Cataloguing the Paul Hirsch Papers

Blog series Music

Author Frankie Perry, Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer

We recently embarked upon a new project in Music Collections to catalogue the papers of Paul Hirsch (1881-1951), as part of the Unlocking Hidden Collections initiative. Hirsch's extensive library of historical printed music and music-theoretical books forms an important cornerstone of the BL's music collections, but the correspondence and papers relating to the collection and the collector had not previously been fully catalogued.

Hirsch was a German industrialist whose youthful passion for bibliography, music, and rare books fuelled a collecting hobby that resulted in a world-class library of scores and music-related books.[i] The library was acquired by the British Museum in 1946, but had initially been based at Hirsch’s home in Frankfurt, where it was made accessible to scholars and musicians and frequented by visitors from around the world. In the summer of 1936, Hirsch relocated both his family and his library to Cambridge, evading the efforts of the Nazi authorities to confiscate the collection, and for the next decade, the collection was housed in Cambridge’s University Library.[ii] The relocation had been facilitated by the musicologist Edward J. Dent, then Professor of Music at Cambridge, who later spearheaded a fundraising effort to enable the library to be acquired for the nation. Increasing financial pressures meant that Hirsch had no choice but to sell his collection, which by then totalled around 18,000 items; while he had received offers from American institutions, he wished for the collection to remain intact, and, importantly, to remain in the country that had become his home.

Once at the British Museum, Hirsch’s Music Library was given pride of place in the Music Room, where Hirsch was allocated a desk to work. Hirsch formed close working relationships with several members of Museum staff, many of whom were also prominent scholars of music bibliography; his correspondence with Alec Hyatt King, then Superintendent of the Music Room, demonstrates a close and enduring relationship as colleagues and friends. King wrote several articles to publicise the Hirsch collection and to emphasise its particular strengths; he also oversaw the creation of a British Museum catalogue of the collection.[iii] Following Hirsch’s death in 1951, King continued to visit Olga Hirsch, who sorted her husband’s professional papers and donated them to the British Museum in 1962-3. Olga Hirsch had her own antiquarian specialism – decorated papers – and formed a collection that also travelled from Frankfurt to Cambridge before eventually being bequeathed to the British Museum; the Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers now occupies shelves adjacent to Paul Hirsch’s collection, deep in the basements of the BL’s St Pancras site.[iv]

It is Paul Hirsch’s professional papers that form the basis of the current cataloguing project, which will take around 4-5 months. The papers include extensive correspondence with academics, librarians, publishers, booksellers, performers, and other professional contacts, alongside records of Hirsch’s acquisitions and other business-related papers. An earlier project at the Library led to the creation of a handlist and summaries of parts of the collection, as well as an illuminating Brio article by Nick Chadwick that puts forward his observations and highlights.[v] The current project involves working through the full 36 boxes, listing all correspondents and briefly summarising topics of discussion, checking for any data protection and conservation issues, lightly reordering (to enhance existing alphabetisation and other sequences), creating detailed catalogue records, and rehousing the papers. The research interest of these papers is already known, and many scholars have consulted the boxes over the years, but full online catalogue records will greatly improve accessibility and searchability.

Networks and friends

Even the first six boxes (correspondence A-G) contain a veritable who’s who of early-20th-century Anglophone and German musicology and music bibliography. Hirsch kept carbon copies of his outbound letters, meaning that many full exchanges are preserved, and we see that he received a constant influx of bibliographic and research queries on everything from the mechanics of early printing to discrepancies in Beethoven editions (a lot of those!) to sources on 19th-century ornamental bindings. No matter who asked – and many queries came from students – Hirsch did his very best to help, pointing his correspondents in the direction of obscure additional sources, offering his own expert opinions, and, if he possessed a relevant volume, facilitating loans. His knowledge and passion for his subject shines through, as does his appetite for frequent Schubert tidbits sent from the likes of Otto Erich Deutsch, Max Friedländer, and Karl Geiringer. Hirsch also appreciated beautiful handwriting, sometimes praising his correspondents’ penmanship while apologising for his own typed replies (he suffered with several longstanding health issues, and typing was less of a strain).

