 | |
| Founded | 1901 |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | Austria |
| Headquarters location | Vienna |
| Publication types | Sheet music |
| Official website | universaledition.com |
Universal Edition (UE) is an Austrian classical music publishing firm. Founded in 1901 in Vienna, it originally intended to provide the core classical works and educational works to the Austrian market. The firm soon expanded to become one of the most important publishers of modernist and contemporary classical music.
Universal Edition was founded on 1 June 1901 in Vienna. [1] [lower-alpha 1] It was formed by the publishers Bernhard Herzmansky (himself from the Doblinger firm), Adolf Robitschek and Josef Weinberger as an attempt to compete with the Leipzig-based publishers Breitkopf & Härtel and Edition Peters. [1] UE itself describes this as an attempt to "simply to counter the predominance of the foreign music trade in Vienna with a domestic music publishing house". [2] In a financial boost for UE, the Austrian Ministry of Education gave a 5 July 1901 decree that Austrian music schools should prefer UE editions over those by German publishers. [1] The firm's creation was announced next month in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt :
"Die neue Musikausgabe, welche unter Zusammenwirken der hervorragendsten Interessenten des österreichisch-ungarischen Musikverlages gegründet wurde, [...] [wird] sowohl die Werke der Classiker wie auch die hervorragendsten Werke instructiver Art umfassen [...], denen sich Schöpfungen bedeutender moderner Meister, [...] anreihen werden." | "The new music publisher is a joint venture founded by leading publishers of Austria-Hungary. [...] As well as publishing the classics and significant instructive works, it will also publish compositions by important modern masters ..." |
| — Neues Wiener Tagblatt , 9 August 1901, p. 6 [lower-alpha 2] | —Translation by Nigel Simeone in Grove |
In 1904, UE acquired Aibl publishers, and so acquired the rights to works by Richard Strauss, Max Reger, and other composers. The arrival of Emil Hertzka as managing director in 1907, who remained until his death in 1932, really pushed the firm towards new music. Under Hertzka, UE signed contracts with a number of important contemporary composers, including Béla Bartók and Frederick Delius in 1908; Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker in 1909. Mahler's Symphony No. 8 was the first work UE acquired an original copyright to. Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky were signed in 1910, Karol Szymanowski in 1912, Leoš Janáček in 1917 and Kurt Weill in 1924. Through their association with Schoenberg, it also published many works by Alban Berg.
The firm's avant garde directions continued after World War II, when UE published works by a number of significant composers, among these Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, György Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Later important additions to the catalogue include Harrison Birtwistle, Friedrich Cerha, Georg Friedrich Haas, Cristóbal Halffter, Georges Lentz, Arvo Pärt, David Sawer, Gisela Selden-Goth, and Johannes Maria Staud.
UE have also published several significant historical editions, including the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi. In collaboration with Schott, they have published the Wiener Urtext Edition series since 1972. Originally consisting of works for one or two performers by composers from Johann Sebastian Bach to Johannes Brahms, the series was later expanded to include a limited number of later works, such as the Ludus Tonalis of Paul Hindemith.
On 19 October 2007, Universal Edition entered legal proceedings against the International Music Score Library Project, an online entity which seeks to make musical scores in the public domain available digitally. In response to a cease-and-desist letter from Universal Edition demanding that certain scores still covered by Austrian copyright be removed, IMSLP closed itself voluntarily, amidst controversy that UE's demands lacked reasonable legal grounds. While Austrian copyright governs works published up to 70 years after its composer's death, IMSLP is hosted in Canada, where copyright lasts twenty years fewer. The Internet Law professor Michael Geist wrote a column for the BBC, suggesting UE's actions lacked reasonable legal ground. [3] The International Music Score Library maintained that UE's actions lacked legal justification, and reopened on 30 June 2008.
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
The Second Viennese School was the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, particularly Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and close associates in early 20th-century Vienna. Their music was initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality and later, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later still, Schoenberg's serial twelve-tone technique. Adorno said that the twelve-tone method, when it had evolved into maturity, was a "veritable message in a bottle", addressed to an unknown and uncertain future. Though this common development took place, it neither followed a common time-line nor a cooperative path. Likewise, it was not a direct result of Schoenberg's teaching—which, as his various published textbooks demonstrate, was highly traditional and conservative. Schoenberg's textbooks also reveal that the Second Viennese School spawned not from the development of his serial method, but rather from the influence of his creative example.
Heinrich Schenker was a Galician-born Austrian music theorist whose writings have had a profound influence on subsequent musical analysis. His approach, now termed Schenkerian analysis, was most fully explained in a three-volume series, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, which included Harmony (1906), Counterpoint, and Free Composition (1935).
Julius Leopold Korngold was an Austrian music critic. He was the leading critic in early twentieth century Vienna, serving as chief music critic of the Neue Freie Presse from 1904 to 1934. His son was the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whom he named after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of his favorite composers.
Viktor Ullmann was a Silesia-born Austrian composer, conductor and pianist.
Hans Erich Apostel was a German-born Austrian composer of classical music.
Erwin Stein was an Austrian musician and writer, prominent as a pupil and friend of Schoenberg, with whom he studied between 1906 and 1910.
Richard Franz Joseph Heuberger was an Austrian composer of operas and operettas, a music critic, and teacher.
Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, published in 1913 at Universal Edition in Vienna.
Emil Hertzka was an influential and pioneering music publisher who was responsible for printing and promoting some of the most important European musical works of the 20th century.
Maria Hofer (1894–1977) was a renowned organist, pianist and composer. The daughter of an accomplished female singer, she was born in Amstetten, Lower Austria. Already as a child she was learning the organ, and within a few years was permitted to participate in church services as organist.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a for-profit subscription-based digital library of public-domain music scores. The project uses MediaWiki software, and as of 24 November 2023 has uploaded more than 736,000 scores and 80,700 recordings by 1,900 performers of more than 226,000 works by 27,400 composers. IMSLP has both an iOS app and an Android app.
Edition Peters is a classical music publisher founded in Leipzig, Germany in 1800.
Franz Mittler was an Austrian composer, musician, and humorist.
Josef Venantius von Wöss was a Viennese church musician, composer, teacher of harmony and music publishing lector. He is known for piano transcriptions of large-scale works by Gustav Mahler for Universal Edition.
Alexander Zemlinsky or Alexander von Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher.
Alfred August Ulrich Kalmus was an influential Austrian-born British music publisher.
Die Seejungfrau is a fantasy for large orchestra in three movements by Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, based on the folk-tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen.
Viktor Josef Keldorfer was an Austrian conductor of male voice choirs, in particular from 1922 to 1954 of the Wiener Schubertbund, and was a chairman of choir associations.
Yella Hertzka was an Austrian women's rights and peace activist, school director, and music business executive. She began working in women's humanitarian and social improvement projects in 1900. Co-founding the Neuer Wiener Frauenklub in 1903, she served as its president from 1909 to 1933. From 1904 she participated in the international women's rights movements, supporting women's suffrage and pacifism. In 1919, she attended the Zürich congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She was a co-founder of the Austrian section of the WILPF, organized its 1921 Vienna Congress, and attended every international WILPF congress held between 1919 and 1948. She worked to free prisoners of war after World War I and during World War II helped those wanting to emigrate or oppose the draft.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
