Schmieder, Wolfgang
Schmieder, Wolfgang
Schmieder, Wolfgang, noted German music librarian; b. Bromberg, May 29, 1901; d. Fürstenfeldbruck, Nov. 8, 1990. He studied musicology with Kroyer and Moser, German philology and literature with F. Panzer and F. von Waldberg, and art history with C. Neumann at the Univ. of Heidelberg (Ph.D., 1927, with the diss. Zur Melodiebildung in Liedern von Neidhart von Reuental). He then was an asst. lecturer in its musicology dept. (1927–30); subsequently studied library science with M. Bollert at the Sachsischen Landesbibliothek in Dresden and with O. Glauning at the Univ. of Leipzig Library. He was librarian of the Technische Hochschule in Dresden (1931–33); then went to Leipzig as head of the archives of Breitkopf & Härtel (1933–42). In 1946 he founded the music dept. of the City and Univ. Library in Frankfurt am Main, which he headed until 1963. He was presented a Festschrift on his 70th birthday in 1971, Quellenstudien zur Musik, ed. by K. Dorfmuller and G. von Dadelsen. Of his numerous publications, of fundamental importance is his exhaustive Thematisch- systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Leipzig, 1950; 5lh ed., rev., 1990); also valuable is Musikalische alte Drücke bis etwa 1750 (with G. Hartweig; 2 vols., Wolfenbüttel, 1967).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire