Nohl, (Karl Friedrich) Ludwig

Nohl, (Karl Friedrich) Ludwig, German writer on music; b. Iserlohn, Westphalia, Dec. 5, 1831; d. Heidelberg, Dec. 15, 1885. He studied jurisprudence at Bonn (1850), Heidelberg, and Berlin, and entered the legal profession against his own desire, to please his father. In music he was instructed by Dehn, and later (1857–58) by Kiel, in Berlin. Having embraced music as his profession, he took his Ph.D. at Heidelberg in 1860. He subsequently went to Munich (1861), where he was an honorary prof. at the Univ. (1865–68). After living in Badenweiler (1868–72), he settled in Heidelberg as a private lecturer, becoming a prof. at the Univ. in 1880. He pubi, biographies and eds. of letters of several great composers, but these have been superseded by modern scholarship. Among his writings are Musikalisches Skizzenbuch (1866); Musiker-Briefe (1867); Beethovens Leben (3 vols., 1867–77); Neues Skizzenbuch (1869); Gluck und Wagner (1870); Die Beethoven-Feier und die Kunst der Gegenwart (1871); Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner (1874); Beethoven nach den Schilderungen seiner Zeitgenossen (1877; Eng. tr., 1880, as Beethoven as Depicted by His Contemporaries); Mozart nach den Schilderungen seiner Zeitgenossen (1880); Richard Wagners Bedeutung für die nationale Kunst (1883); Das moderne Musikdrama (1884), and Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der Kammermusik (1885).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis Mclntire