era," in Papers of the Congress of the International Musicological Society,
Berkeley, 1977, pp. 440-43.
29 Kurth, Bruckner, vol. 1, p. 540.
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 69
use of E as the tonality of the third and final movement of the
symphony. 3 He thus reveals not only an understanding of how
a harmonic detail can be realized in a "background" structure,
or vice versa, but also a grasp of the idea that many late
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nineteenth-century symphonies and operas are not suites of
movements linked by surface reappearances of tunes but multi-
movement wholes that present complex tonal "plots"to
adopt a metaphor from dramathat interlock separate move-
ments into a single broader scheme.
On the other hand, we must admit that observations such as
the above are but a minor part of Romantische Harmonik and
Bruckner, and we can credit Kurth only for having an intuitive
sense of the structural function of tonality in chromatic music,
not for having articulated and formalized it. In fact, the
substantiate often directly contradict the insights that he re-
veals in individual analyses. He even argues against the form-
determining role of harmony: "The Romantic period,"he
writes, "undermines the inherited large-scale harmonic con-
ception of form. 31 "
One of his most suspect notions about nineteenth-century
harmony is what he calls the absolute Fortschreitungliterally ,
the "absolute succession" which allegedly involves two
chords that have no traditional diatonic connection, but are, to
quote another Viennese theorist of the time, "related only to
one another." 32 Kurth defines the absolute Fortschreitung as an
intermediate classification of harmonic syntax between tradi-
tional, tonality-defining, diatonic progression and single chro-
30 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 731-32, footnote.
31 Romantische Harmonik, p. 328.
32 For Kurth's discussion of this concept of the absolute Fortschreitung, see
Romantische Harmonik, p. 262ff. Needless to say, Kurth's Romantische Har-
monik was written long before Schoenberg's famous essay "Composition with
Twelve Tones Related Only to One Another," and the two deal with entirely
different issues.
70 Music Theory Spectrum
Example 4. Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, act 1
{
matic chords, such as the Tristan chord, which are, for him, re-
lated only to themselves. 33 Of the three, he considers diatonic
progression to be illustrative of the "constructive" tendency in
Romantic harmony, the other two of the "destructive" ten-
dency, 34 for they both incline toward the loosening of the bonds
of tonal harmony. One of his principal examples is the progres-
sion that accompanies the words todgeweihtes Haupt in Tristan
(Example 4)particularly the juxtaposition of the triads of Al ,
major and A major. 35 Kurth is, of course, right in asserting that
the two chords are not diatonically related. Yet he is so intent
upon pointing out the "absolute," nondiatonic character of the
progression and describing its coloristic and emotive effect that
he ignores its real structural meaning: it compresses into a sin-
gle progression elements of both A and C, the two tonalities of
the complex that forms the tonal polarity of the first act of the
opera. In this sense it is not only charged with dramatic and mu-
sical meaning, but it also constitutes a referential connection
from the level of harmonic detail to that of large-scale tonal
structure. Rather than being "absolute" and relating only to
one another, the two chords, as well as the progression as a
whole, refer to the entirety of the first act. Kurth introduces
33 Romantische Harmonik, pp. 262-63.
34 Ibid., p. 263.
35 Ibid., pp. 266-67.
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them in the service of an ill-conceived theory of tonal disinte-
gration, whereas they actually comprise a classic example of a
new kind of tonal integration that developed in the nineteenth
century.
Of what we have here called "expressive" tonality Kurtn
writes in richer detail. This phenomenon he not only
recognizesin his own terminology, of coursebut he also
traces it historically to the sequence. 36 Kurth considers the se-
quence to be an important feature not only of the surface of
nineteenth-century works but also of a somewhat deeper level.
He views the sequence as the product of the application of "ki-
netic," or melodic, energy to harmonic and tonal relationships.
A harmonic sequence thus evolves from the pressing of me-
lodic energy upon a harmonic progression or even an entire for-
mal section. 37 As we saw in the prelude to act 1 of Parsifal, se-
quential repetition of material in this period often involves
statements at chromatic and symmetrical intervals, rather than
diatonic ones. These Kurth dubs iiussertonale Sequenzen, as
opposed to diatonic sequences, and he deems them one of the
critical forces destructive of tonality. At the same time, how-
ever, he observes the use of such sequences as a constructive
formal feature, and, predating Bailey's coining of the term "ex-
36 Ibid, p. 333ff.
37 Ibid., p. 353ff.

