Hermann Deiters

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hermann Deiters, drawn by his uncle August Bausch , 1858

Hermann Deiters (born June 27, 1833 in Bonn , † May 11, 1907 in Koblenz ) was a German musicologist and high school teacher.

Live and act

Hermann Clemens Otto Deiters was the son of the Bonn jurist and politician Peter Franz Ignaz Deiters . Like all his siblings, his father belonged to the Catholic Church, while his mother, Emilie nee. Bausch was Protestant. From 1842 Deiters attended the Bonn grammar school together with his younger brother Otto , which was then headed by Ludwig Schopen . After graduating on July 25, 1850, he first studied Classical Philology and History at the University of Bonn , but switched to law after one semester and completed his studies with a doctorate to become a Dr. jur. on August 14, 1854. During his studies in 1853 he became a member of the Frankonia fraternity in Bonn . His first position (in the winter of 1854/55 as auscultator at the Berlin City Court) did not satisfy him, which is why he returned to Bonn and started studying philology again. He attended lectures by Brandis, Heinrich Brunn , Franz Ritter and Ludwig Schopen, but he was most influenced by the directors of the philological seminar Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker , Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn , of which Deiters was a member for three semesters. According to his inclination and versatile talent, he mainly joined Jahn, who represented a wide range of ancient studies and was also known as a musician and musicologist. Deiters was on 28 July 1858, a dissertation on Hesiod Aspis Dr. phil. PhD. On November 6, 1858, he passed the state examination for teaching at secondary schools and began his probationary year at the Bonn grammar school, where he then taught as an assistant teacher, from July 1, 1862 as a full teacher.

During my time as a teacher in Bonn there was also an event that preoccupied the entire academic world in Germany: the philologists dispute between Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl in Bonn . The conflict had been developing for a long time, escalated in 1865 and ended when Ritschl left for Leipzig. In the course of these events, Wilhelm Brambach published a pamphlet in which he proclaimed the "end of the Bonn School of Philology" and in which he sided with Ritschl by name. Deiters responded by publishing an anonymous reply, in which he emphasized Jahn's importance for teacher training and condemned Brambach's polemics. Brambach responded with another pamphlet, which Deiters answered with an article in the Bonner Zeitung in which he also publicly acknowledged himself as the author of his pamphlet. The conflict remained unsolved. The further development of philological studies in Bonn proved Deiters' position to be correct: Instead of the "end of the Bonn school of philology", a turning point occurred, under the successors of Jahn and Ritschl, Franz Bücheler and Hermann Usener , Bonn remained a center of philology studies in Germany.

Deiters' career continued, however. On January 1, 1869, he switched to the high school in Düren as a senior teacher. In January 1874 he left the Rhineland and went to West Prussia as head of the Royal High School in Konitz . On January 1, 1877, he moved to the Mariengymnasium in Posen . As headmaster, Deiters took care of the material and staffing of his school: He laid down technical, methodological, didactic and pedagogical principles as he was used to from Bonn and set up student libraries and collections of teaching materials. Finally he returned to Bonn, where he was appointed director of the Royal High School on October 1, 1883.

As a proven practitioner, Deiters was appointed provincial school councilor to Koblenz on June 15, 1885 and was thus responsible for teacher training and school equipment in the Rhine Province . In this capacity he also worked in the winter of 1891/92 as an unskilled worker for the Prussian Ministry of Education in the design of the new curriculum. Deiters performed his office with great commitment and considerable success and received several awards: in 1891 he was appointed a secret councilor, later he was awarded the Order of the Crown and the Order of the Red Eagle, 2nd class. For health reasons, Deiters retired on October 1, 1903 and moved to Koblenz. He died on May 11, 1907 at the age of 73.

Deiters was first married to Agnes Burkart († 1884), from 1886 in second marriage to Sibylla Heimsoeth, the daughter of the philologist and musicologist Friedrich Heimsoeth . The two marriages had seven children.

