Hermann Abert (25 March 1871 – 13 August 1927) was a German historian of music.

Life

Abert was born in Stuttgart, the son of Johann Josef Abert (1832–1915), the Hofkapellmeister of that city. From 1890 to 1896 he studied classical philology at the Universities of Tübingen, Berlin and Leipzig. While at Tübingen he joined the Akademische Gesellschaft Stuttgardia, a student fraternity which shaped the political views of the liberalism in southern Germany. His philological studies ended in 1896 at Halle, where he had done work on Ancient Greek music. For the next three years he studied music theory at Berlin. In 1902 he qualified as lecturer by presenting his thesis on music of the Middle Ages at the University of Halle. Abert stayed on at Halle as a lecturer, becoming a senior lecturer (or associate professor) in 1910 and a full professor in 1918. In this capacity he moved the next year to the University of Heidelberg. But after just one year, Abert took up a post at Leipzig and in 1920 he became the successor of the music theorist Hugo Riemann. In 1923 he was called to the University of Berlin, where he was seen as the most suitable successor to Hermann Kretzschmar, also a music theorist. It was there that he worked with Friedrich Blume, Rudolf Gerber, Hans Hoffmann and Theodor Schwartzkopff, on the illustrated Dictionary of Music which was discovered to contain plagiarisms of Alfred Einstein's Neues Musiklexikon und Hugo Riemann Musiklexikon. In 1925 he was admitted to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the first music theorist to be granted this honour. On 13 August 1927, Prof. Dr. Hermann Abert died at Stuttgart, aged 56.

Works

English translations