Unger, (Ernst) Max
Unger, (Ernst) Max
Unger, (Ernst) Max, German musicologist, conductor, and painter; b. Taura, Saxony, May 28, 1883; d. Zürich, Dec. 1, 1959. He studied at the Leipzig Cons., and also attended Riemann’s lectures at the Univ. of Leipzig (Ph.D., 1911, with the diss. Muzio dementis Leben;publ, in Langensalza, 1914). He was conductor of the Vereinigte Leipziger Schauspielhauser in 1906; then was conductor of the Leipzig Madrigal Soc. (1912-14) and ed. of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1919-20); after living in Zürich (1932-40), he went to Italy; returned to Germany after World War II. He devoted his research mainly to’ Beethoven, and publ. about 150 papers dealing with various aspects of Beethoven’s life and works. Among his books are Mendelssohn-Bartholdys Beziehungen zu England (Langensalza, 1909), Auf Spuren von Beethovens unsterblicher Geliebten (Langensalza, 1911), Beethoven über eine Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke (Bonn, 1920), Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Verleger S.A. Steiner und Tobias Haslinger in Wien, Ad. Mart. Schlesinger in Berlin (Berlin and Vienna, 1921), Beethovens Handschrift (Bonn, 1926), and Ein Faustopernplan Beethovens und Goethes (Regensburg, 1952). He also ed. the catalogue of the Bodmer Beethoven collection in Zürich, under the title Eine schweizer Beethovensammlung: Katalog (Zürich, 1939).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire