Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg
Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg was a German music critic, music theorist and composer. Described as "one of Germany's leading midcentury music critics," he was friendly and active with many figures of the Enlightenment.
Life
Little is known of Marpurg's early life. According to various sources, he studied "philosophy" and music. It is clear that he enjoyed a strong education and was friendly with various leading figures of the Enlightenment, including Winckelmann and Lessing. In 1746, he travelled to Paris as the secretary for a General named either Rothenberg or Bodenberg. There, he became acquainted with intellectuals including the writer and philosopher Voltaire, the mathematician d'Alembert and the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.After 1746, he returned to Berlin where he was more or less independent. Marpurg's offer to write exclusively for Breitkopf & Härtel was declined by the firm in 1757. In 1760, he received an appointment to the Royal Prussian Lotteries, whose director he became in 1763, receiving the title of War Councillor. His son, Johann Friedrich Marpurg, who later became a celebrated violinist, was born in 1766.
Marpurg's quarrelsome disposition and his enthusiasm for public polemics made him many enemies. Contemporaries also described him, however, as courteous and open-hearted.
Marpurg is most likely at the source of a two-centuries misunderstanding that J. S. Bach would have been using the equal temperament for the performance of "Das Wohltemperirte Clavier", because of his publication "Versuch über die musikalische Temperatur", 1776. This misunderstanding was only much later first challenged by Robert Holford Bosanquet in "An Elementary Treatise on Musical Intervals and Temperament" 1876, pp. 29–30, but this position did not acquire fame.
The above position of Bosanquet, that a distinction should be made between "well temperament" and "equal temperament" was rediscovered by H. Kelletat, and thoroughly defended and analysed historically in "Zur musikalischen Temperatur", 1960, especially p. 32. Thanks to this publication by H. Kelletat, almost all musicologists subscribe to this distinction nowadays.
Works
Marpurg published the bulk of his writings on music between 1750 and 1763. After he had attained his lottery position in 1763, he penned two works on this topic but continued to write on wider areas of music.One of the first works of Marpurg was his tract on the Fugue which is considered one of the oldest sources for the performance practice of J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue. His Handbuch bey dem Generalbasse und der Composition and the translation of d'Alembert's Elémens de musique stand at the beginning of Rameau's reception in German harmonic theory. Other works treat questions of instrumental performance, vocal music, music history and mathematical music theory. His journal projects continued to promote the institution of German music criticism in the wake of Mattheson and Scheibe; his Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst contains significant contributions to the theory of meter, the esthetics of the ode and other topics of current interest. His manuscript work on the ancient water organ remained unfinished.
The scope and unprecedented clarity of Marpurg's writings on music made him the leading German music theorist of the late eighteenth century; he and his rivals Kirnberger and Schulz made up a distinct "Berlin School" of music criticism and theory.