When the musicologist Wolfgang Osthoff began his work at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in 1968, he quickly came into contact with Bertold Hummel in his role as head of the Studio for New Music. Osthoff often took over the musicological underpinning of the concerts on offer, and also arranged for his friends Luigi Dallapiccola, Kurt Hessenberg and Gerhard Frommel to be invited to portrait concerts. The personal relationship between Osthoff and Hummel was based on sympathy and similar ideas about the quality of music. On Wolfgang Osthoff's 60th birthday, Bertold Hummel dedicated the piano song "Herbsttag" (Autumn Day) after R.M. Rilke to the poetry enthusiast. We have Osthoff to thank for two important works on Hummel's song oeuvre:

Wolfgang Osthoff: Zu den Liedern Bertold Hummels

Wolfgang Osthoff: Bertold Hummel's last song cycle "Kopflos"

Wolfgang Osthoff

On 29 July 2008, one of the most important musicologists of our time, Prof. Dr.Dr.h.c. Wolfgang Osthoff died in Würzburg at the age of 81.

He was particularly associated with the journal Vox Humana. For example, he described Bertold Hummel's song compositions in Vol. 1, Issue 2, Nov. 2005 and in the last issue (Vol. 4, Issue 1, June 2008) he provided the Schubert melody "Liebliches Kind" with a piano accompaniment added by him for practical use for the first publication. With the scholarly commentary he wrote in the last week of his life and minor corrections, it is once again included in this edition.

He was practically born into the musicological profession. His father Helmuth Osthoff (1896-1983) worked as a musicologist at Berlin and Frankfurt University. His research focussed on vocal music of the 15th and 16th centuries. Wolfgang Osthoff began his studies with him. At Heidelberg University, he then became a student of Thrasybulos Georgiades (Schubert: Musik und Lyrik, 1979), whom he followed to Munich and later became his assistant at the university there. Studies in philosophy (including with Hans-Georg Gadamer) and Medieval Latin enabled him to understand music in a comprehensive context. His two-year study visit to Italy cemented his love of Italian music. For a quarter of a century, he was in charge of musicology at the German Study Centre in Venice. From 1968 to 1995, he held the Chair of Musicology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Even after his retirement, he remained available to the institute. He took his last doctoral examination in July 2008.

The connections between music and language occupied him throughout his life. In the series of his countless publications, the musicological illumination of vocal works plays a special role. Monteverdi and Verdi were among his main areas of research. Musical settings of the works of J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Stefan George were an important subject area. He documented his commitment to the work of Hans Pfitzner not only in his role as a member of the executive committee of the Pfitzner Society, but also in an Urtext edition of the Eichendorff cantata "Von deutscher Seele". For singers, the titles of these essays alone should arouse deeper interest: The two versions of Verdi's Macbeth; Mozart's cavatinas and their tradition; Monteverdi finds; The Credo of the Mass in B minor: Italian models and inspiration; Richard Wagner's Buddha project Die Sieger. His ideational and structural traces in the Ring and Parsifal; Stefan George and "Les deux Musiques" - sound and musical poetry in harmony and conflict; Comicità alla turca, musica classica, opera nazionale - Osservazioni sulla Entführung aus dem Serail; Poetic and musical gestures in Pfitzner's songs; The "parti serie" in the ensembles of Mozart's opera buffa "Don Giovanni"; Schiller and music; The late dramatic work of Claudio Monteverdi; "Das Todtenhemdchen" - traces of a lost Schubert song?Il personaggio di Azucena e l'unità drammatico-musicale de "Il trovatore"; Pfitzner and Puccini; Verdi and German literature. The edition of the last volume of the songs of his friend Gerhard Frommel was the work that occupied him on the day before his death.

Wolfgang Osthoff was a music enthusiast. Not a day went by without him thinking about musical phenomena in compositions. He enjoyed talking about them, especially when his dialogue partners did not share his opinion. Time and again, he encouraged his students to learn music for themselves on their instruments and to attend concerts and opera performances. He himself always set a good example and attended countless musical events, usually with a score in his hand and always interested in the music itself. Successful performances made him happy. In his persistent search for the composer's original intentions, he could not take today's director's theatre seriously. Any kind of social mumbo-jumbo was deeply repugnant to him. Round birthdays could only ever be celebrated in an official setting retrospectively and then only disguised as a "book presentation with music" in order to gain his approval. His uncompromising attitude in many things had something likeable about it, because it was paired with self-irony and a deeply humane way of thinking. A comprehensive collection of texts by Wolfgang Osthoff entitled "Music from a free spirit in the twentieth century" was published to mark his 80th birthday. Wolfgang Osthoff repeatedly sought this free spirit in music and found it in places where one might not have expected it. - An inspiration for us musicians to rethink the reception of the same old repertoire and to go in search of it?

Martin Hummel (in the magazine "Vox humana", October 2008)

Bibliography of all writings by Wolfgang Osthoff