Philipp Spitta - Biography

Biography

He was born in Wechold, near Hoya, and his father, also called Philipp Spitta, was a theologian and wrote the Protestant collection of hymns entitled Psalter und Harfe. As a child, the younger Spitta learnt the piano, organ, and composition. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1860, graduating in 1864 with a Ph.D. for a dissertation on Tacitus (Der Satzbau bei Tacitus, 1866). While at university, he composed, wrote a biography of Robert Schumann, and became friends with Johannes Brahms. He became a teacher of Greek and Latin in, successively, Reval, Sondershausen, and Leipzig, while pursuing his interest in and lecturing on music history in general and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.

His Bach study began to be published in 1873, and was followed by an appointment as professor of music history at the University of Berlin in 1875, and a further appointment as administrative director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, at which posts he remained for the rest of his life. The students he taught include Oskar Fleischer, Max Friedlaender, Carl Krebs, Max Seiffert, Emil Vogel, Peter Wagner, and Johannes Wolf. He founded one of the first scholarly music periodicals, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, with Friedrich Chrysander and Guido Adler in 1885, and also had an important role in the publication of the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst.