ABSTRACT
Johann Mattheson is almost unique among pre-nineteenth-century composers and musicians in that he left for posterity a detailed autobiography in the form of the third-person entry on ‘Mattheson’ in his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte.1 That entry was to become the source of all modern biographies of the renowned theorist/composer, the best and most detailed of which are those by Beekman Cannon in Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music, George Buelow in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians2 and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen and Klaus Pietschmann in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.3 In so saying, it should be noted that Vera Viehöver has argued that the Ehren-Pforte should not be read as an autobiography or biography as such, but rather as a strategically devised compendium representing relationships that were important, in one way or another, to Mattheson.4 She argues that, therefore, it does not represent the type of objective, clinically researched autobiography that readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have come to expect.
