First freely elected rector of the Weimar University of Music
Musicologist Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Marggraf deceased
The University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar mourns the death of its former rector Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Marggraf. The musicologist passed away on March 21, 2023 in Lörrach at the age of 89, as his family informed the university. For more than 30 years until his retirement in 1999, he worked as an extremely respected educator and researcher at the university - from 1990 to 1993 also as its rector.
"I always looked forward to Professor Marggraf's lectures all week because they were so exciting and stimulating," recalls university president Prof. Anne-Kathrin Lindig of her own student days. "All the more reason he will be remembered fondly, and not just by me."
"He was passionate about making the younger generation more aware of the complex beauties of our art," adds former rector Prof. Dr. Wolfram Huschke, who succeeded him in office in 1993. Born in Leipzig in 1933, Wolfgang Marggraf studied musicology and art history at the universities of Jena and Leipzig from 1952 to 1957.
In 1964 he was awarded a doctorate. After working as a dramaturge in Rudolstadt and Erfurt, Marggraf taught music history at the Weimar University of Music from 1966 - initially as a senior assistant and lecturer, and then as a professor of musicology from 1987.
Wolfgang Marggraf worked in Weimar "during that time, which by no means made it easy for a bourgeois scholar without party membership, as he was, to speak ex cathedra without bias," emphasizes former rector Wolfram Huschke.
"When he was around 50, things brightened up. One signal of this was that in 1984 he became chairman of the 'Franz Liszt' working group in the Cultural Association of the GDR. With the working group, the Liszt anniversary in 1986 became the prelude to a Liszt renaissance in Weimar."
On January 1, 1990, Wolfgang Marggraf took office as prorector for science and research at the Weimar University of Music. As prorector, he arranged for the reestablishment in June 1990 of the Department of Musicology, which had been dissolved in 1955, as a joint institute of the Weimar University of Music and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.
Shortly thereafter, he was elected as the first rector in the history of the university and held office until 1993. "It was a time in which a great deal had to be mastered and new things had to be initiated, which reached far into the future," says Wolfram Huschke. Until his retirement in 1999, Marggraf still headed the Department of Musicology. He also made a name for himself as a biographer of Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, among others.
[29.03.2023]