Christine Siegert died on 3 August at the age of just 55, following a severe illness. Held in high regard as a musicologist both at home and abroad, she was closely associated with our publishing house through the Joseph Haydn Werke and Beethoven Werke editions. From 2003 she was Head of Research at the Joseph-Haydn Institute in Cologne, and from 2015 led the Research Department of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, where the editorship of the Beethoven Complete Works Edition was among her duties.

Opera of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a focus of her research interests, and this had an impact not least on those volumes that she edited for G. Henle Publishers. She contributed, either as editor or co-editor, to four volumes of the Haydn Complete Works Edition concerned with opera or stage music genres (vols XXV/9. L’isola disabitata; XXVI/2, Arias and scenes with orchestra, II; and XXVI/3-4, Arrangements of arias and scenes of other composers I/II). Among her projects as Head of the Beethoven Complete Works Edition was supervision of the complex edition of the Ninth Symphony (vol. I/5); and right until the end she was working intensively on editing the first version of Leonore (1805), the original version of the Leonora/Fidelio work-complex.

She was characterised by her phenomenal accuracy and by the passion with which she took charge of every detail, from the often highly complex compositional and performance histories of, for example, Haydn’s opera arrangements (an area of Haydn’s activities that through her thoroughness she made accessible for the first time) through the textual construction of the scores to the comprehensive documentation of source readings. Her work with our publishing house was always based on mutual appreciation, and we esteemed her extraordinary knowledge and expertise.

We will hold Christine Siegert in respectful memory.
G. HENLE PUBLISHERS