Wolfgang Boetticher (19 August 1914 – 7 April 2002) was a German musicologist and longtime lecturer at the University of Göttingen.
Born in Bad Ems, Boetticher was arranger and editor of numerous works by the composer Robert Schumann, especially for the publishing house G. Henle in Munich.
[1] Boetticher, son of a chemist in the civil service, studied musicology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin after a pianistic education with Arnold Schering, Georg Schünemann, Curt Sachs, Hans Joachim Moser, Friedrich Blume and Helmuth Osthoff.
After he won his doctorate in 1939 with a dissertation dedicated to Robert Schumann (publication in 1941), Boetticher gained his habilitation in 1943[2] with his work Studien zur solistischen Lautenpraxis des 16. und 17.
[6] In 1941 Boetticher was involved in the looting of the collection of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska who had fled from the Nazis to Paris, and the confiscation of other Jewish properties.
In 1963 Joseph Wulf had already published several documents in his source work Music in the Third Reich, which proved Wolfgang Boetticher's National Socialist and anti-Semitic commitment.
Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1989 (unchanged reprint of the first edition in Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh 1963), ISBN 3-550-07059-4.
After Willem de Vries revealed his activity in the Sonderstab Musik of the ERR, the lectures were discontinued with immediate effect by the seminar leaders.
Nauhaus concludes: "The results are qualitatively truly devastating, and a reviewer who spoke of a 'fallen box of papers' hit the nail on the head: The philological unreliability of all Boetticher's Schumann works is striking.