Religious Foundations of Musikwissenschaft: Church Music, Politics, and Education at the University of Berlin, Circa 1820

This article is the first extensive study of music’s entrance into the modern research university. Noting recent insights in the history of religion and new institutional studies, it emphasizes the ideological complexity of emerging institutions in nineteenth-century Berlin. In the wake of Napoleon’s occupation of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher approved a series of new institutions devoted to reviving music education and religious practices supposedly in decline. One example was the Royal Institute for Church Music (established in 1822), which offered an instructional program for singers and organists. In 1829, the University of Berlin created its first professorships in music for Carl Friedrich Zelter and Adolf Bernhard Marx, who sought to merge the institute with the university’s ethos of Bildung. The article details how these institutions negotiated tensions between the state and its Protestant constituency at a time when an absolutist empire was giving ground to new, liberal forms of governance