Moritz Hauptmann - Literary Work

Literary Work

He was a founding member and editor of the Bach Gesellschaft edition of the compete works of Bach, where he edited the first two volumes of church cantatas and the Lutheran Masses.

His musical philosophy embodied in his book Die Natur der Harmonik und Metrik (The Nature of Harmony and Meter, 1853), in which he attempted a philosophic explanation of musical form. His theory is described as "Hegelian" and he emphasized concepts of unity, opposition, and reunion, which he finds in chords, scales, key relationships, and meter. He conceived of minor and major triads as opposite. This theory influenced "harmonic dualists" including Hugo Riemann. He also advocated just intonation and considered enharmonic progressions unnatural. In this sense, he could be considered a conservative in relation to the compositional trends of his time. He displayed a taste for classical proportion, formal order, metrical clarity, and tonal logic. Unlike the Romantic trends of continuous legato, he considered any "metrical first" (i.e. downbeat - implied or actual) to be automatically accented.