Ida Marie Lipsius


Ida Marie Lipsius, alias La Mara, was a German writer and music historian.

Life

Lipsius was born as daughter of the later director of the Leipzig Thomasschule Karl Heinrich Adelbert Lipsius and grew up at Leipzig where she was given a profound musical training, thus by the Saxon composer Richard Müller. Her three brothers were the theologian Richard Adelbert Lipsius, the architect Constantin Lipsius and the classical scholar Justus Hermann Lipsius. In 1856, at nineteen, she met Franz Liszt at a concert to whose closer friends she should belong from henceforth. During the ending 19th and starting 20th century, she played an influent role in the German music business, especially at the grand-ducal Weimarian court and in the Richard Wagner circle at Bayreuth. An intimate friend to Liszt's long-time life partner, the princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, she was distinguished with the title of professor in honor of her eightieth birthday in 1917.

Work

Besides several early written travel sketches, under her alias "La Mara", Marie published a lot of musician biographies, concerning dead as well as contemporaries of hers, which, beginning from 1867, first were printed in the Westermanns Monatshefte before being edited in the then popular series Musikalische Studienköpfe by the house Breitkopf & Härtel. Her well-nuanced, empathetically written portraits often were inspired by her personal acquaintance to many of whom she described and also may be characterized as authentic testimonies of a female contemporary involved in the German music society of her epoch – a character in which their importance for today music history mostly consists.
Marie Lipsius was the first musicologist to conduct systematic research to identify Beethoven's mysterious "Immortal Beloved": In 1909, she published Therese Brunsvik's Memoirs, and she interpreted her glowing admiration of the composer as a secret love. This was revised after the World War I, when letters and other documents were discovered in the Brunsvik estate, which pointed to Therese's sister Josephine Brunsvik.
A part from her original writings, Marie also took care of an edition of the correspondence of Franz Liszt. In 1917, her autobiography was published.

Publications

As author