Music biography is a literary genre consisting of ordered, written accounts of the lives of individuals who are involved in the creation, production, dissemination and reception of music, particularly the lives of composers and musicians but including also librettists, publishers, instrument makers, patrons, music lovers, scholars and writers. In the broadest view, biography is the life history of an individual: it therefore may be said to involve the totality of phenomena impinging upon or shaping the individual, every event participated in or generated by the individual's activities, as well as every aspect of the subject's mental and psychological processes and every product of his or her creativity. Music biography centres on the documentation and interpretation of events, influences and relationships in a life, but its legitimate field of inquiry extends to the biological and ancestral inheritance, the social and historical nexus, the musical tradition and the intellectual milieu. Thus, music biography is inextricably joined to disciplines such as history, mythology, music history, genealogy, sociology and psychology.
MAYNARD SOLOMON
The prehistory of music biography is to be found in folklore, myth and theology, with accounts of legendary musicians and musical deities such as Apollo, Dionysus and Orpheus, David and Jubal, Narada and Sarasvati, Odin, and Väinämöinen. From as early as the 10th century, compendia and lexica offered brief biographies of musicians, but music biography, having no Vasari, was delayed in its further development until approximately the early 18th century, when the genre developed as a component and offshoot of the burgeoning fields of musical lexicography and music history (Lenneberg, 1988). The proliferation of descriptive and taxonomical dictionaries and encyclopedias in every sphere of interest included separate dictionaries of music, both with and without biographies, and volumes wholly devoted to biography. Several notable examples of the latter are W.C. Printz, Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (1690/R), which contains concise biographical sketches of musicians, chronologically arranged; J.G. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, oder Musicalische Bibliothec (1732), a general dictionary with entries for 900 composers; Johann Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740), with 148 entries, including numerous contemporary autobiographies; G.O. Pitoni, unpublished biographical compendium of composers from 1000 to 1700 (c1725); J.-B. de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780), the third and fourth volumes of which contain a biographical dictionary of musicians, poets and writers on music; and J.A. Hiller, Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit, i (1784). The most influential 18th-century dictionary of music biography is E.L. Gerber's Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1790–92), revised as Neues historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1812–14), which served as precedent for such monumental biographical dictionaries as those of F.-J. Fétis (1835–44), Robert Eitner (1900–04) and Theodore Baker (1900). The 18th-century interest in music biography was also manifested in a variety of music journals and almanacs, such as F.W. Marpurg's Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (1754–78) and in periodicals, edited by such music journalists as C.F. Cramer, H.P. Bossler, J.F. Reichardt and J.F. Rochlitz, which fed a healthy public appetite for anecdotes, reminiscences and memoirs.
Leaving aside the occasional early example of autobiographies by musicians, such as those by Thomas Whythorne (c1576) and Lodovico Zacconi (1620), and the memoirs of such figures as Benvenuto Cellini and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who happened also to be musicians, the brief Berufsbiographien solicited for the pages of the 18th-century lexica and journals made autobiography a new sister-genre of music biography: significant examples are autobiographical accounts by J.J. Quantz, J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Franz Benda, Leopold Mozart and C.G. Neefe.
The age of music biography as a distinct literary genre opened towards the turn of the 19th century (but see John Mainwaring's stray Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, 1760), and by 1840 several of the enduring types of music biography were established. Many early biographies loosely combined the factual Berufsbiographie with personal memoirs, anecdotes and surveys of the music. Among these were Friedrich Schlichtegroll's obituary of Mozart (1793), F.X. Niemetschek's Mozart (1798), J.N. Forkel's Bach (1802), G.A. Griesinger's and A.C. Dies's books on Joseph Haydn (both 1810), G.J. Schinn and F.J. Otter's Michael Haydn (1808), F.-G. Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries's biographical notes about Beethoven (1838–45) and Anton Schindler's initial biography of Beethoven (1840). The earliest biographies to be based upon archival and historical research included Luigi Angeloni's Sopra la vita, le opere, ed il sapere di Guido d'Arezzo (1811), Giuseppe Baini's Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1828) and Carl von Winterfeld's Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (1834). A rough prototype of the documentary biography, with copious documentation and correspondence, was G.N. Nissen's Biographie W.A. Mozart's (1828).
Music autobiography and fictional music biography came into their own simultaneously with music biography. Musicians such as C.F.D. Schubart (1791), A.-E.-M. Grétry (1789, 1797) and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1801) wrote extended memoirs, inaugurating a vigorous genre that eventually came to include famous writings by Spohr (1860–61), Berlioz (1870), Wagner (1870–80) and Stravinsky (1935–6), among numerous others. Beginning with W.H. Wackenroder's ‘The Remarkable Musical Life of the Tone-Poet Joseph Berlinger’ (1797 [recte 1796]), Romantic writers wrote imaginative fictional accounts of musicians, most famously E.T.A. Hoffmann's ‘Ritter Gluck’ and ‘Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters musikalische Leiden’, establishing the narrative of the suffering and/or alienated musician that was later taken up in novels by Romain Rolland in Jean-Christophe (1904–12), Jakob Wassermann in Das Gänsemännchen (1915), Hermann Hesse in Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) and Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus (1947).
This period saw the high tide of music biography, in a series of monumental efforts to write definitive lives of the great composers: Otto Jahn, W.A. Mozart (1856–9, 2/1867); Friedrich Chrysander, G.F. Handel (1858–67); Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, Franz Schubert (1865); K.F.L. Nohl, Beethovens Leben (1864–77); A.W. Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben (1866–79); C.F. Pohl, Joseph Haydn (1875–1927); Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach (1873–80); and Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms (1904–14); plus noteworthy biographies of Chopin by Frederich Niecks (1888) and of Schumann by Joseph Wasielewski (1858), and significant monographs on Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn by George Grove in his Dictionary of Music and Musicians and of Mozart and Haydn in Constantin von Wurzbach's Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Österreich, 1750–1850. The great biographers of the period – whether musical amateurs like Jahn and Thayer or professional music editors like Chrysander, Pohl and Spitta – dedicated themselves to documentation of a single biographical subject. Led by Nohl and Marie Lipsius (La Mara), however, there also developed a class of prolific music biographers, writing a variety of accessible biographies for popular audiences. Additional testimony to the widespread interest in musical biography was the abundance of lives, reminiscences and personal memoirs of virtuosos, from Paganini and Liszt to such as Ole Bull, L.M. Gottschalk and Jenny Lind.
Music biography was increasingly in high repute during the later 19th century, except within the new discipline of musicology. Guido Adler's methodical taxonomy of ‘musical science’ (1885, 1919) acknowledged ‘Biographistik’ as one of the auxiliary fields of historical investigation, but left little room in practice for biography, either as a serious field of study or as an explanatory factor. Similarly, despite Hugo Riemann's recognition that music is an emanation of a composer's psychology (1908) and Hermann Abert's defence of biography (1919–20), biography in the first three quarters of the 20th century became peripheral to the concerns of the musicologist and the subject tended to fall outside the realm of musicological discourse. Its possible significance for musicology has been left virtually unexamined in systematic studies of musicology or music historiography in the 20th century; nor has there been an entry on the subject in any previous general encyclopedia of music. Partly, this may be seen as a reaction against the later-18th-century aesthetic of ‘expression’ and the 19th-century Romantic ‘cult of genius’, which had overemphasized the biographical factor in creativity and even advocated views of music as ‘autobiography in tones’; these presuppositions gave way in the 20th century to a wide variety of formalist, sociological and structuralist aesthetics which stressed the autonomy of the musical work or its place within a particular stylistic tradition or its essential derivation from historical or ideological factors.
Several major musicological projects involved the editing, revision and completion of leading biographies of the previous century (e.g. Pohl-Botstiber, Thayer-Deiters-Riemann, Thayer-Krehbiel and Thayer-Forbes, Jahn-Deiters and Jahn-Abert), leaving essentially intact their 19th-century theoretical premises and psychological assumptions. The biographical genre perhaps best suited to the age of ‘objective’ musicology became the documentary biography, originated by O.E. Deutsch in Franz Schubert: die Dokumente seines Lebens und Schaffens (1913–14) with further examples including Deutsch's documentary lives of Handel (1955) and Mozart (1961), Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel's Bach Reader (1945), Werner Neumann and H.-J. Schulze's Bach-Dokumente (1963–72), Jay Leyda's Musorgsky Reader (1947) and Kurt Blaukopf's documentary iconography of Mahler (1976). A profusion of special biographical dictionaries devoted to numerous sub-categories of music and musicians – e.g. by particular genre (jazz, folk, popular, theatre, opera), nationality, gender, ethnicity, instrument – attests the lexicographical and taxonomic preoccupations of recent times (see Duckles; see also Dictionaries and encyclopedias of music, §I). Other specialized forms of biographical documentation also flourished, including thematic catalogues, discographies, pictorial biographies and oral histories, the last ranging from Vivian Perlis's interviews of those who knew Ives (1974) to Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff's interviews with jazz musicians (1955). Musicology in effect largely withdrew from interpretative biography, leaving the field to non-academic biographers and music journalists, and to encyclopedia-style life-and-works overviews. It became a common practice in both popular and academic biography to preface a survey of the music with a biographical sketch or series of biographical essays: some landmark studies of composers are of this type, for example Paul Bekker's Beethoven (1911), Walter Riezler's Beethoven (1936), Alfred Einstein's Mozart: his Character, his Work (1945), several biographies by Karl Geiringer, and the volumes in such series as Dent's Master Musicians. Nevertheless, worthy full-length biographies in the 19th-century tradition continued to be written, such as C.S. Terry, Bach: a Biography (1928), Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (1933–47), Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950), Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: a Critical Biography (1958), Paul Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (1966) and H.C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (1976–80), the last combining documentary biography with a chronological critical survey of the music. For the most part, such biographies are untouched by 20th-century theories of creativity, psychology or genetic causation.
