Reinhold Brinkmann
August 21, 1934 – October 10, 2010

Reinhold Brinkmann, a distinguished scholar whose writings on music of the 19th and 20th centuries made an indelible mark on musicology in Germany and the United States, died yesterday (on October 10, 2010), after a long illness, in Eckernförde, Germany at the age of 76. He taught in the Department of Music at Harvard University from 1985 until his retirement in 2003, serving as James Edward Ditson Professor of Music and department chair. Those who knew him will remember his brilliance, wit, and immense erudition, and his passionate devotion to the department and to his colleagues and students. We will miss him terribly, and extend our love and sincere condolences to his wife, Dorothea Brinkmann.

Brinkmann came to Harvard from Berlin, where he had been Professor at the Hochschule der Künste since 1980, and prior to that, Professor of Musicology at the University of Marburg. In 2001, he was the first musicologist to be awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. The international scope of his work and influence is further reflected in two Festschriften, Music and the Aesthetic of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb and published with Harvard University Press (2005), and one produced by the Humboldt University in Berlin, where Reinhold held an honorary professorship: Musikalische Analyse und kulturgeschichtliche Kontextualisierung, edited Tobias Bleek and Camilla Bork (2010).

His writings span a broad range of topics, including the Second Viennese School (especially Schoenberg), the Romantic Lied tradition, Wagner, Skryabin, Varèse, Eisler, and Ives. Reinhold also lived and breathed new music, and enjoyed close friendships with Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, and Luciano Berio, who dedicated his Sonata per pianforte solo to him in 2001. Reinhold’s work combined intimate knowledge of the music, often shown in detailed, painstaking analyses, with an awareness of social and political backgrounds and ramifications. His publications in English include his nuanced and thought-provoking study of Brahms’s Second Symphony, Late Idyll (Harvard University Press, 1995) and the essays “Distorted Sublime,” in Music and Nazism: Art und Tyranny, 1933-1945 (2003);  “Schoenberg’s Quartets and the Viennese Tradition,” in “Music of My Future”: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio (2000); “The Fool as Paradigm: Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the Modern Artist,” in Schoenberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter (1997); and “What the Sources Tell Us About Pierrot lunaire,” in From Pierrot to Marteau (1987). With his colleague Christoph Wolff, he organized an international conference at Harvard on the German musicians who fled Fascism, and co-edited the volume “Driven Into Paradise”: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (1999). Reinhold was always fascinated with the frieze of famous composers’ names in Paine Hall, and his last publication was a playful and learned essay on origins of the building and its visible display of the musical canon, anno 1914 (Harvard’s Paine Hall: Musical Canon and the New England Barn, 2010).

His edition of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire for the Schoenberg Complete Works Edition, in particular his book-length critical report on the work’s sources and its historical and biographical position, was a ground-breaking contribution to the Schoenberg literature. His 1967 dissertation, Arnold Schönberg, Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11: Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg, was republished in a second edition (with a new foreword) in 2000. A lifelong interest in German Lieder and poetry is reflected in his monograph, Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Op. 39 (1997) and in his substantial contribution on the 19th-century Lied tradition in the volume Musikalische Lyrik (2004). A selection of his essays in German, Vom Pfeifen und von alten Dampfmaschinen: Aufsätze zur Musik von Beethoven bis Rihm, appeared in 2006.

The Harvard Department of Music will host a memorial for Professor Brinkmann in Cambridge, MA in the spring.


--Anne C. Shreffler October 11, 2010

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