Ludwig Nohl

Karl Friedrich Ludwig Nohl (Iserlohn, 1831 – Heidelberg, 1885) was a German writer and editor whose writings on music enjoyed wide circulation during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Although his initial training pointed towards law, in keeping with his father's wishes, he eventually devoted himself entirely to music and to writing about it for a wider public.

Nohl studied law at the universities of Bonn, Heidelberg and Berlin, and in Berlin he also took music lessons with S. W. Dehn and Friedrich Kiel. After entering the Prussian civil administration in 1853, an illness obliged him to travel through France and Italy in 1856. On returning to Berlin, he resumed his musical studies with Kiel, and in 1858 he definitively abandoned law to settle in Heidelberg, where he obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1860. The following year he moved to Munich, and in 1865 Ludwig II appointed him honorary professor at the university. He returned to Heidelberg in 1872 and taught music history and aesthetics there until his death on 15 December 1885; some sources give the 16th, although the 15th is the more usual date.

His name is associated above all with popular biographies of Beethoven and Mozart, as well as with editions of their letters and those of other composers. In his books he combined musical analysis with anecdote and, in the case of Liszt, whom he knew personally, with his own recollections. His interest in the reception of works and in the way audiences listen is reflected in his collections of correspondence and in his study of chamber music. However, his devotion to Wagner led him to interpret the evolution of musical drama before the composer of Bayreuth in a biased way, as shown in his work Gluck und Wagner.