Philipp Spitta

Julius August Philipp Spitta (27 December 1841 – 13 April 1894) was a German music historian and musicologist best known for his 1873 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach.

He was born in Wechold, near Hoya, and his father, also called Philipp Spitta, was a theologian and wrote the Protestant collection of hymns entitled Psalter und Harfe. As a child, the younger Spitta learnt the piano, organ, and composition. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1860, graduating in 1864 with a Ph.D. for a dissertation on Tacitus (Der Satzbau bei Tacitus, 1866). While at university, he composed, wrote a biography of Robert Schumann, and became friends with Johannes Brahms. He became a teacher of Greek and Latin in, successively, Reval, Sondershausen, and Leipzig, while pursuing his interest in and lecturing on music history in general and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.