Julius Maier

Julius Joseph Maier (29 December 1821 – 21 November 1889) was a German musicologist and music educator. He was born in Freiburg and died in Munich.

He initially studied law in Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Karlsruhe, receiving a law degree in 1846. He then entered government service as a secretary in the Ministry of the Interior of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

Throughout this period Maier maintained a strong commitment to music. In 1845 he published a small collection of choral arrangements of early church vocal music, dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn; it included works by Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Josquin des Prez, and others.

In 1849 he left civil service and went to Leipzig to study counterpoint with Moritz Hauptmann. The period of study lasted less than a year, since Maier’s preparation was already advanced, and in 1850 he began teaching theory and counterpoint at the Munich Academy of Music, where his students included Joseph Rheinberger.

After seven years of teaching, from 1857 Maier served for 30 years as curator of the music department of the court library of the Kingdom of Bavaria. He produced the first catalogue of the library’s musical manuscripts, published as Die musikalischen Handschriften der K. Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München (1879).

Maier also pursued research on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and compiled the collection Auswahl englischer Madrigale (Selected English Madrigals).

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