Peters Music Library

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The Peters Music Library (now also: Peters Music Collection ) in Leipzig was the first public and free music library in Germany. Her collection items, which are still in existence today, around 24,000 media units, are protected as cultural property in the state register for Saxony . After an agreement between the city and heirs in February 2013, the collection will remain in Leipzig.

The corner house at Goldschmidtstrasse 26 / Talstrasse housed the music library from 1893 to 1951

history

The music library goes back to a foundation of the then owner of Edition Peters , Max Abraham , from his private fortune in 1893. It was intended to give students and scholars access to difficult-to-access musical works. In October 1893, the library moved into its own rooms at Königstrasse 26 (today Goldschmidtstrasse 26), and in January 1894 the inauguration took place. In the same month Henri Hinrichsen became a partner in the music publisher.

In 1897, three years before his suicide in 1900, Abraham wrote an addendum to his will that stipulated the preservation of the collection in Leipzig. Since it was not signed, the addendum is legally ineffective, which will be of importance in later conflicts.

After Abraham's death, efforts were made to set up a foundation, but it was never legally established. Instead, in July 1901, Hinrichsen handed over a sum of 400,000 marks to the Leipzig city council, the interest of which will henceforth be used to run the library. However, inflation caused this start-up capital to melt. As early as 1922, Henri Hinrichsen took over the library again from the city.

Stumbling blocks of the Henri Hinrichsen family in front of the Talstr. 10

The two sons of Henri Hinrichsen, Walter and Max , both emigrated because of the Nazi persecution of Jews . Walter went to Chicago in 1936, Max to London in 1937. Henri Hinrichsen, on the other hand, was murdered in Auschwitz on September 17, 1942 . After the November pogroms in 1938 the publishing house was placed under compulsory administration and in 1939 "Aryanized" . With the publishing house, the Peters Music Library and its property were also transferred to the new shareholders.

Walter Hinrichsen joined the American army in the USA and returned to Leipzig in April 1945 as an occupying soldier. He managed to get the publishing house returned as "American property" and appointed Johannes Petschull, who had been in charge of the publishing house since the Aryanization, as an agent. Hinrichsen had several boxes of printing plates and autographs from his father's autograph collection, part of the music library, put together as family property and sent to the USA. They served him as start-up capital for the establishment of the CF Peters publishing house in New York City and Frankfurt am Main .

In 1948 the Leipzig publishing house was again expropriated and in 1950 declared public property. The Peters Music Library was transferred to the Music Library of the City of Leipzig in 1951 , which in 1953/1954 combined the Peters holdings with those of the music department of the City Library and the City Music Library and sent the Peters Music Library's last own librarian, Eugen Schmitz , to retire. Until it was incorporated into the former Leipzig City and District Library in 1973, the city's music library remained an independent institution. Today it is part of the Leipzig City Library and is mainly located in the Old Grassi Museum . Individual pieces are in the Leipzig Bach Archive .

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , the expropriation of the publishing house was reversed in 1990, and in September 1993 a restitution notice also declared the music library to be the property of the Hinrichsen heirs. In order to ensure that they remained in Leipzig, a permanent loan and custody agreement for the holdings of the Peters Music Library was concluded between the Leipzig City Libraries, the music publisher CF Peters Frankfurt / Leipzig and the Hinrichsen heirs. In this contract (which, however, had a termination clause), the publisher and the heirs undertook to leave the holdings of the music library in Leipzig without any time limit.

