Carl Friedrich Weitzmann (Aug. 10 1808-Nov. 7 1880) was a German music theorist and musician.
Weitzmann was born in Berlin and first studied violin in the 1820s with Carl Henning and Bernhard Klein. From 1827 to 1832 he studied composition in Kassel with Louis Spohr and Moritz Hauptmann. In 1832 he founded a Liedertafel (a peculiarly German type of male singing society) in Riga (now in Lithuania) with Heinrich Dorn. In Revel (now Tallinn, Estonia), he became music director of the opera where he composed three operas. From 1836 he began a ten-year association with the Saint Petersburg court orchestra. At this time he began to collect music books and folksongs. He toured in Lappland and Finland (then part of the Russian empire) and performed with orchestras in Paris and London. He returned to Berlin in 1848 to research music history and theory. He took a teaching position with the Stern Conservatory (now part of the Berlin University of the Arts) in 1857.
Weitzmann published his first major theoretical work Der übermässige Dreiklang (the augmented triad) in 1853. He suggested a minor triad was merely an inversion of a major triad and both are generated by a common fundamental tone in the middle. This had been only a passing observation by the earlier theorist Moritz Hauptmann. Composer Franz Liszt was especially influenced by Weitzmann's work; therefore, Weitzman is now associated with the "Music of the Future." (a generic term for composers following Lizst, Wagner, Berlioz, and Bruckner). Weitzmann's theories accounted for the increasingly chromatic music of the time, and Lizst drew upon them in his analysis of own Faust Symphony – a work saturated with augmented triads.
Weitzmann later extended his theories to scales, noting how a descending minor scale starting from the fifth degree is an inversion of an ascending major scale. Because his theories relate major and minor, it is called a "dualist" explanation. Later dualist theorists include Arthur von Oettingen and the early work of Hugo Riemann.
Weitzmann differed from most theorists in his ideas of tuning and temperament. Most theorists viewed equal temperament as a compromise or a necessary evil. Weitzmann viewed it positively. He looked for acoustical properties of 12-note equal temperament, presumed enharmonic equivalence, and de-emphaisized traditional rules of voice leading and treatment of dissonance leading to a theory where any chord can follow another chord.
His most lasting contribution to music theory (researched by contemporary American theorist Richard Cohn) concerns chord relations. Traditionally, a C-major triad was thought to be related most closely to a G-major triad through the circle of fifths and traditional tonic-dominant (V-I) resolution. Weitzmann suggested a-minor and e-minor triads were more closely related to C-major because they shared two common notes. This theory elegantly accounted for third relation and common tone progressions in earlier music of Schubert and Beethoven, and it paved the way for later chromatic composers who explored cthe compositional possibilities of tonal regions related by symmetrical augmented triads and diminished seventh chords.