Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut

Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut (Hameln, 1772 – Heidelberg, 1840) was a German jurist whose significance for music lies in his work as a collector, choir director and advocate for the revival of early sacred music.

He studied law at Göttingen from 1792, where he may have attended a lecture by Forkel, and afterwards at Königsberg, Kiel and Jena. He became a professor in 1798, and in 1805 settled in Heidelberg, where he held a chair until his death. In 1814 he published essays in favour of codifying German law; Savigny replied with a treatise on the historical school of law.

During his time in Jena he began gathering sacred vocal music and folk songs, with copies supplied by Ett and Klein from European libraries; his collection came to be one of the largest of its kind in Germany. In 1811 he directed a small amateur choir in Heidelberg, with which he offered some four concerts a year of works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. His weekly rehearsals were visited by Goethe, Tieck, Mendelssohn and Schumann.

His most influential work, Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825), stands alongside the writings of Baini and Kiesewetter in spreading the Cecilian reforms. In it he argued that the declining state of musical taste could be refined through the study of early sacred choral music, especially that of Palestrina and Handel. Nägeli criticised it.

His legacy is twofold: as a jurist, for his contribution to the debate on codification; as a musician, for promoting knowledge of Renaissance and Baroque repertoires at a time when they were scarcely performed.