Max Friedlaender (musicologist)

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Max Friedlaender (October 12, 1852, Brieg/Brzeg, Silesia - May 2, 1934, Berlin) was a German bass concert-singer, writer on music and musicologist (Musikwissenschaftler).

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[edit] Life

He was a pupil of Manuel Garcia (London) and Julius Stockhausen (Frankfort-on-the-Main), and made his début at the London Monday Popular Concerts (St James's Hall) in 1880. From 1881 to 1883 he lived and worked at Frankfort; thereafter his home was in Berlin, where he became interested in historical studies. In 1887 he received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rostock, his dissertation being Beiträge zu einer Biographie Franz Schuberts (Notes for a Biography of Franz Schubert) (published Berlin 1887). He established himself as a formally approved Berlin University teacher in Music in 1894.

In 1903 followed Friedlaender's nomination as extraordinary Professor, in 1908 to the Privy Council and in 1918 as formal Honorary Professor. In 1911 he went as 'preparative professor' to the USA and there he became Honorary Doctor of Harvard University at Cambridge, Massachusetts. (According to Eaglefield-Hull, this LL.D. was at Madison, Wisconsin.) After Rochus von Liliencron's death he became President of the Editorial Commission for the Book of National Songs for Men's Choirs proposed by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1906). During the 1920s he was closely involved, together with Johann Bolte (the colleague of Axel Olrik and Kaarle Krohn), and John Meier, in the formation of the Deutscher Volksliedarchiv (German Folk-song Archive), a fact darkly ironical because Friedlaender was Jewish, but the archive soon afterwards became an important asset of the antisemitic National Socialist state.

[edit] Works

A whole series of previously unpublished songs of Schubert were first brought to light by Friedlaender. He edited above all new editions (Peters collections) of the songs of Franz Schubert (1884-1887), Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn and Carl Loewe and the Scottish songs of Ludwig van Beethoven. These included seven volumes of Schubert for Peters. Friedlaender published a Choral Manual; he critically revised the Collection of hitherto unpublished folk songs; collaborated on Stockhausen's Method of Singing; and wrote a great number of publications on the more recent art of Song, notably in the Goethe Annual, the Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, and independently. His chief work is the two-volume study of German song in the 18th century (Cotta, Stuttgart 1902).

[edit] Literary works

  • 1885: 100 Deutsche Volkslieder (100 German folk songs)
  • "Gluck's Klopstocksche Oden" (1886);
  • "Ein Hundert Deutsche Volkslieder" (1886);
  • 1887: Beiträge zur Biographie Franz Schuberts;
  • "Beethoven's Schottische Lieder" (1889);
  • "Chorschule" (1891);
  • "Wiegenlieder" (1894);
  • "Gesänge von Beethoven" (1896);
  • "Goethe's Gedichte in der Musik" (1896);
  • "Haydn's Canons" (1899);
  • "Beethoven's Klavier-Rondo" (1900);
  • 1902: Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (The German song in the 18th Century)

[edit] References

  • This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia article "Friedlaender Max" by Isidore Singer & Newell Dunbar, a publication now in the public domain.
  • Eaglefield-Hull (Ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians (Dent, London 1924).
  • Hans Joachim Moser: Friedländer, Max. In: NDB Bd. 5, S. 455
  • P. V. Bohlman, Landscape - Region - Nation - Reich; German Folk Song in the nexus of National Identity, in Celia Applegate (Ed.), Music and German National Identity (University of Chicago, 2002).

[edit] External links


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