Gustav Nottebohm

Martin Gustav Nottebohm (12 November 1817 – 29 October 1882) was a German musicologist, teacher and composer who spent most of his career in Vienna.His greatest contribution, however, is probably his series of essays and commentaries on several of the musical 'sketchbooks' in which Beethoven notated and elaborated his initial ideas.[1] Writing of Nottebohm's investigations into Beethoven's sketches, the later Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman evaluated him in the following terms: "He made some mistakes, but it is to be doubted whether many musical scholars have maintained so high a standard of accuracy and objectivity, and so sharp a sense of the relevant, in treating a similar mass of difficult material".He published a thematic catalogue of Schubert's works and was an avid collector of Baroque and pre-Baroque music both vocal and instrumental.In a letter to Heinrich von Herzogenberg dated 20 August 1876, Brahms numbers Nottebohm (in the same sentence with Schumann) among the modern practitioners of variation form.