Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters

I. Bibliographical description

The Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters (Yearbook of the Peters Music Library, RIPM code JMP) was published annually between 1895 and 1941 in Leipzig by the C. F. Peters Verlag. Each issue, which appeared in the spring, treats and bears the date of the previous year.

The central portion of each yearbook, which contained significant music-historical research, generally contained some 80 pages, sometimes fewer, sometimes more. An attempt near the publication’s end to increase the number of volumes—by including shorter contributions—could not be pursued owing to the yearbook’s discontinuation after 1940. This central portion of each yearbook was preceded by an annual report of the library owner and director of less than 5 pages. Each yearbook contained an international bibliography of music literature (“of all cultural nations,” as generally stated in the bibliography’s title) for the past year, divided into nine to ten categories, running to approximately 50 pages. Within this bibliography, titles acquired by the Peters Music Library were marked with an asterisk. Beginning in 1913, a necrology for the past year was introduced under the title "Totenschau," generally some 10 pages in length.

Seldom-used sections included “Kleine Mitteilungen” (short notices), literary reports and reviews.[1] Two double volumes, treating two years in one volume, were published: once at the outbreak of the First World War (for 1914/15) and once again during the economic crisis of 1922/23, this latter volume only containing the annual report and bibliography, without further contributions. The annual report and articles were printed in full-page format, with the necrology and bibliography in two columns. No advertising was included.

II. Biographical sketches of the main editors

This list is grouped by (1) the library owners and (2) the library directors.  The director co-authored the annual reports and appeared as sole author of the annual music bibliography.

1. Library owners

Max Abraham (1831‑1900)

As a music-loving lawyer and businessman, Abraham became sole director of the publishing house C.F. Peters in 1880, renewed the printing of music and founded the Musikbibliothek Peters (Peters Music Library) in 1893, which opened in 1894. He signed the annual reports 1894 to 1899 with the publisher's signature “C.F. Peters.” In the tribute to Abraham by Paul Ollendorff on the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham’s birth, published in JMP 1931, Ollendorff expressly mentions that Abraham, as the library owner, was involved in the publication of the yearbook and the annual report. Abraham lived only a few years beyond the library’s founding; terminally ill, he voluntarily took his life in 1900 and bequeathed the Music Library to the City of Leipzig in his will.

Henri Hinrichsen (1868-1942)

He joined the publishing house as Abraham's nephew and took over after Abraham's suicide and continued signing the annual reports as “C.F. Peters.” Hinrichsen bought the Peters Music Library back from the city of Leipzig in 1922 and donated large sums to the city for its own music library and a women's college. Hinrichsen’s property was expropriated in the Reich Progrom Night of 1938 as part of the "Aryanization" of Jewish property by the National Socialist authorities. Robbed of his property, Hinrichsen fled to Belgium, where he was unable to obtain a visa to England or the United States. He was arrested in Brussels after the occupation of Belgium by German troops and murdered in Auschwitz.

Johannes Petschull (1901‑2001)

To the Nazis, Petschull, a former music publishing manager, was the right man to become the “Aryan” successor to Hinrichsen. Petschull is described as having bought the publishing house with the bookseller Kurt Hermann, which was in fact managed in a trust; he also signed the 1940 annual report with “C.F. Peters.” Together with Walter Hinrichsen, Henri’s son who emigrated to the United States and returned to Germany as an American soldier in 1945, Petschull ensured that large parts of the publishing house were restituted to Walter Hinrichsen and brought to Frankfurt/Main in the postwar American Zone. The remains of C.F. Peters were expropriated again in 1950, this time by the East German government (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) and converted into a “Volkseigener Betrieb” (publicly-owned business, or VEB). The Peters Music Library was incorporated into the holdings of the municipal music library. The Peters Library remains there to this day, while the publishing house was re-privatized after the collapse of the DDR and merged with other parts of the publishing house in London and New York.

2. Library directors

Emil Vogel (1859‑1908)

Vogel studied music with Philipp Spitta in Berlin and worked with Fr. X. Haberl during his Palestrina studies in Italy. He had a tendency towards bibliographical work and, before he took over the management of the Peters Music Library in 1893, he created a two-volume catalog of printed editions of secular vocal music in Italy from the period 1500-1700 as well as a catalog for the music department of the centuries-old ducal library in Wolfenbüttel. Vogel edited the Jahrbuch as library director from 1894 to 1900 and in this function (like all his successors) published the annual reports of his period and the music bibliography. In addition, in the first yearbook (1894) he published a detailed overview, describing the holdings of  libraries in Europe that contain important music sources, and he reported on the condition and fate of the Borghese music library (1896). In the second year of the Jahrbuch, he began a series of reviews under the title “Besprechungen einger Bücher und Schriften über Musik” (Critical reviews of some books and writings on music), which was discontinued in the following year. Vogel also gave descriptions of individual musician portraits from the collection of the Peters Music Library. He also wrote independent music-historical treatises, such as on the first sheet music for figural music made with movable metal type (1895) and on the history of rhythmic beat (Taktschlag, in 1898). In 1901 Vogel ended his work for the Peters Music Library with the publication of the yearbook for 1900 and ceased work for health reasons. Any connection between his departure and the suicide of the owner of the publishing house and library, Max Abraham, who bequeathed the library to the city of Leipzig in his will, can only be assumed.

