Julius August Philipp Spitta (27 December 1841 – 13 April 1894) was a Germanmusic historian andmusicologist best known forhis 1873 biography ofJohann Sebastian Bach.
He was born inWechold [de], nearHoya, and his father, also calledPhilipp Spitta, was atheologian and wrote theProtestant collection ofhymns entitledPsalter und Harfe. As a child, the younger Spitta learnt the piano,pipe organ, andmusical composition. He studiedtheology andclassicalphilology at theUniversity of Göttingen from 1860, graduating in 1864 with aPh.D. for adissertation onTacitus (Der Satzbau bei Tacitus, 1866). While at university, he composed, wrote a biography ofRobert Schumann, and became friends withJohannes Brahms. He became a teacher ofAncient Greek andLatin language in, successively,Reval,Sondershausen, andLeipzig, while pursuing his interest in and lecturing on music history in general and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.
His Bach study began to be published in 1873, and was followed by an appointment as professor of music history at theUniversity of Berlin in 1875, and a further appointment as administrative director of theBerlin Hochschule für Musik, at which posts he remained for the rest of his life. The students he taught includeOskar Fleischer,Max Friedlaender,Carl Krebs,Max Seiffert,Agnes Tschetschulin,Emil Vogel,Peter Wagner,Johannes Wolf, andArthur Prüfer. He founded one of the first scholarly music periodicals, theVierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, withFriedrich Chrysander andGuido Adler in 1885, and also had an important role in the publication of theDenkmäler deutscher Tonkunst.
He left a strong influence on the new fields ofhistorical criticism andmusicology; his work spanned periods of music history from the earlyMiddle Ages to his own time, and embraced research, teaching, writing, and editing of musical editions to a very rigorous degree, including the use of source-critical studies. He was influenced byneo-Kantian philosophy. In his Bach biography, he wrote the first major study of Germanchoral andkeyboard music of the 17th century (earlybaroque).
Most of his papers are divided between the library of theBerlin Hochschule für Musik, theStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and the library of theUniversity of Łódź. He contributed many scholarly articles to periodicals, and wrote articles onSchumann,Spontini, andWeber forGrove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1886.
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