Conflict and resolution

In the summer of 2004, press reports caused a sensation that around 450 pieces from the music library, including the autograph of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's choir cantata The First Walpurgis Night , were brought to Berlin for appraisal by the London auction house Christie's . The Hinrichsen heirs terminated the contract that was only concluded in 1998. As a result, the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Research and Culture initiated a procedure for the entry of 206 items in the register of nationally valuable cultural assets under the Cultural Property Protection Act . On February 24, 2006 the entry in the Berlin Official Gazette and on March 9, 2006 in the Federal Gazette was announced, which meant an absolute export ban for the cultural goods concerned. The Hinrichsen family's lawyers brought an action against this, which was partially upheld on November 29, 2006 by the Berlin Administrative Court. According to the court, there is no legal objection to the initiation of the protection procedure. The registration decision itself, however, was overturned due to formal deficiencies. An appeal to the OVG Berlin-Brandenburg was approved. After the Free State of Saxony initiated a registration procedure and the heirs also sued, the Dresden Administrative Court ruled that the Free State of Saxony was allowed to initiate a procedure for registration in the register of nationally valuable cultural assets under the Cultural Property Protection Act with the result of an absolute export ban. Here, too, the decision was initially not final, as the court had admitted an appeal to the Saxon Higher Administrative Court. The Saxon Higher Administrative Court rejected the appeal by judgment of August 19, 2010 and allowed the appeal. The Federal Administrative Court upheld these judgments of the lower courts with a judgment of November 24, 2011. The law on the protection of German cultural property against emigration thus also applies to assets that were deprived of their Jewish owners by Nazi injustice and after reunification in accordance with Section 1, Paragraph 6 of the Property Act have been restituted. After several years of negotiations between the city and the heirs, it was decided that the collection would remain in Leipzig; the heirs receive payments from funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media , the Cultural Foundation of the Länder and others.

Stocks

The basis of the collection were the holdings of Alfred Dörffels, founded in 1861 in Leipzig, the “Leihanstalt für Musikische Literatur” (loan agency for musical literature) with around 8,000 volumes.

Important acquisitions in the development phase of the library included the Scheibner manuscript collections (1902), Mempell-Preller with the Mempell-Preller manuscript (1904) and Ernst Rudorff (1917) with autographs and contemporary copies of works by Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers. The outstanding cultural and scientific importance of the collection was based in particular on the possession of numerous valuable first prints, rare scientific source works, an extensive opera score collection as well as a first-class autograph collection and a valuable collection of around 1,600 composer pictures.

A handover protocol from 1963 recorded 10,763 books / magazine holdings, 8,660 music editions, 2,669 text books, 266 manuscripts, 1,578 master portraits, 6 paintings, 3 marble busts and 200 different autographs .

Eleven of the autographs that Walter Hinrichsen took with him in 1945 are now in the Morgan Library in New York. Most of them were sold to the American collector Mary Flagler Cary through the antiquarian Walter Schatzki , and her collection came to the Morgan Library in 1968. These included Franz Schubert's swan song ; Chopin's Mazurka op. 59, no. 3 and Polonaises, op. 26; as well as parts of Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Georg Friedrich Händel's cantata Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio (HWV 150). The Octet by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , which was also offered to her , was bought by the Library of Congress . After 1968 the Morgan Library acquired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's concert aria Misero! o sogno / aura, che intorno spiri (KV 425b / 431), Schubert's Impromptus D. 935 and Carl Maria von Weber's invitation to dance .

Yearbook

Yearbook of the Peters Music Library 1895 Titel.png

From 1895 a yearbook of the music library appeared, which in addition to the annual reports of the library also contained larger articles on new acquisitions and developed into one of the most important periodicals of musicology in Germany. This tradition came to an end with Volume 47 in 1949.