Rudolf Schwartz (1859‑1935)

Schwartz was a student of Philipp Spitta and in 1901 took over the management of the Peters Music Library, with its corresponding duties for the yearbook (editing, annual report, necrology, and bibliography), until 1928. From 1907, Schwartz signed with the title of professor. According to information from Arnold Schering in the obituary for Schwartz (1935), a reorganization of the holdings and the theoretical part of the catalog of the Peters Music Library are to be owed to him. His successor Kurt Taut published a list of Schwartz's publications in the same yearbook. Schwartz published several books on Italian and German music history, including the history of frottole in the fifteenth century and a presentation of the art of music in the nineteenth century. He edited works by Dulichius, Haßler and Petrucci. In addition to the annual reports, the necrology and the music bibliography, Schwartz began publishing in the JMP in 1897, with a contribution on the first German oratorio, Actus musicus de divite et Lazaro… by Andreas Fromm (1898). Later publications include those on rhythmic beat (1907), the “songless time” in Germany (1913), the Bach manuscripts of the Peters Music Library (1919), the frottole in the fifteenth century (1924), and on the characteristics of C. F. Zelter (1929). Schwartz also introduced the annual “Totenschau” column immediately preceding the bibliography.

Kurt Taut (1888‑1939)

After studying with Hugo Riemann and Arnold Schering, and two years after his doctorate in musicology (on hunting music), Taut became head of the Peters Music Library in 1929 and editor of the Jahrbuch, He published bibliographies of Handel literature, and the writings of Schering and Rudolf Schwartz (1935). In addition, he compiled and edited initial volumes of the Bibliographie des Musikschriftums behalf of the Staatliche Institut für Deutsche Musikforschug in Berlin, beginning in 1936, which replaced and superseded the directory in the Peters yearbook.

Eugen Schmitz (1882-1959)

Schmitz was a music researcher and editor trained by Adolf Sandberger in Munich, music lecturer and professor at the Technical University in Dresden beginning in 1916, and music journalist who supported the official National Socialist cultural policy in the field of concerts and opera from 1933. As a reliable NSDAP member since 1939, Schmitz was director of the Peters Music Library until it was merged with the Leipzig city music library in 1955. In addition to the obligatory annual reports and necrologies, he wrote articles for the JMP, including those on the early history of lyrical monody in Italy in the seventeenth century (1911), the music critic of today (1930), a report on the autograph holdings of the Peters Music Library (1939), and two portions of a fragmentary alphabetical listing (only letters A to K) of the sources still unnamed in Eitner's lexicon, held in the Peters Music Library (1939 and 1940), as well as the obituary for Arnold Schering (1940).

III. Overview of contents

1. Annual Reports

The annual reports of the library management contained information about the internal organizational conditions and the quantitative and qualitative development of the Peters Music Library, about the number of users and their social composition, but above all a report on the new acquisitions in the various theoretical and practical areas of the institute's collecting activities, as well as on the public position of the library, its participation in exhibitions and educational events. In addition to the name of the library director, who changed three times (Emil Vogel, Rudolf Schwartz, Kurt Taut, Eugen Schmitz), the signatures of the annual report always started with the seal “C. F. Peters,” the name of the founder and name bearer of the Peters publishing house, who died in 1827. Thus, this signature designated the publisher of Edition Peters as the owner and overseer of the library. After the forced Aryanization—expropriation without compensation—of the publisher in 1938 in connection with the Reich Progrom Night and the subsequent escape of Hinrichsen, Petschull was appointed by the Nazi administration, with the library and JMP under his purview. Although Abraham donated the library to the city of Leipzig in his will, Hinrichsen had repurchased it in 1922 after it could no longer be maintained by the city due to the inflationary monetary collapse. In the spring of 1939, following the expropriation, the signature “C. F. Peters” was dropped and the annual report only bore the signature of the library director Schmitz, who had been in office since 1939 following the death of Taut.

2. Music bibliography and necrology

The international music bibliography that concludes each respective yearbook was a historically significant initiative by the library's founder, Abraham, for it fulfilled a widely recognized desideratum and provided an orientation in the ever-growing and confusing musical literature. During the First World War, the literature of countries at war with Germany was excluded from the bibliography, due to a lack of data owing to non-cooperation with foreign libraries and their employees, but also partial exclusion and politically motivated disregard from those allied against Germany. The vague term of “cultural nations” (Kulturländer), Emil Vogel’s professed scope of the music bibliography and a term which generally appeared in the bibliography’s title, also meant that perceived nonelite and hostile nations were deprived of the status of a cultural nation. The bibliography had nine to ten headings with occasionally slightly variant headings. For indication, in 1938 these headings were:

I: Bibliography, encyclopedias and directories;

II: Periodicals; History of music (general and particular);

III: Biographies and monographs (Collected essays on music and musicians. Memoirs. Music guides. Festival, club and congress publications. Folklore. Exotic music);

IV: Biographies and monographs (Individual masters);

V: General music theory. Acoustics. Sound psychology. Rhythm and metric. Elementary, harmony, composition and form theory. Listening. Conducting. Musical notation;

VI: Special music theory: singing. Liturgy. Church, art and school singing. Speaking;

VII: Special music theory: instruments. Includes instrument making and instrumentation teaching;

VIII: Aesthetics. Psychological. Pedagogy. Criticism. Copyright. Fiction. Broadcast. Dance. Sound film;

IX: Dissertations;

X: Textbooks. Cantatas, melodramas, operettas, operas, oratorios, pantomimes, passions, singing games.

This bibliography was published for the last time in the spring of 1939 for the previous year 1938, since its objective had been taken over centrally in 1936 by the Staatlische Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung (State Institute for German Music Research, also created by Eugen Schmitz) and continued under political control, where it remained after 1945, following the denazified continuation of the Institute and its later incorporation into the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SPK), where it remains and cooperates with the Répertoire Internationale de Littérature Musicale (RILM), which was founded in 1966 and has International Center in New York.

The annual necrology consisted of an alphabetical list of deceased musicians with title or function, date of death and source reference; from 1914‑18 those who died as German soldiers in the war were marked with the Military Cross of Merit.

3. Essays

The music-historical essays contained contributions from all areas of music research, especially systematic-theoretical, aesthetic-speculative, work-analytical as well as style and genre history. Experts who sought greater prominence for themselves in their specialist areas, as well as better-known authors with generalizing aspirations, were provided a platform for their occasionally groundbreaking and trend-setting articles. The broad field of Venetian opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was discussed several times by different authors (especially Hermann Kretzschmar between 1900 and 1910 and Sandberger in the 1920s). The madrigal, the frottole and other vocal and instrumental genres in Italy also were repeatedly examined by different authors. Great emphasis was placed on research into the development of German art song in relation to folk song and the emergence of a German form of opera. Apart from topics related to the Middle Ages, music in France was hardly discussed, with the exception of a French-language contribution by Jules Combarieu, which dealt with the influence of German music on France. From different positions and with different methods, authors such as Kretzschmar, Schering, Heinrich Besseler and Hans Mersmann tried to answer fundamental questions of music understanding, music-aesthetically and hermeneutically or phenomenologically.

IV. Statement on journal’s relative importance and historical place

In the JMP, the editors attempted to document and stabilize the upswing that musicology had experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as an academic discipline at German universities. That this work could be sustained continuously for more than forty years owed to the consistently high quality of the contributions, along with constant conservative and German-national sentiments, the latter surely providing cover for the Jewish owner, Hinrichsen. In a similar fashion to Alfred Einstein, editor of the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, Hinrichsen must have recognized personally the type of gratitude paid by the political representatives of the German nation, and the majority of their scientific henchmen in the field of the musicology, when they excluded members of a Jewish minority from leadership positions, expelled and murdered them.

One can say that the Jahrbücher always had an outstanding, standard-setting main author in each period, from Kretzschmar to Hermann Abert to Schering to Friedrich Blume, and most everyone well-known in German musicology were gathered here. Many articles in the JMP were of fundamental and trend-setting importance for further music research in the German Reich, with certain articles emanating decisive, formative terms and axioms that were soon adopted and repeated by the whole guild, for instance, Curt Sachs’s concept of a musical baroque (1919) or Blume’s discussion of "continued spinning" (Fortspinnung, JMP 1929). The entire elaborate conceptual apparatus with which music history was formed according to normative categories also received elaboration in the yearbooks, especially in the 1920s, and continued to be axiomatic after 1945, through continued publication of many of the authors and their students.

Starting with the war years 1914‑1918 the editors tended towards a more chauvinistic attitude. There was constant talk of a German superiority in musicology—in reality, organizationally and politically enforced—, which if believed, would have become visible at the last congress of the International Music Society (IMG) in Paris, June 1914.[2] After 1933, the political terms “volklich” or “völkisch” appeared in the academic articles as a designation for geographically and ethnically determined musical phenomena, although hardly any direct politics appeared in these publications. However, in the annual reports, the political framework conditions and the subordination of the library to state supervision through the inclusion of Nazi representatives in its administrative bodies, was reported without comment. Even the attack by Nazi Germany on Czechoslovakia, sanctioned by the Munich Agreement, and the military repatriation of the Sudeten territories to the German Reich was solemnly welcomed in the annual report co-signed by Hinrichsen in 1938, and the effects of the patriotic enthusiasm on researchers who diligently and unwaveringly pursued their music studies were described.

It was only in the very last article of the last yearbook (1940)—Georg Schünemann on the German transmission of Mozart’s music—where denunciations such as “der Jude Hermann Levi” or “Karl Wolfskehl [Jd]” appeared, suggesting the allegedly pernicious influences of Jewish authors on the German translations of Mozart's Italian opera texts by Da Ponte. Schünemann had the National Socialist-oriented assignment to accomplish a new, “Aryan” translation of the Da Ponte texts at the Peters publishing house, which was controlled and owned by the National Socialists. This grotesque commission, as well the article in which it was explained, concealed that Mozart's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was Jewish, and as such,  he should have been labeled as "Da Ponte [Jd]," and that one should have spoken of the racially depraved character of the libretto.

V. Collaborators and Contributors

Hermann Abert (1871‑1927)

Abert was the son of the composer and Stuttgart conductor Johann Joseph Abert and father of the musicologist Anna Amalie Abert. He was a music historian but began his academic training as a classical philologist and later concentrated on opera history after working on antiquity and the Middle Ages. He taught in Halle, Heidelberg and Berlin. His way of working, which is based on sources and standards of values, was educational. He developed the image of Mozart which was decisive for his generation through a renewed and fundamental revision (second edition) of Otto Jahn's Mozart biography. After his work as secretary of the Deutsche Musikgesellschaft, he became its chairman in 1923. For the JMP he wrote on J.G. Noverre and his influence on dramatic ballet composition (1908), Piccinni as a buffa composer (1913), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1918), the current state of research on ancient music (1921), on the memory of Hermann Kretzschmar (1924), on Beethoven's personality and art (1925), and Carl Maria von Weber and his Freischütz (1926).

Guido Adler (1855‑1941)

He came to Vienna at the age of nine and, after completing his legal training, soon turned his inclinations towards music journalism and science into his profession, founding the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft in 1884 together with Ph. Spitta and Friedrich Chrysander. Adler succeeded Eduard Hanslick in the Viennese chair in 1885 and founded the institute for musicology at the University of Vienna in 1898, based on his 1884 work plan for the structure of the discipline. Adler is one of the great reference figures within the guild because of the style criticism concept he developed. As a professor emeritus in 1927, honorary member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Wien and as editor of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich after the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, Adler had to endure anti-Semitic discrimination and hostility. In the JMP he published on music and musicology (an address given at the University of Vienna) (1898), Beethoven and his patrons (1900), about heterophony (1908), and music history lessons at grammar schools and secondary schools (1914/15)

Heinrich Besseler (1900‑69)

He was a musicologist who trained in Vienna (with Gàl and Adler), Freiburg (with Gurlitt) and Göttingen (with Ludwig), taught in Heidelberg (appointed music professor at the age of 28), Jena and Leipzig, and with groundings in philosophy and science. For partly opportunistic-careerist, partly ideological motives, he ideally and organizationally oriented to the Nazi music policy: first SA, then NSDAP member, member and activist in the Staatliche Institut für Deutsche Musikforschung, was supported by the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Later in the DDR, he similarly knew how to cooperate with the state authorities. As a medieval researcher, he maintained an international exchange of ideas even in the later 1930s (with Jacques Handschin, Basel and Yvonne Rokseth, Paris) without abandoning the axioms of the Ludwig School (and his other nationalist views). In the JMP he wrote on basic questions of musical hearing (1925), and basic questions of music aesthetics (1926).

Friedrich Blume (1893‑1975)

Blume was one of the decisive and formative figures in German musicology in the twentieth century. Trained with Abert in Leipzig and Berlin, he worked in Berlin and Kiel (where he held the musicological chair from 1934 to 1958) and was responsible for the school-based syntheses and formulation of guild-style doctrines. The universalistic claim to collect the knowledge of his generation of German musicologists, to lexically grasp it and to present it with a certain general validity, was decisive for the plan developed since 1943 to create a broad and in-depth lexicon, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), the first volume of which was published in 1949 and which could only be completed after his death in 1986. The focus of Blume's own research was on older and church music. In the period from 1933 to 1945, without being a member of the NSDAP, he took part in the implementation of a number of National Socialist-oriented projects such as the early volumes of Erbe deutscher Musik, which he carried out as a member of the State Institute for German Music Research. In 1939, he contributed the section on German musicology in the Festschrift of German scholars on the fiftieth birthday of the Adolf Hitler. He also introduced the “Festival of Choirs” in Schleswig Holstein in 1939 and on this occasion made commitments to the national community and the German state as a whole and described the music as supporting the state. In two effective and controversial publications, he wrote dubiously on the core issue of National Socialist music policy, race, declaring race research in the field of music to be essential, but doubting the possibility of clarifying it in a scientific way. After 1945, Blume actively participated in the rebuilding of the music research society and its international integration into the scientific community and was its president for a long time. In the JMP he published a contribution to the formation of musical concepts (1929), Joseph Haydn's artistic personality in his string quartets (1931), and Dietrich Buxtehude's cantatas (1940).

Ernst Bücken (1884‑1949)

He was as musicology student of Adolf Sandberger and taught from 1925 to 1945 at the University of Cologne. He thought in terms of epochs and generalized categories and with this attitude he edited the first and for a long time authoritative Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft (in 10 volumes, 1927‑34), which also was reverently called the “Bücken Psalter.” From 1933 he openly and radically represented National Socialist positions, anti-modern and anti-Semitic. In the JMP he published on basic questions in music history as a humanistic discipline (1927).

Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901)

The great Handel researcher of the nineteenth century, he edited several important music magazines: The (Leipziger) Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in 1868‑71 and 1875‑82, the Jahrbücher für musikalische Wissenschaft (1863 and 1867), and the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. From 1866 until his death he lived and worked in a private research center that he created, with an archive and his own publication facilities, in Bergedorf near Hamburg. The network of his relationships and correspondence with musicians and scientists of his time was extensive. For the JMP he wrote on the original voices for Handel’s Messiah (1895).

Jules Combarieu (1859‑1916)

A French musicologist, he studied with Ph. Spitta in Berlin and became a professor at the Collège de France and was the founder and editor of La Revue musicale (Paris, 1901-1912). In the second year of the JMP, he published an article in French, “L’influence de la musique allemande sur la musique française” (1895).

Karl Gustav Fellerer (1902‑84)

Fellerer was a musicologist who was initially close to the Catholic traditions and institutions and researched in the field of church music, then his research and views in connection with National Socialism also extended to secular questions. He taught in Münster, Friborg, and from 1939 in Cologne. In view of his propagandistic publication in the spirit of National Socialism during the war and his morally reprehensible assistance for the special staff music of Reichsleiter Rosenberg in connection with the looting of areas of Europe occupied by the German Wehrmacht, one can be astonished (or it is indicative of the restorative character of the post-war era) that Fellerer could re-establish himself at the Cologne University and had subsequent a leading role in the musical life of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria. In the JMP he published on the exploration of ancient music in the sixteenth to eighteenth century (1935), the sound problem of the style change of the sixteenth century (1937), and Italian organ music of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries (1938).

Max Friedländer (1852‑1934)

Friedländer was a song researcher who was initially trained as a singer and taught musicology in Berlin from 1894, rising from private lecturer to professor. After his leading participation in the commission for the publication of the folk song book for male choirs suggested by the German Kaiser, he travelled to the United States as a guest lecturer. He dealt with the early history of German art song in the eighteenth century as well as with the songs of Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. In the JMP, which was closely connected to him, he published on ten previously unpublished letters by Franz Schubert (1894), ballad fragments by Robert Schumann (1897), an unknown youthful work by Beethoven (1899), and Brahms' Volkslieder (1902).

Walter Gerstenberg (1904‑88)

He was a music researcher trained by Abert and Kroyer in the 1920s, who subsequently taught at various universities including Tübingen. He was mainly concerned with the instrumental music of Bach and Mozart, but also with the vocal music of the early modern era and founded the Internationale Schubert Gesellschaft in 1963 and the New Schubert Edition. In the JMP he wrote “Von Luther zu Schütz” (1936).

Wilibald Gurlitt (1889‑1963)

A music historian trained by Riemann, Gurlitt taught in Freiburg and was a reference person within the guild, a driving force in the German organ movement, and in tonally authentic performance of medieval and later music. Since he refused to separate from his Jewish wife, he was relieved of all his offices in 1937, banned from publication and monitored. Müller-Blattau replaced him, and after 1945 he was reinstated in all academic functions. The JMP opened its pages for him in the later 1930s and he was still able to publish under the editorship of Kurt Taut. He contributed on Heinrich Schütz’s 350th birthday (1935), Max Reger's letters to Hugo Riemann (1936), and the music in Raphael's Saint Cecilia (1938).

Robert Haas (1886‑1960)

Haas was an Austrian musicologist born in Prague, who initially held positions of Kapellmeister in Germany and from 1920 to 1945 headed the music department of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB). He was also an employee of van Hoboken's master archive and from 1929 he held an extraordinary professorship. Haas was co-editor of the complete editions of the works of Bruckner and Hugo Wolf and collaborator on Bücken’s Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft (volumes on the Baroque era and performance practice). As an anti-Semite and, by Austrian standards, a relatively early sympathizer of German National Socialism (he joined the NSDAP in 1933) he experienced his heyday after the Anschluss of Austria and in 1945 was relieved of all his offices. In the JMP he published on the music collection of the National Library in Vienna (1930) and “Der Wiener Bühnentanz von 1740 bis 1764” (1937).

Richard Hohenemser (1870‑1942)

Born in Frankfurt/Main into a Jewish family, Hohenemser lived as a music writer in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin without university employment after completing his musicological training (in Berlin with Ph. Spitta, Bellermann and Fleischer and in Munich with Sandberger). He authored several books and essays and took his own life with his wife in 1942 to avoid deportation. For the JMP he wrote on comedy and humor in music (1917).

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877‑1935)

He came from the natural sciences which he studied in Vienna, then became a student of Carl Stumpf in Berlin and worked on his first projects in the field of sound psychology and music ethnology and headed the Berlin phonogram archive. His professorship at Berlin University was revoked by the Nazis in 1933 and he immediately emigrated to New York, where he taught at the New School of Social Research. He died while teaching at Cambridge. He published in the JMP on melody and scales (1912).

Heinrich Husmann (1908‑83)

Husmann was a music researcher trained in Göttingen (with Friedrich Ludwig) and then in Berlin, and he maintained instrument collection of the Grassi Museum in Leipzig from 1933 to 1939, later teaching as medieval researcher and ethnomusicologist until his retirement in Göttingen. For the JMP he wrote on the office organa the Notre Dame period (1935), Olympos and the beginnings of the Greek enharmonics (1937), and seven African scales (1939).

Georg Kinsky (1882‑1951)

As a trained archivist, Kinsky had a tendency towards music bibliography as an exact science and acquired a great deal of knowledge in the field of instrument science. He worked at the Berlin State Library and at the Musikhistorisches Museum Wilhelm Heyer in Cologne. He also taught as a private lecturer at Cologne University, laid the foundations for August Halm's Beethoven catalog raisonné, and was persecuted by the National Socialists as the son of a Jewish businessman and was deprived of working documents. In the JMP he published on musical instrument collections in the past and present (1920), and Forkel's letters to Hoffmeister & Kühnel, a contribution to the early history of book maintenance (1932).

Oswald Koller (1852‑1910)

Koller worked as a secondary and trade school teacher in Kremsier (Moravia) and Vienna in general education subjects until 1898 before he worked as a librarian at the musicological institute at the University of Vienna, which was newly founded by Adler. From 1892 he worked for Adler on edition and exhibition projects. As a medieval researcher, he was self-taught. In the JMP he published on music and Darwin's theory (1900).

Hermann Kretzschmar (1848‑1924)

As a trained philologist, Kretzschmar was initially a music teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory, then University Music Director in Rostock and Leipzig; from 1904 he took over the newly established professorship for musicology at the Berlin University and, until his death, the artistic director of the Berlin Music Academy. He was a scholarly authority that shaped the musical public and the academic milieu and published a number of authoritative and trend-setting articles in the JMP, in some cases several in one volume: the great style composition for the concert in 1896 (1896), a report on notable books and writings (1897 and 1898), the German song since the death of Richard Wagner (1897), the monuments of musical art in Austria (1899), some remarks on the presentation of early music (1900), the training of German musicians: a musical question of time (1901), from Germany's Italian times (1901), Friedrich Chrysander (1902), suggestions for the promotion of musical hermeneutics (1902), understanding Gluck (1903), the correspondance littéraire as a source of music history (1903), the significance of Simon Mayrs music history (1904), Kant's conception of music and its influence on the following period (1904), Mozart in the history of opera (1905), new suggestions for promoting musical hermeneutics and setting aesthetics (1905), Robert Schumann as an aesthetician (1906), on the meaning of Cherubini's overtures and main operas for the present (1906), contributions to the history of Venetian opera (1907), brief reflections on the purpose, development and future tasks of music theory (1907), two operas by Nicolo Logroscinos (1908), the music book of Zeumerin (1909), folk music and higher musical art (1909), Ludovico Zacconi's life based on his autobiography (1910), further contributions to the history of the Venetian opera (1910), a final contribution to the history of the Venetian opera (1911), concerning the doctrine of affect (1911 and 1912), about the essence, growth and work of Richard Wagner (1912), Giuseppe Verdi (1913), for and against opera (1913), musical demands on higher education institutions (1916), Luther and music (1917), major works among the monuments of German music (1918), Max Friedlaender on his seventieth birthday (1921-22).

Theodor Kroyer (1873‑1945)

He was a musicologist specializing in older Catholic church music who taught in Leipzig, Heidelberg and from 1932 in Cologne; he was chairman of the department for the publication of older music at the Deutsche Musikgesellschaft. For the JMP he wrote on dialogue and echo in old choral music (1909), “Die circumpolare Oper”: on the history of Wagner (1919), and between renaissance and baroque (1927).

Rochus von Liliencron (1820‑1912)

He was a literary and music historian of secular and spiritual song. For the JMP he wrote on the future of evangelical choral singing (1895).

Hans Mersmann (1891‑1971)

Mersmann was a musicologist with an inclination to fundamental aesthetic issues and was entrusted with the establishment of a folk song archive during the German Empire. He taught at the Technical University in Berlin during the Weimar period, fought for the recognition of new music, and headed the journal Melos from 1924 to 1933. Mersmann was relieved of all his functions after 1933, branded a “cultural Bolshevik” and was able to survive the “Third Reich” as a private music teacher; after the Second World War he was director of the Cologne High School of Music for ten years. In JMP he published on the history of the style of music (1921-22) and on the history of the concept of form (1930).

Hans Joachim Moser (1889‑1967)

After studies, war, and habilitation he was music professor in Halle, Heidelberg, and Berlin, where he became director of the church and school music college until 1933. His dismissal had no political reasons. He later became a member of the NSDAP and worked in the music department of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, where he dealt with the "Aryanization" of Handel's works. His attempt to hold a professorship in Jena after the Second World War failed. In Berlin he was then director of the municipal (formerly Sternschen) conservatory for ten years. His revised and new publications after 1945 also show an unchanged “ethnic” sentiment. For the JMP he wrote on the early history of the German through-bass passion (1920), about the peculiarities of German musical talent (1924), the German choral song between Senfl and Haßler as an example of a change in style (1928), Karl Friedrich Zelter and the song (1932), the fate of the Penultima (1934), and on the history of German singing (1939).

Josef M. Müller-Blattau (1895‑1976)

He was a musicologist trained in Strasbourg and Freiburg who, after completing his habilitation, taught in Königsberg, Freiburg (as the successor to Gurlitt, who was expelled with his help), Strasbourg and, after the Second World War, in Saarbrücken. As a member of the NSDAP and SA, he worked during the Nazi period for the SS-subordinate research association “Deutsches Ahnenerbe” and participated in the dissemination of battle songs during the war. In the JMP he published on Bach and Handel (1926), Goethe and the cantata (1931), Gluck and the German poetry (1938), the history and style of the four-hand piano setting (1940).

Hugo Riemann (1849‑1919)

Riemann was the generalist among German musicologists who believed that he could develop a system of harmony, rhythm, melody and performance practice that would be valid for all ages and peoples, was accordingly hyperproductive and tried not to leave any question of musicology unanswered. He can be seen as the decisive reference person for the generation of German musicologists that followed him. For the JMP he wrote: on the problem of choral rhythm (1905), ideas for a doctrine of sound concepts (1914/15), new contributions to a doctrine of sound concepts: typical lanes and special phenomena of tone presentations in the rhythmic-metric area (1916).

Heinrich Rietsch (1860‑1927)

He was a musicologist trained in Vienna by Hanslick and Adler, and taught in Prague, working as a song researcher and style historian. In the JMP he published on the artistic selection in music (1906), the difference between the older and the newer German folk tunes (1911), and Heinrich Isaak and the Innsbruck song (1917).

Curt Sachs (1881‑1959)

Sachs was an instrument scientist and music ethnographer who was also trained in art history, headed the musical instrument collection at the Berlin University of Music, and was a professor at the Berlin University. Relieved of his offices in 1933, he emigrated to the USA via Paris, where he taught at the New York University until 1953, authoring authoritative manuals and histories of musical instruments. In the JMP, he published on the concept of an epoch for the first time: baroque music (1919), with which he introduces this term into the historiography of music.

Adolf Sandberger (1864‑1943)

A musicologist and composer trained by Ph. Spitta in Berlin, Sandberger was a Lassus researcher and editor, founder and director of the Society for the Publication of Bavarian Music Monuments, and taught in Munich. For the JMP he wrote on Mozartiana (1901), on the genesis of Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1903), on older Italian piano music (1918), on the Venetian opera (1924 and 1925), new Haydniana (1933), and some unprinted musicians' letters (1939).

Arnold Schering (1877‑1941)

Schering was a musicologist trained in Berlin, first on violin (with Joseph Joachim) and composition, then in musicology (with Oskar Fleischer), later Munich (with Sandberger) and Leipzig (with Kretzschmar). With a career spanning the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the “Third Reich” he diligently researched, published, and held several key functions in the university sector, including professorships in Leipzig and Berlin and in the professional association of musicologists (chairman of the commission for the monuments of German music, president of the Deutsche Musikgesellschaft from 1928 to 1937) and several societies (leading positions in the Bach and Handel Societies). He was editor of and collaborator on various music magazines and daily newspapers. He strove for a synthetic view that grasped the symbolic nature of the musical work of art, and was the representative of a musical historiography based on examples, which he treated like patterns for superordinate categories, and dealt with questions of performance practice. Bach's church music and Beethoven's secular, idealistic music of ideas (especially his fifth symphony as the “symphony of national elevation”) were the fixed points of his views. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists, whom he welcomed, he represented views in the sense of the new totalitarian rulers and their ideology of the superiority of German culture, especially music. In the JMP he published annually from 1925 to 1939: on the history of the Italian oratorio in the seventeenth century (1903), from the early years of musical neo-romanticism (1917), on listening to music and feeling for music in the Middle Ages (1921-22), the history of the ars inveniendi in music (1925), about Liszt's personality and art (1926), historical and national sound styles (1927), from the history of musical criticism in Germany (1928), musical analysis and value idea (1929), on musical performances (1930), artist, connoisseur and lover of music in the age of Haydn and Goethe (1931), Johannes Brahms and his position in the history of music in the nineteenth century (1932), the knowledge of the musical artwork (1933), on the concept of the monumental in music, on the 250th birthday of Handel and Bach (1934), musical symbolism (1935), the emergence of the world of instrumental symbols, more on musical symbolism (1936), criticism of the romantic concept of music (1937), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the speaking principle in music (1938), remarks on Haydn's program symphonies (1939).

Ludwig Schiedermair (1876‑1957)

He was a musicologist trained in Munich, Leipzig (with Riemann) and Berlin (with Kretzschmar), and started as a Mozart researcher (first critical Mozart letter edition) which after five years in Marburg he spent 1912 to 1945 in Bonn, where he directed the musicological seminar and the Beethoven archive, both of which he founded and organized  institutions from 1933 according to the Führer principle, and enforced the performance ban for Jews. He interpreted Beethoven's music as an ideological music of ideas. For the JMP he wrote on the history of the early German opera (1910), and an unknown Leipzig adventure book by Neefe (1933).

Max Schneider (1875‑1967)

As a pupil of Kretzschmar and Riemann (musicology) and Jadassohn (composition) Schneider gained assistant, lecturer and professor positions in Berlin, Breslau, and Halle, where he finally taught as Schering's successor from 1928 to 1952. His main areas of research were Protestant church music and secular music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He gave up his position as dean of the Philosophical Faculty (since 1936) because of his rejection of the aggressive ideological orientation of the universities towards National Socialism, but remained a member of several Nazi educational organizations. He distinguished himself as a Bach and Handel researcher and worked significantly for the societies dedicated to these two composers as the editor of their publications, was co-editor of the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft (organ of the Bückeburg Institute) from 1918 to 1927 and took over the editorial management of the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft after Alfred Einstein's dismissal in the summer of 1933. In the JMP he published on the through-bass of Johann Sebastian Bach (1914/15), Arnold Schering on his sixtieth birthday (1936).

Georg Schünemann (1884‑1945)

He was a multi-faceted and educated music historian and educator, professor and director of the Berlin Music Academy as well as head of the music department of the Berlin State Library (as successor to Johannes Wolf) and the instrument collection of the Musikhochschule (as successor to Sachs). Schünemann was a former employee of Leo Kestenberg’s social-democratically led Prussian Ministry of Culture and though he had reservations about the National Socialists, he works towards their aims, for instance, an "Aryan" German translation of the Daponte libretti for Mozart operas, also for the Rosenberg office. For the JMP he wrote on contemporary issues in music education (1928), and Mozart in German translation (1940).

Helmut Schultz (1904‑45)

Schultz was a musicologist and instrument scientist who was trained and taught in Leipzig. In the JMP he published on the laws of folk music (1934), “Die Musikzeitung der Wiener Baumannshöhle” (1936), dance styles and the suite (1939).

Max Seiffert (1868‑1948)

A music researcher trained by Ph.Spitta, co-founder of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft and co-editor of its Sammelbände, professor at the Berlin Conservatory (Department of Church and School Music), head of the Bückeburg Research Institute and co-editor of its journal (1918/19‑27), he also headed the institute under the name Reichsinstitut für deutsche Musikforschung after its relocation to Berlin, and he promoted the centralization of musicology in Germany under National Socialist auspices. For the JMP he wrote: Buxtehude - Handel - Bach (1902), new Bach discoveries (1904), Handel's relationship to works by older German masters (1907), and the Mannheim Messiah performance in 1777 (1916).

Friedrich Spitta (1852‑1924)

Spitta was a theologian and church music historian, taught Protestant theology in Strasbourg and Göttingen and dealt with questions of liturgy and church hymn books and was the brother of the musicologist Philipp Spitta. In the JMP, Friedrich contributed on new movements in the field of Protestant church music (1901), the passions of Schütz and their resuscitation (1906), and H. v. Herzogenberg's importance for Protestant church music (1919).

Walther Vetter (1891‑1967)

Vetter was a music historian trained in Leipzig and Halle (with Abert) with a humanistic horizon and taught in Halle, Hamburg, Breslau, and Greifswald, and was later a member of several National Socialist educational and welfare organizations where he expressed himself unequivocally in promotion of National Socialist music ideology. After 1945 he became successor to Schering's chair in Berlin, which had remained vacant since his death, and held numerous all-German and separate internal DDR functions in societies and associations. In the JMP he published Hermann Abert on memory (1927), on the folk and landscape determination of the German accompanied solo song (1937), and Bach's vocality (1939).

Peter Wagner (1865‑1931)

A music historian trained in Strasbourg under Gustav Jacobsthal with a focus on Catholic church music and the Middle Ages, Wagner later taught in Friborg and became famous as a theorist. In the JMP he published on the rhythms of neumes (1910), and the coloratura in medieval church singing (1918).

Egon Wellesz (1885‑1974)

Wellesz was an Austro-British musicologist and composer who was trained in Vienna by Adler and Schönberg, and later developed into a specialist in baroque opera and ancient oriental music, including deciphering Byzantine music notation. He worked in Vienna and Oxford, to where he had to emigrate in 1938. For the JMP he wrote on problems of musical research on the Orient (1917), and the Armenian Mass and its music (1920).

Johannes Wolf (1869‑1947)

A humanistic music historian and medieval specialist trained in Berlin by Ph.Spitta and Bellermann, Wolf worked in Berlin as a professor and music librarian and was secretary of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft and edited its anthologies. Co-founder of the Deutsche Musikgesellschaft in 1917, of which he chaired the Berlin local groups from 1926 to 1933, he was member of the Bückeburg Institute for Music Research, whose journal he co-edited until 1926. Wolf retired in 1934 and resigned from his position as head of the music department of the Berlin State Library and as chairman of the Berlin branch of the Deutsche Musikgesellschaft in protest, but found a publication venue in the JMP, where he published on new contributions to medieval music (1907), the Protestant hymn book in the past and future (1924), a German source of sacred music from the end of the fifteenth century (1936), the Rossi manuscript 215 of the Biblioteca Vaticana and the Trecento madrigal (1938).

This RIPM Index was produced from a copy of the Kraus reprint of the JMP.

[1] These include the noteworthy collective reviews by Vogel from 1896 and from Kretzschmar in 1897 and 1898.

[2] However, no conference proceedings appeared; see Schwartz's annual report in JMP 1914/15, p. VII.