This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2023) |
Paul Adolf Hirsch (24 February 1881 in Frankfurt am Main –25 November 1951 in Cambridge, England) [1] was a German industrialist. He was also a musician, bibliophile and musicologist who assembled the largest private music library in Europe. The Hirsch Collection is now housed at the British Library. [2]
Paul Hirsch was born into a wealthy Jewish mercantile family, the fourth of five children of Anna Pauline (née Mayer) and Ferdinand Hirsch (1834–1916). He had two brothers— Robert von Hirsch (1883–1977), [note 1] a noted art collector, and Carl Siegmund Hirsch, a district court judge who died in 1938 in the Buchenwald concentration camp. [3] Ferdinand Hirsch founded Hirsch and Company, an iron works, in 1867. After completing school, Paul Hirsch entered the family business, training in England and France, which also broadened his acquaintance with musicians and collectors. [1]
In 1911 he married Olga Ladenburg (1889–1969), daughter of a Frankfurt banker. [note 2] They lived first in Beethovenstraße and later at Neue Mainzer Straße 57 (destroyed in 1944). They had two sons and two daughters.
From 1930 to 1933 Hirsch was vice president of the Frankfurt Chamber of Industry and Commerce. He was also served on the advisory board for export trade, the foreign trade committee of the German Industry and Commerce Association, and chaired the foreign trade office. [1]
Hirsch belonged to the Weimar Society of Bibliophiles and co-founded the Frankfurt Bibliophile Society (Frankfurter Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft) in 1922, serving as chairman. [1]
He was a member of the German People's Party. [1]
Hirsch died on 23 November 1951 in Cambridge. [5]
Hirsch, an accomplished violinist who had studied with Adolf Rebner, [1] took a keen interest in publications concerning all aspects of music—performance, history and theory. In 1896 he began to collect historical musical works, focusing on early printed editions of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, 19th-century opera and early theoretical works. He participated in the Second Specialist Music Exhibition at the Leipzig Crystal Palace in 1909. [6] In 1922 Hirsch hired musicologist Kathi Meyer (later Meyer-Baer) as a research assistant and opened the library to the public two days a week. Hirsch and Meyer began compiling a catalog of the library contents.
In 1928 and 1929 Hirsch purchased the library of Berlin music critic Werner Wolffheim at auction. With this addition of approximately 15,000 items to the 5,000 he already possessed, he now owned the largest and best-kept private music library in Europe. Housed in a wing of the house on Neue Mainzer Straße, the library had its own concert hall. Hirsch organized over four hundred chamber music evenings, during which he often played first violin in his "house quartet", which on occasion would include his friend Ludwig Rottenberg and Rottenberg's son-in-law Paul Hindemith. [7]
The library was a valuable resource for musicians, musicologists and students. The visitor register for the years 1923 to 1935 lists many people well known in Frankfurt's musical circles, including Licco Amar, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, conductor and music critic Artur Holde, Erich Itor Kahn, pianist Emma Lübbecke-Job, singer Carl Rehfuss, Ludwig Rottenberg, Hermann Scherchen, Mátyás Seiber and Helmut Walcha. The list also records visitors who came from as far away as Tokyo. Other friends in Hirsch's musical circle included Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter and Stefan Zweig. [1]
Hirsch's collection encompasses four and a half centuries of Western music. A few of the items that he was most proud of, according to librarian and musicologist Alec Hyatt King, were:
Opera is particularly well represented, as noted by King: [10]
The range of operas in score in Hirsch's library was remarkable, and exemplified both his bibliographical and his musical taste. It began with Peri's Euridice (Florence, 1600), and proceeded right up to his own times. He had some forty operas by Lulli, all Mozart's in the first editions issued in full score in all important countries, and some Rossini rarities, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Il Guglielmo Tell, L'Inganno felice, Matilde Shabran, Maometto secondo, Mosè in Egitto, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Semiramide, all printed in handsome oblong folio by lithography by Ratti & Cencetti in Rome, between c. 1816 and 1825. [note 5] Equally impressive were the sumptuously bound folio scores of nine operas and ballets by Richard Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos (in both versions), Der Bürger als Edelmann, Elektra, Feuersnot, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Guntram, Josephs Legende, Der Rosenkavalier, and Salome. These and five dramatic works by [Franz] Schreker were normally available for hire only. The same restriction had originally applied to the full score of the younger Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, one of Hirsch's most cherished operas, and to another rarity, Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla.
Between 1922 and 1934 Hirsch issued facsimile editions of some library items, edited by Johannes Wolf and published by Martin Breslauer. The German National Library has cataloged eleven of these facsimiles and reprints. [12]
When the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Hirsch's situation became difficult because of his Jewish heritage. The Bibliophile Societies came under the control of the Reich Chamber of Culture, where Jews could no longer hold board positions. In 1934 Hirsch resigned as chair of the Frankfurt Society and joined the Kulturbundes Deutscher Juden.
Early in 1936, Hirsch wrote to his friend Edward J. Dent, Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, proposing a contractual loan of the music library to the university. Dent helped arrange the loan and facilitated the emigration of Hirsch's family to Cambridge later that year. [13] Despite efforts by Frankfurt mayor Friedrich Krebs to prevent export or to confiscate the music library, [1] Hirsch was able to transfer almost all of it to Cambridge in several train cars. [2]
Hirsch's collection was placed in the newly built Cambridge University Library where it took up almost 1,000 feet (300 m) of shelving on the fifth floor. [14] Despite his expatriation from Germany in 1938, Hirsch was briefly interned as an enemy alien in 1940, which worsened his already fragile health. This, in combination with his strained finances, led to his decision to sell the music library. [1] In 1946, with assistance from Dent, he sold it to the British Museum for £120,000 (equivalent to £6,287,000in 2023) although he continued to purchase additional items which he donated to the museum. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 [15] created the British Library, which took ownership of the British Museum library. [2]
Hirsch wrote a number of papers about items in his library. A 75-page catalog of works by W. A. Mozart was published in 1906 in honor of the composer's 150th birthday. [16] In 1928 he published the first volume of the Katalog der Musikbibliothek Paul Hirsch. [17] He also published several articles about the iron business.