Protection of cultural property

The Peters Music Library with around 24,000 media units (consisting of: "Manuscripts, autographs, manuscripts, letters, sheet music, textbooks, music literature, magazines, pictures, sculptures") was listed as a cultural asset in the state directory for Saxony under the protection of cultural assets within the meaning of the Hague Convention passed in 1954 placed to protect cultural property in the event of armed conflict .

literature

  • Emil Vogel : Catalog of the Peters Music Library. Leipzig: Edition Peters 1894 ( digitized version )
  • Yearbook of the Peters Music Library. Leipzig 1 (1894) to 47 (1949)
  • Otto E. Albrecht: Musical Treasures in the Morgan Library. In: Notes , 2nd Ser., Vol. 28, No. 4 (Jun., 1972), pp. 643-651
  • Erika Bucholtz: Henri Hinrichsen and the music publisher CF Peters: German-Jewish bourgeoisie in Leipzig from 1891 to 1938. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2001 (series of scientific papers by the Leo-Baeck-Institut; 65) Zugl .: Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2000 ISBN 3-16-147638-7
  • Sophie Fetthauer: Music publishers in the “Third Reich” and in exile. (Music in the “Third Reich” and in Exile, Volume 10) By Bockel Verlag Hamburg 2004 ISBN 3-932696-52-2
  • Irene Lawford-Hinrichsen: Music Publishing and Patronage - CF Peters: 1800 to the Holocaust. London: Edition Press 2000 ISBN 0-9536112-0-5
  • Irene Lawford-Hinrichsen; Norbert Molkenbur: CF Peters - a German music publisher in Leipzig's cultural life. On the work of Max Abraham and Henri Hinrichsen. In: Ephraim Carlebach Foundation (ed.): Judaica Lipsiensia: On the history of the Jews in Leipzig. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994. pp. 92-109
  • Leipzig: Peters Music Library soon with Christie? In: Bibliotheksdienst 38 (2004), p. 1164 (digitized version) (PDF; 698 kB)
  • Heinrich Lindlar: On the history of the Peters music library. In: Source studies on music: Wolfgang Sceder on his 70th birthday. Frankfurt a. M. 1972, pp. 115-123
  • Peter Nicolai: A European music collection before diversion. The Peters Music Library. In: Marginalien H. 179, 2005, pp. 3–12
  • Anne Schleicher: The History of the Peters Music Library . BibSpider, Berlin 2016. ISBN 978-3-936960-89-1
  • Eugen Schmitz: The Peters Music Library as a place of discovery. In: Yearbook of the Peters Music Library 46 (1939) pp. 82–87; 47 (1940) pp. 70-76
  • Eugen Schmitz: 50 years of the Peters Music Library. In: Deutsche Musikkultur 9 (1944) issue 1/2, p. 8 ff.
  • J. Rigbie Turner: Infinite Riches in a Little Room: The Music Collections in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Part 1. In: Notes, 2nd Ser., Vol. 55, No. 2 (Dec., 1998), pp. 288-326

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Report on lvz-online.de from February 7, 2013 , accessed on February 7, 2013
  2. ^ "Peters" music library (OVG 10 B 1.09).
  3. ^ VG Dresden, judgment of November 5, 2008 , Az. 5 1837/05, full text.
  4. ↑ VG Dresden, press release ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.justiz.sachsen.de
  5. ^ Sächsisches OVG, judgment of August 19, 2010 , Az. 1 A 112/09, full text.
  6. ↑ See the detailed description and discussion of the case in David Moll: Export bans for Nazi looted art. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter 2017, plus dissertation, University of Augsburg 2017 ISBN 978-3-11-054137-3 (= writings on the protection of cultural assets), esp.p. 252ff
  7. ↑ Press release of the City of Leipzig from February 6, 2013 ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 7, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.leipzig.de
  8. ↑ Erika Bucholtz: Henri Hinrichsen and the music publisher CF Peters: German-Jewish bourgeoisie in Leipzig from 1891 to 1938. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2001 (series of scientific treatises of the Leo Baeck Institute; 65) Zugl .: Berlin, Techn. Univ. , Diss., 2000 ISBN 3-16-147638-7 , p. 228
  9. ↑ Peters Yearbooks (PDF)
  10. ↑ Registered cultural property in Saxony ( Memento of the original from February 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kulturgutschutz-deutschland.de

Web links

Commons : Peters Music Library  - collection of images, videos and audio files