Mitteilung des Instituts

The Brahms Institute at the Lübeck University of Music (MHL) has acquired a significant new addition to its collection: a three-page letter handwritten and signed by Johannes Brahms, addressed to the music scholar and Bach biographer Philipp Spitta and written in the summer of 1873. Previously held in private American ownership, the letter is now accessible to researchers and the general public via the Brahms Portal.

The letter, dated June 14, 1873, is the second piece of correspondence from Brahms to Spitta (1841–1894) in the Lübeck collection. In it, Brahms thanks the musicologist for sending him the newly published first volume of his major biography of Johann Sebastian Bach—a project on which Spitta had worked for nearly ten years.

The letter documents not only the two men’s shared passion for the great masters of the past, above all Johann Sebastian Bach, but also Brahms’s deep appreciation of Spitta’s scholarly work. “How long we have wished for such a work devoted to Bach,” Brahms writes, praising its “warm and vivid tone, its fine thoroughness, its compelling portrayals of the period, and its excellent analyses.” His respect for Spitta—co-founder of musicology and editor, among other works, of Dieterich Buxtehude’s organ compositions—is also evident in the unusually neat handwriting, careful dating, and signature of the letter. Three years later, Brahms dedicated his Motets, Op. 74, written in the style of Bach, to the scholar. Both the handwritten engraving copies and the first printed edition of the Motets are part of the valuable Lübeck collection.

The acquisition of the letter, which was offered to the Lübeck Institute by an American private collector, was made possible through the generous support of the Lübeck-based Possehl Foundation and the Society for the Support of the Brahms Institute.

“With the acquisition of this letter, we have been able to enrich the Brahms Institute’s collection with another outstanding item while at the same time underscoring our position as a leading international research center for Johannes Brahms and his circle,” said Prof. Dr. Bernd Redmann, President of MHL. Dr. Teresa Cäcilia Ramming, Acting Managing Director of the Brahms Institute, added: “The letter is a wonderful testament to Brahms’s and Spitta’s shared conviction that monuments to ‘great German art’ must be created both musically and editorially. While the letter’s content has been known to scholars since the publication of the correspondence in 1920, we are delighted that the original document itself is now accessible.”

The letter is available to researchers and the general public via the recently launched Brahms Portal at https://www.brahms-portal.de/objekt/dc00009614/. Since August 1, the Brahms Portal has provided an innovative digital gateway to the globally unique Lübeck collection as well as to the life and works of the composer. Nearly 10,000 works and objects—including autographs, letters, photographs, and first editions—have already been catalogued according to the latest standards, semantically interconnected, and made accessible worldwide. The letter will be presented to the public for the first time at the Brahms Institute Museum on December 13 as part of the event “Christmas with Brahms.” Further information is available at www.brahms-institut.de and www.brahms-portal.de.