Sternfeld, F(riedrich) W(ilhelm)
Sternfeld, F(riedrich) W(ilhelm)
Sternfeld, F(riedrich) W(ilhelm), Austrian-born English musicologist; b. Vienna, Sept. 25, 1914; d. Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, near Wallingford, Jan. 13, 1994. He took courses with Lach and Wellesz at the Univ. of Vienna (from 1933); then pursued his training with Schrade at Yale Univ. (Ph.D., 1943, with the diss. Goethe and Music); held a Guggenheim fellowship (1954). He taught at Wesleyan Univ. (1940–46) and Dartmouth Coll. (1946–56); also was a member of the Inst. for Advanced Studies at Princeton Univ. (1955). In 1956 he joined the faculty of the Univ. of Oxford, where he served as a reader in music history (1972–81). He also became a naturalized British subject. He was ed. of Renaissance News (1946–54) and of the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1957–62); publ. the books Goethe’s Relationship to Music: A List of References (N.Y, 1954), Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1963; second ed., 1967), Songs from Shakespeare’s Tragedies (London, 1964), and The Birth of Opera (Oxford, 1993). He also ed. A History of Western Music (London, 1973), with Wellesz, the 7th vol. of The New Oxford History of Music: The Age of Enlightenment 1745–1790 (Oxford, 1973), and with others, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup (Oxford, 1975).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire