Witnesses, Scholars, and Would-Be Scholars. Musical Biography at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Nikolaus von Nissen’s Mozart stands at the apex of the old type of biography, standard except for Forkel, a mixture of anecdote, eye-witness testimony, selective documentation, and rather crude attempts to list a composer’s works. Both Raphael Georg Kiesewetter and Francois Joseph Fetis praised Angeloni’s biography but damned his musical scholarship. Fetis’ article summarized all the contributions Guido had not made, while Kiesewetter tried to correct attributions and assign them to the right theorists. Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s biography of Johann Sebastian Bach is almost the counterpart of Angeloni. Such collective biographies as Hiller’s or Gerber’s contain increasingly intelligent commentary about music, and the journals of the period are more and more commonly inclined toward musical criticism. While Mainwaring had been unembarrassed in assigning the crassest motives to Handel, we have entered new territory with Forkel, who, in that respect, too, set the tone for several generations of biographers.