Carl Georg Vivigens von Winterfeld

Carl Georg Vivigens von Winterfeld (Berlin, 1784 – Berlin, 1852) was a German musicologist whose work focused on music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and, above all, on Lutheran religious music. Initially trained in law at the University of Halle, he served as a judge in Breslau from 1816 before returning to Berlin in 1832.

His interest in music history was consolidated during a journey to Italy in 1812, of which he left a diary. On that trip he transcribed compositions from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this collection is today held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Among his publications, Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (1834) stands out, as it is both a biography of the composer and a panorama of musical life in Venice. Earlier, he had published a study of Palestrina in 1832.

In his work on Lutheran chorale singing, he argued that Johannes Eccard's harmonisations of hymn tunes were the most valuable part of the repertoire, as they adhered to the chorale, whereas Schütz and Bach retained their value as sacred music, though not as church music. In 1839 he was appointed an honorary member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and he maintained ties with the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst; he was also one of the founders of the Bach-Gesellschaft.

His legacy lies in his studies of the Lutheran repertoire and in the documentation he gathered on Venetian music, which researchers still consult today.