In the later 20th century, a heightened interest in biography as a narrative form of literature combined with a general weakening of the authority of traditional belief systems – including musicology – revived the willingness to test biography as an explanatory tool in the study of creativity. Biographers have undertaken to investigate the achievements of women and other under-reported groups in music history and to explore the implications of sexual orientation upon creativity. Studies of musicians and composers by psychoanalytically orientated biographers have placed issues of fantasy, familial conflict and unconscious sources of creativity on the biographer's agenda. Similarly, T.W. Adorno's idiosyncratic writings on Mahler, Berg, Wagner and Bach have encouraged prospects for biographies that apply a synthesis of psychoanalysis and critical theory. Musicology, too, had by this time achieved an ambivalent reconciliation with biography, resulting in biographies too numerous to mention individually marked by a high degree of accuracy and scholarly acumen. Proponents of biography see its resurgence in terms of a renewed emphasis on the individual, as part of a search for meaning and as embodying a need to find exemplary models. But the revival of biographical modes of exploration has not gone unchallenged, with some critics concerned about tendencies that would impose on the life a fairly restrictive array of mythic, narrative or other extramusical structures.
It has long been recognized that the accumulation and analysis of biographical data – performances, correspondence, autographs, sketches, publications – are crucial in dealing with matters of chronology, the authenticity of compositional sources, personal motivations, creative intentions, patronage, ideology and reception. And it is unquestioned that the biographer's legitimate subject matter includes the nature of creativity, documentation of the minutiae of daily life, the historical impact of individual creativity and trans-historical patterns of behaviour and belief. In the end, the primary area of dispute about the value of biography appears to centre on the vexed question of how – or whether – the pathways between life and art can be mapped, whether a ‘personal’ factor in creativity can be identified. The ancient Platonic and Plotinian archetypes, viewing the poet now as a mirror of nature and again as an active agent capable of shaping reality, thus continue to play themselves out in shifting conceptions of the nature of musical art and biography.
Baker8
EitnerQ
FétisB
GerberL
La BordeE
WaltherML
W.C. Printz: Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst (Dresden, 1690/R)
G.O. Pitoni: Notitia de contrapuntisti e de compositori di musica (MS, I-Rvat C.G. I/1–2, c1725); ed. C. Ruini (Florence, 1988)
J. Mattheson: Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (Hamburg, 1740); ed. M. Schneider (Berlin, 1910/R)
F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1754–78/R)
J.A. Hiller: Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit, i (Leipzig, 1784)
G. Adler: ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, VMw, i (1885), 5–20
H. Riemann: Grundriss der Musikwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1908, 4/1928)
O. Rank: Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Leipzig, 1909, 2/1922; Eng. trans., 1914)
H. Kretzschmar: ‘Populäre Musikerbiographien’, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik und anderes aus den Grenzboten, i (Leipzig, 1910), 433–43
A. Einstein, ed.: Lebensläufe deutscher Musiker von ihnen selbst erzählt, i: Johann Adam Hiller; ii: Christian Gottlob Neefe; iii: Adalbert Gyrowetz (Leipzig, 1915)
G. Adler: Methode der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1919)
H. Abert: ‘Über Aufgaben und Ziele der musikalischen Biographie’, AMw, ii (1919–20), 417–33; repr. in H. Abert, Gesammelte Schriften und Vorträge, ed. F. Blume (Halle, 1929/R), 562–88
A. Einstein: ‘Die deutsche Musiker-Autobiographie’, JbMP 1921, 51–65
E. Panofsky: Idea: ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der ‘alteren Kunsttheorie’ (Leipzig, 1924; Eng. trans. as Idea: a Concept in Art Theory,1968)
E. Kris and O. Kurz: Die Legende vom Künstler: ein historischer Versuch (Vienna, 1934; enlarged, Eng. trans., as Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: a Historical Experiment, 1979)
W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939, 2/1962)
W. Kahl: Selbstbiographien deutscher Musiker des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Cologne and Krefeld, 1948/R)
P. Nettl: Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951/R)
W. Vetter: ‘Gedanken zur musikalischen Biographie’, Mf, xii (1959), 132–42
J.M. Osborne, ed.: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961)
V. Duckles: Music Reference and Research Materials: an Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1964, 3/1974)
C. Dahlhaus: Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Cologne, 1967; Eng. trans., 1983, as Foundations of Music History), 19–26, 76–7
R.B. Slocum: Biographical Dictionaries and Related Works (Detroit, 1967, suppl. 1972)
Komponisten, auf Werk und Leben befragt: Weimar 1981
M. Solomon: ‘Thoughts on Biography’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 268–76; repr. in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 101–15
H. Lenneberg: Witnesses and Scholars: Studies in Musical Biography (New York, 1988)