pressive tonality," he notes that wholesale transposition of this
sort generally serves a "poetic" function, usually that of pro-
gressive intensification. 38 For once, however, he abjures the
temptation to use a metaphorical or emotive term to describe a
musical procedure, and he employs the more objective term
"sequence-principle" or refers to the concept of Steigerung.
Concerning "directional" tonality, Kurth was aware of the
phenomenon, but he hardly understood it in any depth. As is
the case with his discussions of many theoretical issues, he has
difficulty finding explanations other than those dictated by his
own subjective views of psychological meaning and stylistic
change. Such is the case here: in Romantische Harmonik he
notes the tendency of late nineteenth-century works to pro-
gress from one tonality at the beginning to another at the end,
and he even comments upon the preference for large-scale
tonal organization by the interval of a third. 39 Yet in both cases
his explanations are fanciful at best, and they reveal his inabil-
ity to go beyond the musical surface. He has little to say about
the progressive nature of late nineteenth-century tonality other
than that it is symptomatic of the disintegration of the tonal sys-
tem. 4 And the whole question of tonal organization in thirds
he refers back not only to stylistic change but also to his idiosyn-
cratic views of the relationship between melody and harmony.
In an extraordinarily imaginative interpretation of stylistic
change, he theorizes that just as the Classical style is, for him,
based fundamentally on the consonant triad, so is the Roman-
tic style based on the melodic "tension" of the leading toneits
tendency to break the bonds of chordal constraints. Melodi-
cally, this stylistic contrast is realized, he claims, by an emphasis
on the melodic third scale degree in Romantic music, as op-
posed to the emphasis in Classical melodies on the fifth scale
degree. The melodic concentration on thirds presses outward
38 Ibid.,p. 353.
39 Ibid., pp. 175-78.
40 Ibid., pp. 314-15.
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 71
to influence other aspects of structure, so that tonal areas as
well as melodies are based on the same interval. 41 Again, de-
spite his questionable stylistic explanation of a musical phe-
nomenon, it is noteworthy that he reveals an incipient concep-
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tion of musical levels.
As we approach levels of greater detail, Kurth has more and
more to say. (It must be kept in mind that we have, in a sense,
been going backwards with respect to Romantische Harmonik,
since Kurth begins with the detail and progresses to aspects of
larger structure, while we have done just the opposite.) One
has the feeling that what he has to say in the earlier parts of the
bookapproximately the first half to two-thirdscarries more
authority than the remainder, simply because he seems to have
been more comfortable with matters of detail than with
broader tonal considerations. Many of his ideas are, in fact, ac-
cepted without question today, generally without any knowl-
edge on our part that he was the first, or one of the first, theo-
rists to observe certain principles. Like Schenker, he objected
to the inclination of nineteenth-century theorists to understand
each verticality as an independently functioning chord, and he
was eager to show that many apparently independent sonorities
are generated by the interaction of contrapuntal lines. 42 He also
parallels Schenker in his sensitivity to musical context and his
freedom from the classificational theoretical systems of the late
nineteenth century. Both Schenker's concern for organic
growth and Kurth's continual appeals to the musical "will" be-
speak a laudable and quite contemporary desire to come to
grips with the singularity of musical works.
Like Schoenberg, he realized that dissonance is less acoustic
than contextual, and his analysis of the opening of the Tristan
prelude points out that the dominant seventh chords that con-
41 Ibid., p. 178.
42 See, for example, his analysis of a short passage from act 1 of Tristan (Ro-
mantische Harmonik, p. 57), in which he shows a complex chromatic progres-
sion to be essentially reducible to the motion IVV in the key of C major.
