The musical thought of Adolph Bernhard Marx has long been one of the familiar themes of German musical scholarship, from Eduard Krüger's perennially shared view of Marx's work as Hegelian, through Hugo Riemann's frequently polemical engagement with Marx's method, to Carl Dahlhaus' ever renewable fascination with Marx and his Formenlehre. Until very recently, however, there has been precious little in English on Marx, and until this very volume, precious little Marx in English. In the nineteenth century, four of his works received English translations relatively quickly after their initial publication: General Music Instruction, The Music of the Nineteenth Century, Introduction to the Interpretation of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and the first volume of his composition treatise. Since then, there have been no further translations, despite a burgeoning interest on the part of Anglo-American musicologists in Marx's theory of form, and particularly his view of sonata form.

Thus when Ian Bent invited me to contribute a volume on A. B. Marx to his Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, my first thought was to do a translation. But which work of Marx's would be most useful to English-speaking historians of theory? At four volumes, his treatise on composition is impracticably long, whereas his General Music Instruction, although compact, does not present his thought at its most developed. And the polemical monograph, The Old School of Music in Conflict with our Times, while presenting a fascinating view of nineteenth-century music theory and pedagogy, does not touch on Marx's theory of musical form.