Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (5 January 1919 – 30 August 1999) was a German musicologist and professor of historical musicology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg.
His father Siegfried Eggebrecht [de] was a Protestant minister and since 1929 superintendent in Prussian Schleusingen and early on sympathized with political right-wing movements.
At the beginning of his studies in 1937/38 at the Hochschule für Lehrerbildung [de] in Hirschberg Eggebrecht was a member of the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB) and was temporarily active as a music consultant for Hitler Youth.
In 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Attack on the Soviet Union, the Feldgendarmerie Department 683, 2nd Company, 3rd Platoon, to which Eggebrecht belonged, was deployed as part of the 11th Army in the conquest of the Crimea.
[2] According to music historian Boris von Haken[3] Eggebrecht stood in the so-called trellis for at least one day, through which the victims were driven immediately before their murder; this assertion was meanwhile rejected as unprovable and even unlikely.
Eggebrecht studied from autumn 1945 with Richard Münnich, Hans Joachim Moser and Max Schneider in Weimar, Berlin, Munich and Jena, where he promoviert as Dr. phil.
In 1949, without having to face a denazification trial, he received an assistant position with Walther Vetter[7] at the Institute of Musicology of the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Already in 1955 Eggebrecht presented the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz with a report entitled Studien zur musikalischen Terminologie.
However, it was to take until 1972 before this project could be implemented in Freiburg im Breisgau and the first deliveries of the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie [de] appeared.
Among his students were Peter Andraschke, Christoph von Blumröder, Werner Breig, Reinhold Brinkmann, Elmar Budde, Fritz Reckow, Albrecht Riethmüller, Wolfram Steinbeck and Michael Wittmann.
Unlike many musicologists, Eggebrecht sought dialogue with a number of contemporary composers (for example with Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with him in Freiburg, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mathias Spahlinger).