Carl Friedrich Weitzmann

Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, photograph from 1862

Carl Friedrich Weitzmann (born August 10, 1808 in Berlin , † November 7, 1880 in Berlin) was a German music theorist and musician.

life and work

Weitzmann learned violin and composition from Carl Henning and Bernhard Klein in the mid-1820s , and from 1827 to 1832 composition and music theory from Louis Spohr and Moritz Hauptmann in Kassel . Weitzmann composed in Riga for a Liedertafel that he founded in 1832 with Heinrich Dorn . In Reval, today's Tallinn , he was appointed music director and composed three operas. From 1836 he occupied positions at St. Petersburg court orchestras for ten years ; there he also began to collect rare music books and folk music. He then went on a concert tour in Lapland and Finland, followed by brief positions at orchestras in Paris and London . In 1848 Weitzmann returned to Berlin, where he devoted himself to research on music history and theory. In 1857 he began teaching at the Stern Conservatory .

In 1853 Weitzmann published The Excessive Triad, in which he stated that a minor triad can be viewed as an "inverted" major triad and how both can be created from a common root. He also pointed out relationships between the excessive triad and these triad types. Franz Liszt may have been influenced by this work, as an analysis of his Faust Symphony suggests. In later writings, Weitzmann also transferred his harmonic dualism to scales . These ideas were further developed by Arthur von Oettingen and Hugo Riemann .

In 1860 Weitzmann published a harmony system that was criticized several times. With his work The New Harmony Doctrine in Controversy with the Old , he sought to counter this criticism. When looking at tuning systems, Weitzmann differed from the opinion of most theorists: while many musicologists viewed tuning systems as a necessary compromise, Weitzmann was possibly the first to take a consistently positive stance. He started from an equal mood and explained how the dissonant chords occurring in it could be resolved.

Fonts

• The excessive triad (Berlin, 1853)
• The diminished seventh chord (Berlin, 1854)
• History of the seventh chord (Berlin, 1854)
• History of Greek Music (Berlin, 1855)
• Harmoniesystem (Leipzig, 1860, 2nd edition 1895)
• The new theory of harmony in conflict with the old one (Leipzig, 1860)
• History of piano playing and keyboard literature (Stuttgart, 1863, expanded 2nd edition 1879); reworked and ed. by Max Seiffert as a history of piano music (Leipzig, 1899)

literature

• Rachel Rudd: Karl Friedrich Weitzmann's Harmonic Theory in Perspective. Dissertation. Columbia University, 1992.
• Robert Wason: Weitzmann, Carl Friedrich. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . 2nd Edition. Ed. Stanley Sadie. Macmillan, London 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Carl Friedrich Weitzmann in the catalog of the German National Library