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Among Riemann's analyses of Beethoven's piano sonatas, one has come under particular criticism, and often serves as an example of the musicologist's insensitivity to music: the Sonata ‘quasi una fantasia’ in Eb major, Op. 27, no. 1. In this analysis, Riemann decided to rebar the first movement, almost in its entirety. On the face of it, there is of course something very blunt about this single-handed intrusion into the score. In fact, however, his decision to change the score is nothing but an expression of his ‘psychological turn’, and the changes that this initiated in Riemann's later musical thought. Riemann's meddling with the score may have roused the critics, since most analysts have traditionally taken the score as the starting point for their analytical observations, on the assumption that it forms the most manifest link to the composer's thought. Witness, for instance, Heinrich Schenker's deep involvement with manuscripts, which is also expressed in his meticulous editions (which are in stark contrast to Riemann's own Phrasierungsausgaben, his edition with phrasing annotations, where editorial fidelity became subservient to pedagogical concerns). In Five Graphic Analyses, for instance, Schenker noted that in the autograph of Bach's C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, the stems of the bass line in one bar point up rather than down. He interpreted that as justification – derived from no less a figure than Bach himself – for his decision to omit this bar from his analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the metaphor of musical logic, as discussed in the previous chapter, the metaphor of a syntax of music was prominently employed by Riemann to describe his idea of how music works. Again, its precise meaning and the interrelation between the two metaphors are anything but clear. It is noticeable that Riemann's early works are oriented by various aspects of language: after his dissertation, Musikalische Logik, he embarked on two projects entitled Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) and Musikalische Grammatik, though the latter manuscript remained unpublished and was destroyed when he could not find a publisher. In some ways, the early works would have appeared like a kind of ‘musicological trivium’, in which linguistic aspects of music are determined. The relation between logic and syntax is addressed in Musikalische Syntaxis: If one insists on drawing analogies, one could roughly compare the … simple [cadential] thesis with the sentence of the simple judgement in language. The subject would be the tonic and the predicate the confirmation through Quint-klänge, Terzklänge, etc. The relationship between language and logic that Riemann presents here is marked by a certain uneasiness: although he seems to be talking about language, the ‘simple judgement’ that he mentioned would suggest that he is primarily thinking about logic. Under this ambivalent notion it becomes impossible to tell whether the ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ which he defined in the sentence that follows are supposed to be logical or linguistic terms – or rather, Riemann appeared to underline that he considered the two to be indistinguishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]