Scientific work

In addition to his work in the Prussian school service, Deiters dealt with scientific work. His early work dealt with topics from Greek mythology, especially the cult of the muses . The special focus of research, however, became the music itself, with which Deiters had been concerned since his childhood. He gave up the plan to become a composer or pianist even before studying, but the history, development and practice of music preoccupied him all his life.

At the beginning of his career, Deiters wrote music reviews and reports for various newspapers and magazines, including the Allgemeine Musical Zeitung . He adored Mozart , Beethoven and Schumann , among the contemporary composers especially Johannes Brahms , with whom he had been close friends since the 1960s. On the other hand, he rigorously rejected Wagner and his massive innovations in musical practice.

Deiters made outstanding contributions to the history of music as a publisher: after the death of his teacher Otto Jahn, he revised his Mozart biography, the third edition of which appeared in 1889 and the fourth in 1905. He also corresponded with the American researcher Alexander Wheelock Thayer , who was working on a major Beethoven biography. Deiters translated the work into German and accompanied the publication of the first three volumes (1866, 1872, 1879). The German edition of this biography was all the more important as the English original was not published due to difficulties with the local publishers. After Thayer's death (1897), his heirs commissioned Deiters to publish the rest of the work. Deiters initially planned another final volume and a revision of the first three volumes, of which Volume 1 appeared in 1901; Volume 2 and 3 were edited by Hugo Riemann . The final volume soon proved to be too extensive and was split into two volumes, which were ready for printing when Deiter died and which appeared in 1907/1908.

Deiters also published several studies on ancient music theory . He examined the writings of Aristides Quintilianus (1st century) and Martianus Capella (5th century), in which he worked on the Stoic, Pythagorean and Neoplatonic music theory. The ancient musicians were then only available in the antiquated collective edition by Marcus Meibom (1652), which did not meet the requirements of textual criticism . Together with Karl von Jan and Paul Marquard, Deiters planned a new edition of the Greek musicians and adopted the script of Aristides Quintilianus himself. The company did not get beyond the beginnings, as Deiters made slow progress after being transferred as director to West Prussia. It was finally completely suspended after Albert Jahn published his own, but hasty and inadequate edition in 1882. Deiters completed his Aristides edition over the next few years, but did not bring it to print. The completed manuscript did not come out even after his death.

Fonts (selection)

  • De mancipationis indole et ambitu . 1854 (legal dissertation)
  • De Hesiodia scuti Herculis descriptione . 1858 (Philological dissertation)
  • De Hesiodi theogoniae prooemio . 1863 (program of the Royal High School in Bonn)
  • The philological studies in Bonn. From a schoolboy from the Rhineland . Cologne 1865
  • About the worship of the muses among the Greeks . Bonn 1868
  • De Aristidis Quintiliani doctrinae harmonicae fontibus. Particula great . Düren 1870 (program of the grammar school in Düren)
  • The manuscripts and old prints from the local high school library . Konitz 1875 (program of the grammar school in Konitz)
  • About the relationship between Martianus Capella and Aristides Quintilianus . Posen 1881 (program of the Mariengymnasium in Posen)
  • Johannes Brahms , in the Collection of Musical Lectures (XXIII-XXIV). Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1880
  • Beethoven's letters to Bettina von Arnim. Leipzig 1882
  • Johannes Brahms, a Biographical Sketch (first edited in english). Edited by JA Füller-Maitland (TF Unwin, London 1888).
Editing
  • AW Thayer: Ludwig van Beethoven's life . Volume 1, second edition, Leipzig 1901. Volume 4, Leipzig 1907. Volume 5, Leipzig 1908
  • Otto Jahn: Mozart . Two volumes, third edition, 1889; fourth edition, 1905

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Hermann Deiters  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Deiters, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Deiters, Hermann Clemens Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German musicologist and high school teacher
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1907
Place of death Koblenz