72 Music Theory Spectrum
clude each of the initial three phrases are acoustically dissonant
but contextually consonant. 43 He was one of the first theorists
to emphasize, and certainly the first to illustrate with copious
examples, the principle that the assertion of a key by indirect
statementby means of its dominant aloneis a central fea-
ture of late nineteenth-century music. 44 He also suggested that
not only triads and dominant sevenths on the fifth scale degree,
and the diminished seventh on the seventh scale degree, but
also the augmented sixths on the flatted second scale degree
could assume a dominant or quasi-dominant function. He was
thus one of the earliest theorists to recognize what jazz theory
calls "tritone substitution. 45 " nor could conceivably constitute a real modulation reveals that
Two final analytical issues are worthy of consideration: first,
the interchangeability of the major and minor modes, and sec-
ond, voice-leading and linear analysis. In his early essay, Die
Voraussetzungen der theoretische Harmonik, Kurth presents an
original and characteristically dynamic theory of the relation-
ship between the major and minor triads. Since, he says, the
major third is by nature an unstable melodic interval that de-
mands "leading-tone" resolution, neither the major nor minor
triad is absolutely stable, since each includes a major third. To
quote from Rothfarb's translation of Die Voraussetzungen:
Even the sensation of repose in a cadential major chord is only a rela-
tive sensation. An explanation of minor can be based upon this fact
alone: if the third of a major chord is that overtone which embodies
latent tension in an ascending direction, then the minor represents an
adjustment of this leading-tone tendency by means of a downward al-
teration. . . . Minor harmony represents an adjustment of the tension
of major harmony; however, this adjustment leads to a similar tension,
but in the opposite direction!
43 Romantische Harmonik, pp. 50-52.
44 Ibid., pp. 318-22.
45 Ibid., p. 60.
46 Rothfarb, p. 179.
The extent to which this apparent theoretical equivalence of
the modes enlightens Kurth's analyses is open to question. Oc-
casionally he will note that a shift of mode denotes not a har-
monic modulation but a melodic coloring of a triad. For exam-
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ple, in his discussion of a passage from the beginning of act 1 of
Tristan (Example 5), he suggests that the resolution to El , mi-
nor at the end of the excerpt is merely a melodic alteration, not
a harmonic modulation. 47 Such an analysis shows that Kurth, at
least implicitly, recognizes that the two modes can function
equivalentlythat is, that Et , is El, , regardless of mode. On the
other hand, his intimation that a move from El , major to El, mi-
he is still thinking of the two as independent keys rather than a
single key with interchangeable mode.
Our final issue is that of line, in the Schenkerian sense. We
have seen in our discussion of late nineteenth-century analyti-
cal principles the value of distinguishing between the voice-
leading component of Schenker's thought and the harmonic
scale-degree component. Of the two, Kurth seems to under-
stand only the first, and that in an extremely circumscribed
sense. Certainly there is no evidence whatsoever that Kurth
was ever influenced by Schenker's radical methods of analy-
sis, 48 yet he does seem to realize that line can take precedence
over harmony, and he occasionally notes that in chromatic pas-
sages it is not harmonic progression but the motion of lines that
controls musical structure. Thus, with reference to an excerpt
from the prelude to act 3 of Tristan (Example 6), he comments
upon the presence of an "important new principle"
specifically, that in music of this period, "Often for entire pas-
47 Romantische Harmonik, p. 103.
This opinion is confirmed in John Rothgeb's review of Hellmut Federho-
fer's Akkord und Stimmfuhrung in den musiktheoretischen Systemen von Hugo
Riemann, Ernst Kurth, und Heinrich Schenker (Vienna: Verlag der oesterrei-
chischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981) in Music Theory Spectrum 4
(1982), p. 133.
 Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 73

