Gustav Schilling (musicologist)

Friedrich Gustav Schilling (3 November 1805 – March 1880) was a German musicologist, editor and lexicographer. Born in Schwiegershausen, Schilling was the son of a cantor and village schoolteacher and performed as a pianist at the age of ten. From 1823, he attended the University of Göttingen, studied theology there, and probably obtained a doctorate in philosophy. In 1826, he went to the University of Halle, where he finished his studies. In 1830, he settled as a piano teacher in Stuttgart and became director of the music institute founded by Franz Stöpel. He published numerous books on music and music education, in which he advocated a value-conservative-classical view of art, according to which the "perfection of mankind" The standard of all art, connected with the popular educational ideal, was that music practice and music knowledge could be learned by all, if one only applied the right system. He became best known through the Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften (1835–1838), which he edited and in which numerous important musicians and scholars of the time participated. In some of his writings he was already accused by his contemporaries of plagiat. For example, his main work Versuch einer Philosophie des Schönen in der Musik (1838) draws on Carl Seidel's Charinomos. Beiträge zur allgemeinen Theorie und Geschichte der schönen Künste (two volumes, Magdeburg 1825 and 1828). In part, he also plagiarised himself. In addition to plagiarism, contemporaries also criticised factual errors and unverified adoptions from other works in Schilling's encyclopaedias. The criticisms, among others by Heinrich Dorn and Carl Ferdinand Becker, resulted in public polemics, which were published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik edited by Robert Schumann and in the Jahrbüchern des deutschen National-Vereins für Musik und ihre Wissenschaften edited by Schilling. In 1839, Schilling founded the "Deutscher National-Verein für Musik und ihre Wissenschaft" (German National Association for Music and its Science) and won the Kassel Kapellmeister Louis Spohr for the presidency.