Letters to and from fellow antiquarians – both dealers and collectors – reveal both the transactional and personal dimensions of Hirsch’s collecting practice.[vi] A sustained correspondence with the antiquarian bookseller Martin Breslauer runs from 1928, when both were active in Germany, to 1940, when Breslauer died suddenly in London, having re-established his firm there in previous years. These papers contain invoices and receipts, auction lists, insurance valuations, and special offers, but also provide considerable detail of their changing personal and business circumstances as both navigated emigration. Hirsch’s friendly and empathetic nature comes across well in correspondence with the organologist and collector Adam Carse, in which the pair share experiences of parting with their collections. In 1947, Carse wrote: ‘I have given my collection of old wind instruments to the Horniman Museum, and feel rather at a loss without them. But I was very anxious that they should never be dispersed or leave this country, and feel sure that I have done the best thing’. Hirsch responded: ‘Being without your “hobby” you will experience the same feelings which I have occasionally being without my music library. Still, like you, I am happy that it has found such a fine home’.

Naturally, there is a lot of material relating to the exodus of Jewish musicians, musicologists, and booksellers from Nazi-occupied Europe. There are glimpses of networks of musicians updating each other on the fate of mutual friends: for instance, as Hirsch informs correspondents on his brief internment in 1940, various replies give updates on attempts to secure Egon Wellesz’s release.[vii] While evidently comfortable in Cambridge, and happy with his new musical and bibliographic communities, Hirsch made occasional reference to the precarity of his status in Britain: having spotted an error in a Times article, he wrote to his correspondent, ‘I would rather – still being an alien, alas! – not write to the Editor during the war’. He was also concerned about descriptions of his library’s relocation, and lightly criticised Richard Capell in 1937 for a paragraph about ‘the dramatic departure of the collection from Frankfurt’, noting that ‘it may be possible that I get into trouble with the German authorities on account of this, if I or any member of my family would eventually like to pay a visit to Germany’.

Hirsch’s emigration inevitably changed his collecting practices, and from the late 1930s he drastically narrowed his collecting remit for financial and political reasons. Having received an unsolicited volume of Deutsche Volkslieder from the Cambridge bookseller Bowes & Bowes in 1940, he attempted to send the book back, writing: ‘since war started, I told all firms who had arranged to deliver continuations of subscribed works to me to stop all deliveries, as I did and do not want any money to go to German firms directly or indirectly now’. Further research into items in Hirsch’s collection will allow us to better understand his international networks of antiquarian booksellers and collectors, and to trace genealogies of ownership, collection, gift, and trade across the rich object-histories of individual scores and books.

Tracing women’s activities

The reach of Hirsch’s network of correspondents is considerable, and cataloguing these papers will draw attention to lesser-known names of mid-century musicology and music librarianship, including many women. Hirsch was clearly sympathetic to the additional barriers faced by women in entering the upper echelons of their professions, and often advocated and wrote references for his female colleagues (elsewhere, in one interesting letter to a prominent male musicologist, Hirsch gently accuses him of professional chauvinism, which is met with a slightly defensive reply). So far, I’ve enjoyed flurries of letters from Anna Amalie Abert about the music dictionary MGG; Jean M. Allan discussing Bach editions in advance of an exhibition at the Reid Music Library; Geneviève Thibault (Vicomtesse de Chambure) with queries relating to her project about early volumes published by Le Roy & Ballard; Sophie Drinker concerning a loan of early printed sources relating to Hildegard of Bingen; and Berta Geissmar on various topics including her in-progress memoir of music, society, and exile.[viii] I look forward to reaching ‘S’ and its promise of correspondence with Marion Scott and Edith Schnapper.

Hirsch’s mentorship and continued support of his former librarian and research assistant, Kathi Meyer-Baer, is a prime example of the good nature that shines through his correspondence. Meyer-Baer was a musicologist and bibliographer employed by Hirsch from 1922 until the library’s forced relocation; together, they published a meticulously-researched and beautifully-produced four-volume catalogue of Hirsch’s library.[ix] Also from a Jewish family, Meyer-Baer left Germany after Hirsch, moving first to Paris before settling in America. David Josephson’s extensive research into her life and work has documented her lifelong struggle thereafter to assimilate into anglophone professional networks of musicology and librarianship. Josephson writes compellingly of Meyer-Baer’s professional frustrations and of her dual disadvantage as a woman and as a Jewish emigrée, and he also notes the unrelenting kindness and professional counsel offered to her by Hirsch.[x] The BL papers were a major source for Josephson’s research, and his findings are borne out clearly in the lengthy correspondence between Hirsch and Meyer-Baer between 1936 and 1951. Hirsch offers advice and consolation, but also urges Meyer-Baer strongly to improve her written English or to have her articles translated by native speakers; he celebrates milestones in her family’s new American life, writes letters of recommendation, and mediates between Meyer-Baer and editors of journals interested in her work, but he also firmly encourages her to see beyond her reservations about North American bibliographic practice, and to persevere in the face of seemingly endless professional setbacks.

