On Monday November 29th in the night of Monday to Tuesday, the former professor the musicologist, publicist, and great Grieg connoisseur Hella Brock died at the age of 101!
At first Hella Brock was best known to me for her much acclaimed German-language biography of Edvard Grieg from 1990. Later I met her at the international Grieg conferences in Bergen, Norway and during the German Grieg conferences in Münster and in Leipzig. Her erudition in the field of music science and also her knowledge and involvement in music pedagogy always awed me. Nevertheless, she was always very approachable and was always interested in a good conversation about musical matters of all kinds, not least about matters concerning the life and work of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.
In her education she has long taught at colleges and Universities, her warm interest in musical education spoke in all its facets. She published important textbooks on music pedagogy. She collaborated with Norwegian Prof. Finn Benestad in the publication of Grieg’s correspondence with his music publisher C.F. Peters in Leipzig. Hella Brock organized Grieg conferences in Leipzig and founded ‘her’ Edvard Grieg – Gedenk und Begegnungsstätte in Leipzig, which has now become a spiritual and cultural centre for study, concerts, and gatherings.
With her death, we lose a ‘Grande Dame’ with a great spirit of knowledge in the field of music science and in particular in the field of the life and work of Edvard Grieg through her great contributions to the Grieg research! We wish her family a lot of strength!
Siebert Nix – President International Grieg Society