Example 5. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, act 1

Brangane
6 nn

i? J
UMW n n =II MI

17 al

Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015

Blau-

i7 MI
-, # 9A
r-
i

P
3
r tr r i''. r e'
i.......J
3
..................................-- ----n,

9' 1,176 4 C
,..------1.
.n

1
____:.
.1 -64J- bil si 4 -1

--&-.--- -i-
-- -
-
::11
-7- tr.: >

fen stei- gen im We- sten auf; sanft und schnell

se- gelt das Schiff; auf ru- hi- ger See vor A- bend er-

continued
74 Music Theory Spectrum

Example 5 continued
Isolde: wel- ches land?

Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015

- rei - chen wir si - cher das Land. grii- nen Strand.

sages the lines, rather than the chordal organization, assume
primary meaning and render the chord-succession itself sec-
ondary." 49 However, he was utterly unable to conceptualize
such progressions in contrapuntal terms, as Schenker was.
From the beginning of his career, from Die Voraussetzungen
through his well-known Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts
of 1917, and Romantische Harmonik and Bruckner, he under-
stood "line" only in its note-to-tone, "kinetic-energy" sense.
He discusses line in terms of psychological abstractions, never
concrete voice-leading principles, and he was never able to as-
sociate linear progression and harmonic scale degree. Thus,
whereas he was able, like Schenker, to demonstrate that cer-
Ultimately, then, even though Kurth is justly credited with
helping to revive an interest in musical line in early twentieth-
century theory, there can be little doubt that he understood
harmony better than he understood line. Kurth's concepts of
melodic motion, kinetic energy, and leading-tone tension,
however central they may be to his psychological and stylistic
Example 6. Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, act 3
V/ Ally JI . MINIM= NM IMOU-11111111 1111111=11111 mom
....:1n KM AM11111-111111111111l AMPS Mill UM MN UMW 7 7.71111111WOMMINIMIMII31.11MIN el
II f aul.M tall MINIM.INIMf MIN 11111111:1.1114.4.11111r al a :". MN IM NM D1 7 r. MIN IU
IL., 2 , MI FM MIMI 7" W JIA.MMI WIWIIIMIIIP9:1"1111! WO .F.
I

tain chords in complex progressions do not function indepen-

dently but arise from contrapuntal motion, he could never take
the further step of noticing that some notes in musical lines as-
sume a more determinant role in the structure than do others
in essence, that melody, like harmony, is hierarchical in nat-
ure. 50
49 Kurth,Romantische Harmonik, p. 353.
50 LeeRothfarb has pointed out to me, however, that Kurth develops a
more hierarchical view of melody in his Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts:
Bachs melodische Polyphonie (Bern: P. Haupt, 1917). See p. 225ff.

arguments, offer not so much a technical methodology as an el-
oquent testimony to the need for their inclusion as factors in
late nineteenth-century harmony. And if his dynamic view of
the harmony of the perioda view that emphasizes context
over classification, psychological meaning over acoustic struc-
ture, and Drang over Klangdoes not provide us with either a
system or a language for our own theories, it does provide us
with original and perceptive analyses. That these analyses fit
logically into an original, if no longer viable, metaphysical sys-
Ernst Kurth and Analysis of Chromatic Music 75
tem, that they are supported by an unparalleled knowledge of
late nineteenth-century repertoire, and even the very fact that
they proceed from an unstated assumption that there is musical
order and comprehensible structure in this literatureall are a
Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ at National University of Singapore on April 17, 2015
tribute to his intelligence and his intuition and a contribution to
our understanding of the period and its music.
Examples 2, 4, 5, and 6 are reprinted by permission from Ernst Kurth, Roman-
tische Harmonik, pp. 347, 132, 100-01, 352.