The Meyer-Baer correspondence is, at times, heart-breaking. More optimistic is the shorter but very animated series of letters between Hirsch and the folklorist and librarian Margaret Dean-Smith, who had ambitious ideas about the future of music librarianship in the UK. She writes several extremely long letters on everything from her research on Playford’s The Dancing Master to the minutiae of gramophone cataloguing, which Hirsch clearly appreciated: he replied to one letter, ‘I really do not know how to thank you [...] your letter reads like a novel’.[xi] In correspondence of the mid-1940s, the pair agree about the need for the establishment of professional societies for music libraries and archives (IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, wasn’t founded until 1951). Reporting from a conference in 1944, Dean-Smith wrote:

My impression of English Music Libraries is that, while they contain great treasures, information about these treasures can only be obtained by putting some person to a great deal of trouble, the catalogues being either inadequate or almost non-existent. At the same time one is constantly told that there is no opening in Music Librarianship.

Another blog post at the end of this cataloguing project will highlight some further examples from the wealth of information held within these papers about Hirsch’s professional and personal networks. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying working through the boxes of a collection so steeped in institutional history.

Notes

[i] For an overview, see Alec Hyatt King, ‘Paul Hirsch and his Music Library’, British Library Journal, 7/1 (1981), 1-11.

[ii] A talk by Nicolas Bell details aspects of the collection’s removal and relocation: ’Music and Exile: Evacuating the Hirsch Library from Frankfurt to Cambridge’, paper read at Cambridge: City of Scholars, City of Refuge (1933-1945), Trinity College, Cambridge, 5-6 March 2020.

[iii] Catalogue of Printed Music in the British Museum: accessions. Part 53, Music in the Hirsch Library [compiled by Alec Hyatt King and Charles Humphries] (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1951). On the status of Hirsch’s collection within the music collections of the British Museum more broadly, see ‘The Music Room of the British Museum 1753-1953. Its History and Organization’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 79th session (1952-1953), 65-79.

[iv] See Mirjam M. Foot, ‘The Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers, British Library Journal, 7/1 (1981), 12-38.

[v] Nick Chadwick, ‘The Hirsch correspondence: some preliminary observations’, Brio, 45/1 (2008), 60-67.

[vi] Chadwick provides particular detail on Hirsch’s correspondence with Otto Haas and Max Pinette, see ibid, 60-62.

[vii] For instance, a postcard from H. C. Colles on 21 September 1940 notes that ‘Emmy Wellesz is very anxious about Egon, not yet returned though most strenuous efforts have been made. It is all very complicated’. On the matter of exile, Chadwick’s article points to a particularly moving exchange of letters with Richard Friedenthal concerning Stefan Zweig, following Zweig’s death in 1942; see ‘The Hirsch correspondence’, 64.

[vii] Berta Geissmar, The Baton and the Jackbook (London: H. Hamilton, 1944).

[ix] Paul Hirsch and Kathi Meyer-Baer, Katalog der Musikbibliothek Paul Hirsch (vols 1-3, Berlin: M. Breslauer, 1928-1936; vol 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947).

[x] See Josephson’s article, ‘“Why then all the difficulties!”: A life of Kathi Meyer-Baer’, Notes, 65/2 (2008), 227-267, and monograph, Torn between cultures: a life of Kathi Meyer-Baer (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2012).

[xi] Hirsch remained keenly interested in Dean-Smith’s research, and purchased single issues of the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in order to read a substantial article by Dean-Smith and Alex Helm; in an unusual run of slightly grumpy letters with the journal, Hirsch objects to the its inflexible and very high pricing structure.