Work
Besides several early written travel sketches, under her alias "La Mara", Marie published a lot of musician biographies, concerning dead as well as contemporaries of hers, which, beginning from 1867, first were printed in the Westermanns Monatshefte before being edited in the then popular series Musikalische Studienköpfe (musical study portraits) by the house Breitkopf & Härtel. Her well-nuanced, empathetically written portraits often were inspired by her personal acquaintance to many of whom she described and also may be characterized as authentic testimonies of a female contemporary involved in the German music society of her epoch - a character in which their importance for today music history mostly consists.
Marie Lipsius was the first musicologist to conduct systematic research to identify Beethoven's mysterious "Immortal Beloved": In 1909, she published Therese Brunsvik's Memoirs, and she interpreted her glowing admiration of the composer as a secret love. This was revised after the World War I, when letters and other documents were discovered in the Brunsvik estate, which pointed to Therese's sister Josephine Brunsvik.
A part from her original writings, Marie also took care of an edition of the correspondence of Franz Liszt. In 1917, her autobiography was published.
Read more about this topic: Ida Marie Lipsius
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