Erich Prieger
born Kreuznach, October 2, 1849; died Bonn, November 27, 1913
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German musicologist and private collector.
Erich Prieger studied philosophy at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig. After service in the 1870/71 Franco-German War he went to Berlin, where he wrote a dissertation on the esthetics of Alexander Baumgarten. He worked all his life as a private teacher.
From early years he was a collector of music manuscripts. In 1897 he acquired the Artaria collection of Beethoven manuscripts, which he susbsequently passed to the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin. In 1889 he co-founded the Verein Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, of which he became a patron. He was author of eight books and several articles, and published a facsimile of the manuscript of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A flat, Op. 26 (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1895). He reconstructed the first version of Beethoven's Fidelio, performed in Berlin in 1905. He had no known contact with Schenker, but his work is mentioned occasionally in letters from Otto Erich Deutsch.
Sources
- MGG (1952)
- Paul Egon Hübinger, "Gründung und Stifter des Vereins Beethoven-Haus," in Divertimento für Hermann J. Abs: Beethoven-Studien, ed. Martin Staehelin (Bonn, Beethovenhaus, 1981), pp. 198–204
Contributor
- Ian Bent