Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg

Biography

Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795) was a German Enlightenment-era music writer, theorist, and composer whose sharp-edged criticism and prolific publishing helped define mid-18th-century musical debate in Berlin. Born in the Altmark and active mainly in Berlin after 1749, he moved between intellectual circles and public administration, later serving as director of the royal lottery and as a Prussian Kriegsrat.

Marpurg’s name is inseparable from the era’s fascination with musical “systems”: he wrote widely on the foundations of theory, on practical musicianship, and on the craft of composition, with his Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753/54) becoming a defining reference point for fugue and learned counterpoint in German discourse. As a composer, he appears in printed keyboard and instrumental repertory circulating through mid-century anthologies and publications, including an Ouverture in G major first published in a 1756 annual collection, and he is associated in work authority data with Fughe e capriccj for keyboard (Op. 1, 1777).

Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.