Hans Joachim Marx

Hans Joachim Marx (born 16 December 1935) is a German music historian. He has been professor of European music history at the University of Hamburg.

Life Born in Leipzig, Marx first studied music at the Academy of Music in Leipzig. In 1956 he escaped from East Germany to Freiburg im Breisgau in West Germany. After 1958 he studied musicology, German literature and philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg and Basel. In 1966 he obtained his doctorate in Basel under Arnold Schmitz with a dissertation on "The Organ Tablature of Clemens Hör". In the following years, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, he spent time researching and compiling sources for a complete edition of the works of Arcangelo Corelli. In 1966–1967 he was a lecturer at the University of Zurich, and from 1968 to 1972 he was assistant to Günther Massenkeil in Bonn. In the summer of 1972 he received his habilitation in musicology: in 1973 he became professor of European music history at the University of Hamburg where he remained until his retirement in 2001.

Marx's main areas of research have been on Renaissance instrumental music and Baroque music, in particular the works of George Frideric Handel to which he has many contributions. He is co-editor of the work editions of Corelli, Hasse and Handel, editor of the Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, which he founded in 1984, and of the six-volume Händel-Handbook (2008-2012). He is also co-editor of various musicological series (among others Abhandlungen zur Musikgeschichte, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn) and the Hamburger Mendelssohn-Vorträge, Verlag Christians, Hamburg.

Marx is a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, full emeritus member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg and Member of the Institute of Advanced Musical Studies of King's College London. Between 2004 and 2014 he was chairman of the board of the Göttingen International Handel Festival Foundation. Since 2001 he has been an honorary member of the Göttingen Händel-Gesellschaft.