Heinrich Besseler

Heinrich Besseler (April 2, 1900 – July 25, 1969) was a German musicologist born in Hörde, Germany. He is particularly known for his colossal work, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1931), which provided a new perspective on historical musicology by taking a history-of-ideas approach to music history.

Besseler studied philosophy (under Martin Heidegger), German language, mathematics, and natural science in Freiburg im Breisgau. Subsequently, he studied music (under Hans Gál) and musicology (under Wilibald Gurlitt, Guido Adler, and Wilhelm Fischer) in Vienna and Freiburg. In 1923 he obtained a doctoral degree in musicology from the University of Freiburg. The subject of his thesis was the history and stylistic development of dance suites in seventeenth-century Germany. After further studies at the University of Göttingen, he wrote a professorial thesis on medieval music, spanning the years between 1250 and 1350. From 1928 he taught at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1934, Besseler became a member of the Sturmabteilung. While admittedly failing to distance himself from National Socialism, Besseler did experience a series of conflicts with Herbert Gerigk, the most notorious anti-Semitic musicologist in Germany. From 1949 to 1956 he taught at the University of Jena; and from 1957 to 1965 at the University of Leipzig. He was conferred with an honorary doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1967. Besseler died at Leipzig.

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