Schmid, Ernst Fritz

Schmid, Ernst Fritz, eminent German musicologist; b. Tübingen, March 7, 1904; d. Augsburg, Jan. 20, 1960. He studied violin, viola, and viola d’amore at the Munich Academy of Music, and also took private lessons in theory and conducting. He then studied musicology at the univs. of Munich (with Sandberger), Freiburg im Breisgau (with Gurlitt), Tübingen (with Hasse), and Vienna (with Haas, Orel et al.); received his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Tübingen in 1929 with the diss. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und seine Kammermusik (publ. in Kassel, 1931); completed his Habilitation as a Privatdozent in musicology at the Univ. of Graz in 1934 with his Joseph Haydn: Ein Buch von Vorfahren und Heimat des Meisters (publ. in Kassel, 1934). He became a prof. at the Univ. of Tübingen in 1935; also founded the Schwabisches Landesmusikarchiv; he left Tübingen in 1937 to devote himself to private research. During World War II, he served in the German army. In 1948 he founded the Mozartgemeinde, and in 1951 the German Mozartgesellschaft. In 1954 he became academic director of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe; from 1955 he oversaw the pubi, of the new critical ed. of Mozart’s complete works, the Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke. In addition to his valuable research on Mozart, he discovered the private music collection of Emperor Franz II in Graz in 1933; this important collection is now housed in Vienna’s Nationalbibliothek.

Writings

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Lübeck, 1934; third ed., 1955); Die Orgeln der Abtei Amorbach (Buchen, 1938); ed. Ein schwabisches Mozartbuch (Lorch and Stuttgart, 1948); Musik am Hofe der Fürsten von Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg, 1720–1750 (Würzburg, 1953); Musik an den schwäbischen Zollernhöfen der Renaissance (Kassel, 1962).

Bibliography

W. Fischer et al., eds., In memoriam E.F. S., 1904–1960: Ein Gedenkblatt fir seine Angehörigen und Freunde (Reckling hausen, 1961).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire