DR. WOLF-DIETER SEIFFERT
Managing Director and Head of Promotion and Marketing at G. Henle Publishers Munich
Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert has been the Managing Director and Head of Promotion and Marketing at G. Henle Publishers in Munich/Germany, the world-famous music publishing company with its distinctive, high-quality blue Urtext editions since 2000. With a small team, Seiffert was the inventor of the “Henle Library App,” the now world-leading music app for classical musicians.
Versatile musician, editor, and musicologist
Seiffert was born in 1959 in Frankfurt. He read musicology, modern German literature, and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. As a student, he worked for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe at the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg, where his mentor was Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rehm. On a scholarship from the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes,” he did his doctorate in 1990 with a thesis on “Mozarts frühe Streichquartette” (Rudolf Bockholdt). That same year, Seiffert entered G. Henle Publishers as an Urtext editor. Parallel to employment with Henle; he completed a diploma in business studies at St. Gallen University, KMU-HSG.
Editor of numerous Urtext Editions
Seiffert has edited numerous Urtext editions for G. Henle Publishers, predominantly on Mozart’s works: all of his violin sonatas (including the “Wunderkind” sonatas and the fragments), the string trio (“Divertimento”), the piano trio fragments, all string quartets, and string quintets, the “Kleine Nachtmusik,” the piano quintet, all violin concertos (including the single-movement pieces) as well as the “Sinfonia concertante.”
Seiffert was the first to edit a revised Urtext of Mozart’s famous “Alla Turca”-piano sonata K. 331 under consideration of the recently found new sources. He has also worked on Reger and Schubert. In addition, Seiffert is recently occupied with Mozart’s last piano concerto and is planning a new Urtext of Mozart’s d-minor piano concerto.
The Henle Blog and other initiatives
Seiffert represents Henle Urtext worldwide at music fairs (e.g., in Frankfurt, Shanghai, and Tokyo) or with lectures on all continents. The well-known Henle Blog (in English and German) was his idea, and he regularly writes for it. Seiffert loves to give introductory concert lectures at music festivals, and he has, without exaggeration, written thousands of contributions to concert programs and liner notes for all significant CD labels.
Official positions
Seiffert served as Secretary and President of RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), and for many years, he was Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Musikhochschule München.
