Adolf Marx

Friedrich Heinrich Adolf Bernhard Marx was a German musicologist, music educator, and composer, born on May 15, 1795, in Halle into a Jewish family as the son of a physician. He originally studied law in his hometown while simultaneously taking composition lessons from Daniel Gottlob Türk. In 1819 he was baptized, having previously borne the name Samuel Moses Marx. Beginning in 1821 he lived in Berlin, where he became increasingly involved in the city’s intellectual and musical life.

In 1825 the publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger appointed Marx as editor of the newly founded Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. His sharply intellectual critical articles, often directed against the Berlin musical establishment led by Carl Friedrich Zelter, were admired by Beethoven. During the 1820s and 1830s Marx developed a close friendship with Felix Mendelssohn and significantly influenced him; contemporaries noted that Mendelssohn’s revision of the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream was shaped by Marx’s ideas. In 1829 Marx persuaded Schlesinger to publish Bach’s St Matthew Passion, newly rediscovered by Mendelssohn. In 1830 Mendelssohn recommended him for a newly created professorship of music at the University of Berlin.

Marx and Mendelssohn even planned to exchange libretti for oratorios, though the collaboration later soured. Mendelssohn made substantial changes to Marx’s libretto for the oratorio St Paul, and when Marx asked him to perform his own oratorio Moses, Mendelssohn refused, judging the music inadequate. Deeply angered, Marx destroyed all the letters he had received from Mendelssohn. His oratorio Moses was eventually performed only in 1853 through the efforts of Franz Liszt.

Marx’s greatest contribution to music was as a pedagogue and theorist. In 1826 he published the pedagogical work Kunst des Gesangs, and the following year received a doctorate from the University of Marburg for his writings. He became one of the most influential theorists of the nineteenth century, especially through his four-volume treatise Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1837–1847), which developed what has been described as perhaps the most advanced and influential doctrine of musical form of the century. His theory of song forms, presented in this treatise, became particularly well known, though Marx himself did not apply the concept of “song form” to instrumental music.

In addition to theoretical works, Marx wrote a major monograph on Beethoven, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1859), and a memoir, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (1865). In 1850 he co-founded the Stern Conservatory in Berlin together with Theodor Kullak and Julius Stern and remained one of its leaders until 1857. He died in Berlin on May 17, 1866, leaving a legacy as one of the key figures in nineteenth-century German musical thought.

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