Gustav Schilling

Gustav Schilling (Schwiegershausen, 1805 – Crete, Nebraska, 1880) was a German writer on music whose work, though now little known, provides valuable documentation on music theory and performance practice in the nineteenth century. The son of a pastor, he received a dual training in music and theology, the former partly from his father and the latter with teachers in Göttingen and Halle.

Between 1830 and 1836 he directed a music school in Stuttgart founded by Franz Stöpel, but he left it to devote himself entirely to writing, chiefly on musical subjects, though also on theology and politics. He was founder and secretary of the Deutsche National-Verein für Musik und ihre Wissenschaft, whose yearbook he edited between 1839 and 1843. In those years he published more than twenty books on aesthetics, harmony, pianism and composers, among them a 1842 portrait of Liszt. Sources describe these works as generally superficial, though relevant for their contribution to the development of the theory of interpretation and to the history of music theory.

His career in Germany ended in 1857, when he was prosecuted for debt and fled to the United States. A project to found a conservatory in New York came to nothing; he then lived in Montreal and finally in Crete, Nebraska, where he died on his son's farm.

Today he is remembered above all for the six-volume Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften oder Universal Lexikon der Tonkunst, to which contributors included A. B. Marx and Gottfried Weber, among others. Schilling may have written numerous unsigned articles, perhaps including the one devoted to himself. The entries on general topics are of less interest than the biographies of contemporary musicians, which often contain information not found in other sources.