Jacobsthal, Gustav (EN)

Jacobsthal Gustav, *14 March 1845 Pyrzyce, Pomerania, †9 November 1912 Berlin, German musicologist. From 1863 to 1870 he studied composition (with H. Bellermann) as well as history at the University of Berlin, where he earned his doctorate in 1870. Between 1871 and 1873 he pursued advanced historical studies at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung) in Vienna. In 1872 he completed his habilitation in musicology at the University of Strasbourg. In 1875 he was appointed associate professor and established a chair of music history. From 1897 to 1905 (following the death of Philipp Spitta), he was the only full professor of musicology in Germany. Until 1905 he taught at the University of Strasbourg, lecturing on the history of medieval and Renaissance music and on the development of musical art up to the time of Beethoven. He also directed the Akademische Gesangverein and composed primarily a cappella works for liturgical and concert use, the manuscripts of which are preserved in the German State Library (Deutsche Staatsbibliothek) in Berlin. 

Jacobsthal’s scholarly and artistic interests were shaped within the Berlin intellectual milieu, represented among others by E. Grell and his student H. Bellermann, for whom sixteenth-century vocal polyphony was both an absolute artistic value and a model for practical music-making. Jacobsthal himself, however, combined scholarly inquiry with composition and conducting, while maintaining that only the integration of musicological and compositional expertise could reveal the true nature of a musical work. At the same time, he broke with the notion that the art being analyzed should be identical with the art being created and performed. As a historian, he focused on the “prehistory” of the music of the Palestrina era, especially medieval polyphony and monody. As a composer, he concentrated on a cappella works inspired by sixteenth-century musical traditions. For Jacobsthal, medieval music was primarily a historical value and a heteronomous phenomenon, whereas Renaissance music represented an artistic phenomenon of autonomous significance. Consequently, in his relatively few but methodologically rigorous studies, which remain important contributions to musicological literature, Jacobsthal did not attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of medieval musical art. Instead, he initiated research and established directions for future scholarship on polyphony. He dealt particularly with questions of musical notation, copied the Montpellier Codex H 196, the most important source for the study of the motet in the ars antiqua period, and published the French texts of the compositions contained in it. In the field of Gregorian chant monody, he investigated chromaticism in Gregorian chant. By applying historical and philological methods, Jacobsthal laid the foundations of a modern conception of musicology as a scholarly discipline that reconstructs the musical culture of the past on the basis of surviving sources. The themes and methodological approaches developed by Jacobsthal were continued by his students F. Ludwig and P. Wagner, leading representatives of the “Strasbourg School of Musicology.”

Literature: F. Ludwig, E. Schmidt Trauerfeier für Gustav Jacobsthal, Strasburg 1912; F. Ludwig Gustav Jacobsthal, ZIMG XIV, 1912–13; A. Schweizer Selbstdarstellung, «Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen» VII, ed. R. Schmidt, Leipzig 1929; F. Gennrich Die Strassburger Schule für Musikwissenschaft, Würzburg 1940.