Heinz Becker

Heinz Becker (Berlin, 26 June 1922) was a German musicologist whose work focused on the history of reed instruments and, above all, on nineteenth-century French opera. His research on Giacomo Meyerbeer and the grand opéra returned to academic debate a repertoire that had been largely forgotten.

His training began in 1946, when he studied conducting, composition, piano and clarinet at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he obtained a clarinet diploma in 1949. At the same time, from 1948, he began studying musicology at the Humboldt University of Berlin under Walther Vetter, Dräger and Ernst Hermann Meyer, with art history and philosophy as complementary subjects. He received his doctorate there in 1951 with a dissertation on the problems and techniques of cadences.

Between 1951 and 1955 he worked as a teacher at a Volkshochschule and headed the private music teaching department of the Petersen Conservatory in Berlin. In 1956 he became assistant professor at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Hamburg, where in 1961 he completed his habilitation with a study of the development of reed instruments in antiquity and the Middle Ages. He then taught as an external lecturer in Hamburg until his appointment in 1966 as professor of musicology at the Ruhr University in Bochum. In 1975 he founded the monumental edition series Die Oper, which has recovered important works. Between 1975 and 1987 he sat on the advisory committees of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin and the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt. He retired in 1987, although he has continued to contribute to the edition of Meyerbeer's correspondence and the critical edition of his stage works.

Becker is remembered above all for reintroducing nineteenth-century French opera into academic research, thanks to painstaking archival work. Although his attention centred on Meyerbeer, his studies have inspired the rediscovery and staging of numerous works of the grand opéra. The two Festschriften dedicated to him acknowledge his role as one of the leading reference figures in operatic research.