Friedrich Chrysander

Friedrich Chrysander (born July 8, 1826, Lübtheen, Mecklenburg, Ger.—died Sept. 3, 1901, Hamburg) was a German music historian and critic, whose collection of the works of George Frideric Handel and authoritative writings on many other composers established him as a pioneer of 19th-century musicology.

Chrysander’s early career was as a private tutor, but his strong interest in music led, briefly, to composition and then to music criticism and scholarship. His first publications were reviews and articles for local journals, which were followed by essays on oratorio and folk song that appeared in 1853. By the time Chrysander was awarded the Ph.D. from the University of Rostock (Germany) in 1855, he was already seriously involved in the study of Handel’s works and had started collecting material for a biography of the composer. The first of these volumes was published in 1858 and the second in 1860; part of the third volume appeared in 1867 (covering Handel’s life until 1740), but the project was never completed.

Together with the literary historian Gottfried Gervinus, Chrysander founded, in 1856, the Händelgesellschaft (“Handel Society”), with the intention of publishing a complete edition of Handel’s works from the original manuscripts. The society disbanded in 1860, two years after the first volume had been published. With some assistance from Gervinus, Chrysander continued the edition on his own and almost completely at his own expense. In 1860 King George V of Hannover granted an annual sum toward the project, but after Prussia’s annexation of that state in 1866 Chrysander took over the entire production at a small printing shop in the garden of his Bergedorf home. During the time that he worked on this monumental undertaking (the last volume, 95, was completed in 1894), Chrysander made frequent extended visits to London to examine Handel’s autograph scores and papers; in so doing he acquired much of that composer’s writings for the music library at Hamburg, to which he had also sold part of his own considerable library in 1875 in order to raise funds.

Never free from financial worry, he was forced to take on additional work as editor: for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1868–71 and 1875–82); Jahrbuch für musikalische Wissenschaft (1863, 1867); and, in collaboration with Philipp Spitta and Guido Adler, the founding (1885) and editing of the authoritative journal Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. Chrysander also participated in the editing of six volumes of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst (1869–71; “Monuments of Music”) and was the author of numerous essays and articles on composers of the 18th and 19th centuries and a wide range of musical topics.