Sabine Feisst

Sept. 1, 2016 was the official publication date of Sabine Feisst’s “Schoenberg’s Early Correspondence 1891– May 1907.” Feisst, professor of musicology in the School of Music, published the volume in collaboration with Ethan Haimo, professor of music at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Praised as a “work of exceptional scholarship which vividly illuminates Schoenberg’s formative years through primary documents and insightful commentary,” this 450-page book, part of Oxford University Press’s nine-volume set “Schoenberg in Words,” contains over 300 little known letters from and to Schoenberg, transcribed from Sütterlinschrift, a historical form of German handwriting, translated into English and backed with biographical and historical background information. 

This is the second published volume of “Schoenberg in Words,” which comprises four volumes with Schoenberg’s correspondence as well as five volumes containing Schoenberg’s program notes, musical analyses, writings on form, counterpoint and performance, all in English translation and with ample annotation. Feisst developed this set together with Severine Neff, Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; as general editors, they selected the overall content of the set and recruited authors from an international group of Schoenberg scholars  for each individual volume. “Schoenberg’s Early Correspondence” follows the April 2016 release of J. Daniel Jenkins’s “Schoenberg’s Program Notes and Musical Analyses” and precedes the October 2016 release of Gordon Root’s “Schoenberg’s Models for Beginners in Composition.”