Philipp Spitta

Julius August Philipp Spitta (27 December 1841 – 13 April 1894) was a German music historian and musicologist best known for his 1873 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach.

He was born in Wechold [de], near Hoya, and his father, also called Philipp Spitta, was a theologian and wrote the Protestant collection of hymns entitled Psalter und Harfe.

He became a teacher of Ancient Greek and Latin language in, successively, Reval, Sondershausen, and Leipzig, while pursuing his interest in and lecturing on music history in general and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.

He founded one of the first scholarly music periodicals, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, with Friedrich Chrysander and Guido Adler in 1885, and also had an important role in the publication of the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst.

In his Bach biography, he wrote the first major study of German choral and keyboard music of the 17th century (early baroque).