Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg

(b Seehof, nr Wendemark, Brandenburg, 21 Nov 1718; d Berlin, 22 May 1795). German critic, journalist, theorist and composer.

Gerber claimed that Marpurg had told him that he lived in Paris around 1746; Carl Spazier confirmed this, adding that Marpurg was friendly with Voltaire, D'Alembert and others when he was secretary to a ‘General Bodenburg’. This is generally assumed to refer to Generallieutenant Friedrich Rudolph Graf von Rothenburg, a favourite of Frederick the Great and Prussian emissary to Paris in 1744–5, and the dedicatee of Marpurg's Der critische Musicus an der Spree (1749–50).

From 1749 to 1763 Marpurg devoted himself almost exclusively to writing and editing books and periodicals about music and to composing and editing lieder and works for keyboard. In 1752, at the request of the heirs of J.S. Bach, he wrote a notable preface for a new edition of Die Kunst der Fuge. In 1755 J.G.I. Breitkopf asked him to review the first work printed with Breitkopf's improved system of movable type, and subsequently published many of his works. Their correspondence shows that this was a period of severe financial difficulties for Marpurg, as do various letters from Kirnberger to Forkel. Through Kirnberger's efforts Marpurg obtained a position in the Prussian state lottery in 1763; in 1766 he was appointed director, a post he held until the end of his life. Though there is evidence that he continued to review music and engage in other musical activities after 1763, very little appeared with his signature in his later years.

Marpurg's three periodicals, Der critische Musicus an der Spree (1749–50), Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (1754–62, 1778) and Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (1760–64), were not only edited but also largely written by him. The intention of the first was to present discussions of the important musical topics of the day, such as the relative merits of French, Italian and German music and performance. Most of these were directed at the middle-class amateur and included several delightful satires on bourgeois musical attitudes. Marpurg also gave his readers a course in elementary music theory and translations of French essays in musical aesthetics such as Grandval's Essai sur le bon goust en musique (1732). The Historisch-kritische Beyträge were more professional in style and content than the Critischer Musicus, including reviews of books about music, short biographies of important musicians, reports on musical inventions and discussions of theoretical questions; an entire issue was devoted to tuning and temperament (1778). The last periodical, the Kritische Briefe, employed the format of a collection of letters composed on behalf of an imaginary society very much like that devised by Addison and Steele for their Spectator. The letters were addressed to various musicians and most were signed with pseudonyms, all of which seem to have represented Marpurg. The contents are similar to those of the Historisch-kritische Beyträge but also include extended polemics with Kirnberger about fugue and with Georg Andreas Sorge over the merits of Rameau's theories, a lengthy series of articles about the composition of recitative, and 59 short musical compositions by contemporaries. In 1786 Marpurg published his Legende einiger Musikheiligen consisting mainly of anecdotes about music and musicians including such contemporaries as Joseph Haydn and the Abbé Vogler. The collection is an imitation of the popular musical almanacs of Forkel and Junker.

At the beginning of his career as a music journalist Marpurg advocated the conventional view that the proper function of art was to move the audience (affective aesthetics) through the imitation of nature. Like most of his German contemporaries he derived his ideas from the works of the early 18th-century French writers on music, including Du Bos, Batteux and Bollioud-Mermet. For example, he doubted the value of purely instrumental music. In time his attitude changed; he accepted and praised modern instrumental music and the focus of his critical concern shifted from the audience to the work itself and even to the composer’s relation to the work in question. This change in critical approach is representative of a general change in the 1760s and 1770s in Germany.

Marpurg's didactic works cover keyboard performance, thoroughbass and composition. They are well organized and well written, but neither forward-looking nor original (in certain cases he admitted his debt to others). Of his theoretical treatises, the Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753–4) is the encyclopedic and authoritative discussion of fugal practice in late Baroque music. It is systematic in the tradition of Fux, though at the same time up to date in describing and discussing the tonal counterpoint of J.S. Bach, and gathers examples from works by composers from Frescobaldi to Telemann. The many quotations from Bach's music and the numerous references to him as the supreme master of counterpoint and fugue in the preface contribute to the work's historical significance. Marpurg's descriptions of small- and large-scale contrapuntal and fugal procedures, based largely on Bach's works, are forerunners of modern textbook descriptions of the classical fugue. Yet in its own day the subject of the Abhandlung was considered old-fashioned: in the preface Marpurg adopted a defensive tone, pleading that fugal technique was as necessary to the galant style as it had been to the strict, and the book underwent only one German edition and one in French (his own translation) in his lifetime. The re-publication of the work several times during the first half of the 19th century coincided with the introduction of the music of J.S. Bach to the general public by Zelter, Mendelssohn and their followers.

Marpurg's translation (1757) of D'Alembert's Elémens de musique was largely responsible for the propagation of Rameau's theories in Germany. Yet his knowledge of these ideas was defective, leaving him at a disadvantage in his controversies over them with Kirnberger and Sorge. Similarly, Marpurg's knowledge of music history was little better than that of most of his contemporaries, making his efforts in that area of little interest. But his recognition of the importance of original sources is demonstrated by his plea to the readers of his periodicals to assist Martin Gerbert in locating and describing extant medieval manuscripts.

Marpurg's compositions consist largely of strophic songs of the kind composed in north Germany in the mid-18th century. He was very active as a compiler and editor of such songs and of keyboard works suited to amateur performers. Most of his surviving compositions appear in these collections; they are competent but not outstanding. In addition he published a set of six sonatas for keyboard (c1755), a collection of fugues (1777) and two collections of chorale preludes. The sonatas are similar to those composed by C.P.E. Bach in the 1740s, the fugues are correct in detail and plan but uninteresting, and the chorale preludes are mostly routine cantus firmus treatments.