Of all Schenker’s pupils and disciples, none was as important for the dissemination of his teachings as Hans Weisse. Weisse seems to be at the forefront of every initiative to promote his teacher’s work, whether as a private tutor, a public lecturer, or an ambassador of music theory. It was Weisse who created a little seminar in analysis at his home in the late 1920s, which Schenker himself was later to take over. He introduced American musicians to Schenker’s approach to musical structure and gave the first public lectures in Schenkerian theory to the German and Austrian music-pedagogical establishment in the winter of 1930–31. His projected Die Tonkunst, a monthly periodical dedicated to Schenkerian concepts but authored mainly by Schenker’s pupils, never got off the ground; nonetheless it provided the model for Der Dreiklang of 1937–38, edited by Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer, a precursor of the Music Forum. And, famously, he was offered and accepted a teaching post at the David Mannes School of Music in New York (and, later, at Columbia University), and so planted the seeds of Schenkerism in America.

The correspondence shows that Weisse had a facility for engaging with people, something which his teacher could only have envied. He was on friendly terms with Wilhelm Furtwängler, and sometimes escorted the conductor to the theorist’s apartment. He had enormous success in raising money and was able to keep Schenker from relying entirely on the patronage of Anthony van Hoboken in later years: it was as a result of Weisse’s intercession that Furtwängler offered 3,000 marks toward the costs of printing the “Eroica” Symphony analysis, i.e. Masterwork 3; and this was soon followed by a second sizeable donation, from the husband of one of Weisse’s piano pupils. He made every effort to ensure that the early success of Schenkerian theory in America brought some financial reward to its originator; and, as late as 1935, he successfully implemented a scheme whereby many of his American pupils contributed to a kind of pension fund for Schenker’s widow.

The ease with which Weisse made friends is reflected in a number of his earlier letters to Schenker.