Joseph Maria Müller-Blattau

Joseph Maria Müller-Blattau (Colmar, Alsace, 1895 – Saarbrücken, 1976) was a German musicologist whose work revolves around the history of the fugue, the figure of Christoph Bernhard and, above all, German folk song. Born in an Alsace that then belonged to the German Empire, he trained in musicology with Friedrich Ludwig at the University of Strasbourg, and also studied composition and conducting with Hans Pfitzner and organ with Ernst Münch at the conservatory in that city.

After the First World War he continued his training with Gurlitt in Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1920 with a dissertation on the history of the fugue. In 1922 he obtained his habilitation with a study of Christoph Bernhard, a pupil of Schütz, at the University of Königsberg. There he served as musical director, directed the musicology seminar, founded the series Königsberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft and reached the rank of full professor in 1928. In 1935 he became a professor and university music director in Frankfurt. Two years later he was recruited to Freiburg, in a move probably linked to his political interest in Alemannic folk music; he replaced his former teacher Gurlitt, who had been dismissed under the Nazi racial laws and reduced to poverty until the end of the war. At the same time he directed the Freiburg Municipal School of Music and championed the organ reform movement. In 1941 he accepted a post at the University of Strasbourg.

After the war he worked as a teacher in Kusel, near Kaiserslautern, and in Kirchheimbolanden. In 1952 he accepted the directorship of the State Conservatory in Saarbrücken and a teaching post at its university, where he eventually became a professor.

Alongside his work on Bernhard, he is best known for his studies of German folk song and medieval monophonic music, for which he prepared important editions. His interest in communal singing, born during his military service in the First World War, led him to the Singbewegung and to helping establish the study of German folklore as a serious musicological discipline. This line of research, centred on tracing Germanic traits inherited from prehistory, earned him the support of Nazi organisations; his book Germanisches Erbe in deutscher Tonkunst (1938) was funded by the SS and the Hitler Youth. His legacy is today controversial: alongside editions and studies of lasting value, his work of the 1930s and 1940s is situated within an ideology that current historiography examines with caution.