The pianist, composer, music teacher and music writer Jürgen Uhde (1913-1991) will be familiar to many friends of Beethoven's music and probably to countless musicologists, especially through his three-volume monograph on Beethoven's piano music published by Reclam in Stuttgart between 1968 and 1974. In this fundamental standard work, Jürgen Uhde has provided an impressive, still relevant testimony to his decades-long engagement with Beethoven's music as a pianist, analyst and thinker, which is extremely profitable to read and is recommended to every serious music lover. In addition to his musicological publications on composers and works from the Baroque to the modern era, we owe him stimulating and sensitive writings on musical interpretation and piano methodology.
The fact that Jürgen Uhde also composed only recently became known to a wider public through the indexing of his estate in the context of a symposium and the resulting publication.[2] The present edition is the first publication of a large-scale, 114-bar, six-part motet on a significant text by Martin Luther that has not yet been set to music by any other composer.
Born and raised in Hamburg, Uhde studied in Berlin from 1932 with Leonid Kreutzer (piano), Kurt Thomas (conducting) and Heinz Tiessen (composition). In 1936 he began his own, primarily pedagogical activity, interrupted by conscription into the Wehrmacht and a serious illness. From 1947 to 1989 he taught at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart.
From the preface by Bodo Bischoff