The Austrian National Library is the largest library in Austria, with more than 12 million items in its various collections. The library is located in the Neue Burg Wing of the Hofburg in center of Vienna. Since 2005, some of the collections have been relocated within the Baroque structure of the Palais Mollard-Clary. Founded by the Habsburgs, the library was originally called the Imperial Court Library ; the change to the current name occurred in 1920, following the end of the Habsburg Monarchy and the proclamation of the Austrian Republic. The library complex includes four museums, as well as multiple special collections and archives.
The German National Library is the central archival library and national bibliographic centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its task is to collect, permanently archive, comprehensively document and record bibliographically all German and German-language publications since 1913, foreign publications about Germany, translations of German works, and the works of German-speaking emigrants published abroad between 1933 and 1945, and to make them available to the public. The DNB is also responsible for the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie and several special collections like the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945, Anne-Frank-Shoah-Bibliothek and the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum. The German National Library maintains co-operative external relations on a national and international level. For example, it is the leading partner in developing and maintaining bibliographic rules and standards in Germany and plays a significant role in the development of international library standards. The cooperation with publishers has been regulated by law since 1935 for the Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig and since 1969 for the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main.
The German Music Archive in Leipzig, is the central collection of printed and recorded music and the music-bibliographic information centre for Germany. It is a Federal agency founded in 1970, tasked with collecting all music published in the country. Publishers of printed and recorded music in Germany are required by law to deliver two copies of every edition as legal deposits to the archive.
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales is an international non-profit organization, founded in Paris in 1952, with the aim of comprehensively documenting extant historical sources of music all over the world. It is the largest organization of its kind and the only entity operating globally to document written musical sources. RISM is one of the four bibliographic projects sponsored by the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, the others being Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Répertoire international d'iconographie musicale, and Répertoire international de la presse musicale.
Max Paul Eugen Bekker was a German music critic and author. Described as having "brilliant style and […] extensive theoretical and practical knowledge," Bekker was chief music critic for both the Frankfurter Zeitung (1911–1923), and later the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (1934–1937).
Walter Greiling was a German chemist and futurologist. He sometimes used the pseudonym Walt Grey.
The Bibliography of Music Literature is an international bibliography of literature on music. It considers all kind of music and includes both current and older literature. Since 1968, the BMS editorial staff has also been working as the German committee for the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM). The bibliography includes monographs, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, articles and reviews from journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings, yearbooks, anthologies, and essays from critical reports. It contains printed media as well as online resources, data media, sound recordings, audiovisual media, and microforms. Each record provides the title in the original language, full bibliographic data, a keyword index, and mostly an abstract. Currently, BMS online has more than 315,000 records of literature on music. It is supplemented by the OLC-SSG Musicology, which incorporates the contents of some more 150 music journals from 1993 onward. BMS online participates actively on Virtual Library of Musicology (ViFaMusik), the central gateway for music and musicology in Germany.
Martin Sommerfeld was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany to the U.S. who was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and subsequently at Columbia University, the City College of New York, Smith College, and Middlebury College, where he taught German language and literature. He authored and edited a number of volumes on German literature from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and he wrote numerous contributions to the four-volume Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (1925–31).
"Beim Auszug in das Feld", K. 552, is a military-patriotic song composed for tenor voice and piano accompaniment by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The title may be translated "On going forth to the field".
Bernard Hartmut Breslauer was a German antiquarian book dealer and collector, who lived in turn in Germany, England and the United States. As a book dealer he published many catalogues and was a scholar of book history.
Alois Ickstadt is a German pianist, choral conductor, university professor and composer. He was professor at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt. He promoted choral singing from children's choir to adult groups for the state broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk, namely the Figuralchor Frankfurt which he founded in 1966 and conducted until 2011.
Figuralchor Frankfurt is a mixed choir in Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany. It was founded in 1966 as a youth choir for the broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk by Alois Ickstadt, who conducted it for 45 years. From 1977 to the 1990s, the choir was known as Figuralchor des Hessischen Rundfunks. It performs in concerts, radio productions and recordings, with a focus on a cappella music, but has also participated in joint symphonic productions such as Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand for the opening of the Alte Oper concert hall in 1981. The choir has been conducted by Paul Leonard Schäffer since 2016.
Harald Heckmann was a German musicologist who focused on source documentation, particularly supported by electronic data processing, and music iconography. Besides teaching at the Musikhochschule Freiburg, he established in 1954 and led until 1971 the German Archive for the History of Music, and afterwards was chairman of the German Broadcasting Archive. He held leading positions of international organisations such as the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), and Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM).
Ulrich Leisinger is a German musicologist and director of the research department of the Mozarteum University Salzburg in Salzburg.
Ewald Lassen is a German classical violinist.
Max Kurnik was a German writer and theatre critic.
Peter Sühring is a German musicologist, publicist and music critic.
Alexander Hyatt King, also known as Alec Hyatt King, was an English musicologist and bibliographer, who was a music librarian of the British Museum and leading scholar on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Gotthilf Weisstein was a German journalist, writer and bibliophile.
Robert Max Hirsch, from 1913 von Hirsch was a German-Swiss leather manufacturer and patron of the arts.