The Paul Hirsch Music Collection at the British Library is one of the most outstanding discrete collections of printed music held within the Library.[1] It is accompanied by the Paul Hirsch Papers, which include archival papers and documents relating to Hirsch’s music library and his collecting practices.

Paul Hirsch and his collection

Paul Hirsch, the son of a German-Jewish industrialist, was born in Frankfurt on 24 February 1881. He first began collecting music with his acquisition in 1897 of a Peters Edition copy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion which would become the foundation purchase of a collection that would in time encompass over 18,000 items.

Paul Hirsch was also an accomplished musician (he played the violin and viola to a high standard), and an exceptionally cultivated man, who fully understood the needs of both the performer and the musicologist. In collecting, he was guided by principles of scholarly importance, the physical condition and preservation of the items, their rarity, typography, binding, and any special features such as illustration. In the early years of this collection, Hirsch’s acquisitions were dominated by editions of, and scholarly works relating to, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of Hirsch’s favourite composers. Hirsch went to great lengths to assemble a vast collection of first and early editions in 1906, and was able to publish his own catalogue of Mozart items, the Katalog einer Mozart-Bibliothek.

Paul Hirsch, Katalog einer Mozart-Bibliothek. Frankfurt 1906. British Library Hirsch 442

Later, Beethoven and Schubert would be represented in almost equal strength and the library would hold a copy of almost every major opera published in full score. Paul Hirsch published a four-volume catalogue to his own collection, detailing the four main areas of the collection: theoretical works; opera; miscellaneous; and early editions of Mozart along with first editions of Beethoven and Schubert.[2] Items included in his collection can be searched on our library catalogue.

Hirsch's Music Library

From 1909 onwards, Hirsch’s Music Library in the Neue Mainzerstraße was open to the public for two afternoons per week, with Dr. Kathi Meyer as its librarian, whom Hirsch had appointed. Internationally, the collection was recognised as being an outstanding one, with many famous visitors throughout the musical world flocking to the library. Over the years, his visitors’ ledgers record such famous clientele as Alfred Einstein, cousin of Albert Einstein. On a warm and sunny October afternoon in 1920, Hirsch held an open day for visitors, complete with some of the rarest items, hand-picked, on display, and a small catalogue to describe them. One of the guests, Ludwig Sternaux, described the collection with admiration as the greatest private library he knew, located within one of the best parts of Frankfurt.

However, due to the changing political circumstances in Germany, it increasingly became more and more difficult for Hirsch to maintain his passion as a collector, having maintained contacts with booksellers all over Europe via his correspondence and regular travels. His correspondence after 1933 reflects the pressures to which Hirsch found himself exposed, due to the regulations which the Nazi authorities were imposing upon those wanting to obtain foreign currencies and purchases. More acutely, Hirsch, as a Jewish citizen in Germany, must have felt his business, and indeed his and his family’s lives to be under threat. His skills as a collector become even more remarkable when the enthusiasm he maintained amid the political events of those times is considered.

Hirsch fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in Cambridge. In 1946, he sold his collection to the British Museum – later British Library – after it had previously been housed within Cambridge University Library for a short period. Paul Hirsch died in Cambridge on 23 November 1951, having secured for the British Library one of its finest ever acquisitions.

Hirsch the collector

The Paul Hirsch Papers at the British Library provide detailed records of how carefully and systematically Paul Hirsch went about building his library. All genres and all periods of European classical music are represented in his collection. It was his practice sometimes to buy inexpensive, imperfect copies of an item, and to exchange them for better copies at a later stage, if the opportunity arose. As Hirsch himself put it:

‘I do not regret a single one of my purchases, although I know I sometimes paid too much. What I do regret are the things I refused to buy, for many of them I have not seen again and some I despair ever to see again’.

The Paul Hirsch Papers include correspondence from bookdealers in major cities such as London, Paris, and Berlin, with whom Hirsch was in regular contact in the 1920s and ‘30s in Germany, as well as from the period following his move to England. You can find out more about the Paul Hirsch Papers in this blog.

Hirsch the musician

Not only was Paul Hirsch a collector of music, but he was also a gifted performer. He played the violin and viola, as a talented amateur, giving chamber music concerts at his own home in Frankfurt on a monthly basis. The Paul Hirsch Papers include concert programmes from concerts given in his house at 29 Neue Mainzerstraße. Hirsch played first violin in his own string quartet and quintet.

Highlights from the collection

Theoretical works

Among the many hundred theoretical works collected by Hirsch are several by the 15th century Italian theorist Franchinus Gaffurius. The autograph manuscript of Gaffurius’s first important work Theoriae Musicae Tractatus (A treatise on the theory of music), probably dates from 1479. A revised version of the treatise, which was printed in 1480 with the title Theoricum Opus, is also in the Hirsch Collection.

Franchinus Gaffurius: Theoriae Musicae Tractatus. British Library Hirsch IV.1441.

16th century music printing

The Hirsch Collection is especially rich in early examples of music printing. Ottaviano Petrucci was among the first to print music from moveable type. In 1498 he was granted a 20-year privilege to print both polyphonic music and chant in the Venetian states; by 1510 he has produced around 40 lavish volumes of sacred and secular music. Among these were five books of motets by the most highly regarded composers of the day, including Josquin, Brumel and Isaac. Hirsch owned a fine copy of the superius part of the third book of motets.

Ottaviano Petrucci's Motetti C. Venice, 1504. British Library Hirsch III.984.

Decorated editions

Hirsch was particularly interested in decorated editions and fine engraving. The image shown here is from a description of a court ballet performed in celebration of the marriage of the Duc de Joyeuse in 1581 and includes illustrations of the costumes and sets, as well as the full text, and music for the songs and dances.

Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, Balet Comique de la Royne. Paris, 1582. British Library Hirsch III.629

Musical playing cards

The vogue for dancing and singing in the early 18th century led to a huge increase in the publication of popular music. Some was published in unusual forms, for instance on fans or playing cards. Hirsch acquired a rare pack of 52 playing cards dating from around 1725. Each card bears a song for voice and flute. The cards are currently on display in our Treasures Gallery.

Pack of musical playing cards. British Library Hirsch IV.1444

A new AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD Studentship between the British Library and Royal Holloway, University of London will study the Paul Hirsch Music Collection, its rich history and Paul Hirsch's collecting practices. More information about this exciting project and how to apply can be found on the Royal Holloway website.

The deadline for applications is Friday 25 April 2025, 12 noon UK time.

Music Collections Team 

Further reading

[1] For an overview of the collection, see Alec Hyatt King, ‘Paul Hirsch and his Music Library’, British Library Journal, 7/1 (1981), pp. 1-11. Available at: https://bl.iro.bl.uk/concern/articles/7122340c-9fd4-4593-ba59-5c23fbf6d375

[2] 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).

The British Library has acquired a set of original sketches and drafts by Sir Edward Elgar for one of his best-known compositions, the Introduction and Allegro for strings. Elgar completed the work in February 1905 and conducted the first performance a few weeks later. In 1930 he tore these particular sketches out of one of his sketchbooks and gave them to a friend.

Years later, the sketchbook from which he tore them, which contains sketches for some of his other works, was donated to the British Library. We are delighted that we can now reunite the torn-out pages with the sketchbook, almost 100 years after Elgar removed them.

 

A page from the newly acquired sketches for Elgar's Introduction and Allegro

 

Identifying the origin of the sketches

Elgar often jotted down tunes and other musical ideas into a bound sketchbook. He would then expand and rewrite his ideas, sometimes copying them from one sketchbook to another, and gradually turn them into fully-formed musical works.

When we were alerted to the existence of the Introduction and Allegro sketches last year, we suspected that they came from one of Elgar’s many sketchbooks. It wasn’t clear which one, though. An initial clue came from the distinctive rubber-stamped page numbers on the sketches. The same type of numbering is found in Elgar’s ‘Sketchbook V’, now in the British Library.

Crucially the page numbers on the torn-out pages fill gaps in the pagination in this sketchbook. What clinches the connection, though, is the way that two pages from the Introduction and Allegro sketches fit exactly with stubs of the pages that were left behind in the sketchbook when they were torn out.

 

Torn-out pages fit exactly with the stubs of the pages remaining in the sketchbook.

 

Torn-out pages fit exactly with the stubs of the pages remaining in the sketchbook.

 

Elgar’s gift of the Introduction and Allegro sketches

Once Elgar had finished composing a work, he no longer needed the sketches and drafts created during the process of composition. He would sometimes give these to friends as mementoes. On 6 November 1930 he gave the Introduction and Allegro sketches to his former pupil Frank Webb. Webb recorded this gift in a faint pencil note on the first of the pages:

Given me by EWE [i.e. Edward William Elgar] Nov 6/30 (Torn out of his Sketch book) Sketches for the Introduction & Allegro

Frank Webb’s son Alan later published his own memories of Elgar, recalling that:

On occasion he [Elgar] would visit my father in his office. Once he pulled some manuscript sheets out of his pocket and said: ‘Here, would you like these?’ ‘These’ were sketches for the Introduction and Allegro for Strings.

The pages must have been folded up to fit into Elgar’s pocket, and they appear to have remained tightly folded ever since. They have now been acquired by the British Library, via Christie’s Private Sales, from the descendants of Frank Webb.

The musical content

We already held some very fragmentary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro, as well as the manuscript of Elgar’s final version. The newly acquired sketches and draft material fill a gap between these, chronologically, and shed light on how Elgar composed the work.

Many of the musical themes found in the final version are in place in the sketches, though they are mostly written in short score (i.e. on two staves) and not yet in the order in which they appear in the final version.

One particular melody in the Introduction and Allegro is known as the ‘Welsh tune’. Elgar was inspired to compose it after hearing distant singing while on holiday in Wales. This theme appears several times in the manuscript: as a single-line tune, a melody with lightly sketched harmony and fully harmonised in a setting for strings. Elgar used this string setting in the final version of the piece.

 

Orchestrated version of the ‘Welsh tune’ from the Introduction and Allegro sketches.

 

Making the material available

For preservation reasons the newly acquired pages will not be physically reattached to the sketchbook. However, researchers will be able to view all of the material together in the Library’s Rare Books and Music Reading Room. We will also be digitising it and ‘virtually’ reuniting it online.

The sketchbook has other missing pages, which were also torn out before the Library acquired it. Perhaps these will also come to light one day.

 

Notes

Alan Webb’s reminiscences of Elgar, ‘Some personal memories of Elgar’, are published in An Elgar Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), pp. 168-174.

The sketchbook from which Elgar tore the Introduction and Allegro material has the British Library manuscript number Add MS 63157. The new acquisition has been assigned the number MS Mus. 1964. Preliminary sketches for the Introduction and Allegro are found in Add MSS 63153, 63154, 63156, 47903. The final full score is numbered Add MS 58015.

 

Sandra Tuppen
Head of Music Collections

 

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.

Map of Frankfurt am Main, with Hirsch’s Music Library highlighted. From Mitropa Zeitung, 137 (Nov 1926), 4-5.

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).

Snapshots of beautiful handwriting from correspondents Albert Gans (top) and Edward Croft-Murray (below).

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.

Frankie Perry, Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer

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[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. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0AzmP0KtE.

[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, 79^th 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.