Adolf Bernhard Marx

Friedrich Heinrich Adolf Bernhard Marx, also known as A. B. Marx (15 May 1795 – 17 May 1866), was a German music theorist, critic, and musicologist. Life Marx was the son of a Jewish doctor in Halle who, though a member of the congregation, was according to his son a convinced atheist. Marx was given the names Samuel Moses at birth, but changed these at his baptism in 1819. He began his career studying law at Halle, but also learned musical composition there—a fellow student was the composer Carl Loewe. After rejecting an offer for legal appointment at Naumburg, in 1821 he went to Berlin, where in 1825 Adolf Martin Schlesinger appointed him editor of the music journal he had founded, the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Marx’s intellectual critiques were appreciated by, amongst others, Beethoven, although they often offended the Berlin establishment, including Carl Friedrich Zelter. Marx became an intimate of the family of Felix Mendelssohn, who was greatly influenced by Marx’s ideas about the representational qualities of music—Marx’s influence in the revision of Mendelssohn’s overture to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1826) was noted by their mutual friend Eduard Devrient