Introduction

THIS BOOK, WHICH DOCUMENTS THE Moldenhauer Archives now in the Library of Congress and eight other institutions, is the realization of a project first envisioned by Hans Moldenhauer in 1982 as a memorial to Rosaleen, his wife of nearly four decades. He referred to it often as "my Taj Mahal." They collaborated throughout most of their long marriage in a working relationship that grew early out of their common interest in music--both were professional pianists--and, in later years, his increasing dependence on Rosaleen as his eyesight progressively weakened.

Although parts of his Archives became famous for their richness in manuscripts of such renowned composers as Brahms, Mahler, and Webern, his idea had always been to gather documents from the entire history of Western music, an ambitious undertaking that even a major library would find daunting. His enterprise was unusual, too, in another way, for not only had he the private collector’s necessary passion for, and aesthetic appreciation of, the things he acquired, but he also saw their importance for research.

His motto for the Archives, "Music History from Primary Sources," might well have been the motto, beginning in the 1950s, of every music historian concerned with Western music, for there was then no authoritative body of scores of the works of the great masters consistently based on available primary sources. Musicologists had only just begun, after the disruptions of the Second World War, to address the need to make new critical editions. The nineteenth century, to be sure, had produced monumental editions of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Even earlier music by such composers as Palestrina, Couperin, and Schütz had been carefully edited and published, during that century when Europeans were rediscovering their great artistic heritage. After Mendelssohn’s historic revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829, Germans were particularly active in bringing to light forgotten masterpieces. But in the postwar years of our century; there were several important developments of which scholars could take advantage: a growing number of trained musicologists; improved methods of making inexpensive microfilms, which provided better access than before to original sources; and a widely available and reliable history of paper and watermarks which provided new tools for dating and authenticating works. With due acknowledgment to such pioneers as the Bach scholars Phillip Spitta and Wilhelm Rust, music historians undertook first a complete revision of the chronology of Bach’s musical works and then a new edition based on holographs and other primary sources. Each volume was issued with a separate, detailed, measure-by-measure commentary documenting the editor’s decisions. Similar projects for Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and many others were soon to follow. This was the beginning of an era in which standard editions of familiar classics fell under the suspicion of infidelity to the intentions of the composer. Artur Schnabel’s insightful but highly interpretive edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas was among the many well-worn tomes with which generations of musicians had grown up that were replaced by new scholarly editions that stripped away layers of all phrasings, dynamics, tempo indications, and other such markings added without the composer’s authority. Henceforth, no respectable performer could fail to consult the so-called "Urtext" if it were published; and graduate seminars in musicology frequently relied on photocopies of manuscripts rather than printed scores. It was primarily for this new breed of researcher that Moldenhauer proudly built his collection.

Yet he had the connoisseur’s sense of the intrinsic worth of a beautiful and rare page, and so, besides their research value, some of his manuscripts--and these were the ones he treasured most highly--represent, in his words, "tangible links with the esoteric efforts which produced them in the composer’s hour of inspiration." We stand in awe before the pages on which Mozart or Brahms wrote down a memorable piece and wonder at the mysterious role that the composer’s original notation plays in the relationship between his musical idea, its realization as sound by a performer, and the listener. The manuscript score serves, on the one hand, its essential and practical function of charting for singers and instrumentalists a succession of pitches in time. On the other hand, it has acquired, for the listener drawn to it out of reverence for the audible art it serves, a silent and numinous significance as a sacred relic of the act of musical conception, a tangible link with esoteric efforts. There is, moreover, the strong visual impact that many music manuscripts have as kinetic art, whether or not they can always be considered calligraphic in the truest sense. Whether or not they are written at the hour of inspiration, many listeners see in composers’ manuscripts characteristics analogous to the music itself: Webern’s precise expressivity, Beethoven’s cerebral urgency. Whatever our subjective response may be to such things, Moldenhauer appreciated their visual beauty or graphic collected them passionately as his sight failed, and held them vividly in his mind’s eye when he could no longer see them.

Aware that he could not afford to acquire representative documents from Gregorian chant to the present day in examples of only major composers and musicians, Moldenhauer took a great interest in subordinate figures with significant associations. In his own words, the scope of his Archives was to include "not only the bricks, but the mortar." For this he had a special genius for finding not only interesting items from lesser figures, but documents that show great ones occupied with matters other than the original work for which they are famous: Berlioz, for example, restoring Gluck’s Alceste; or Beethoven copying, presumably for his own edification, ensembles from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

In his early days of collecting, Moldenhauer also successfully acquired manuscripts from younger contemporaries, adding to his Archives valuable sketches and complete scores of composers who were then just beginning to be recognized: Boulez, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Rochberg, Schuller, and Stockhausen, among others. Among musicians of the twentieth century he was also particularly interested in those who, like himself, had been uprooted by the rise of Fascism: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Wolfgang Fraenkel, Karl Weigl,and Jaromir Weinberger. They had escaped the concentration camps, but some were shattered. While the Italian Castelnuovo-Tedesco had the temperament and technical facility to adapt to life in America and enjoy a successful career in Hollywood, Weinberger was never able to resume his once brilliant career. In 1967, after putting his manuscripts in order, he committed suicide.

Hans Moldenhauer was born in Mainz in 1906. The two pillars of his education, beyond the traditionally rigorous Gymnasium, were music and mountain climbing. His musical training consisted of five years at the Mainz Municipal College of Music withthe eminent Hans Rosbaud, best known to several generations of musicians as a conductor whose recordings made it possible to hear for the first time superbly realized performances of music by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and also Stravinsky after his adoption of serial techniques. It was with Rosbaud that Moldenhauer must have developed his interest in contemporary music. The piano, however, was Moldenhauer’s major interest, and his proficiency on it enabled him to establish himself professionally as a musician when he was finally forced to move with his family to America.

He emigrated to the United States in May 1938, arriving in New York, and was followed a few months later by his first wife, Margot, his mother-in-law, and his two children. As a German, his heritage of forests and, most important to him, mountains, was as much a part of him as music. One can only imagine how desolate the mountainless city skyline appeared to the man, leaving a home whose landscape of alps, far more than providing familiar and comforting scenery, was a way of life. His unpublished essay "Die Bergsteiger-Legende" (The Legend of the Mountaineer) is about the ethos of climbing in those mountains where he developed the characteristic tenacity and courage with which he met life’s later challenges. In July 1939, encouraged by what he had learned of his new country’s northwest, he bought a single round-trip bus fare to Spokane, Washington. Almost at once, he led a climbing party up Mt. Rainier, established himself as a piano teacher, and began a new life. In the last year of his life, he recalled that somewhere in his unsorted papers one might still find the unused part of his bus ticket.

Among his students was a young woman named Rosaleen Jackman. When he was drafted to serve, because of his alpine skills, as an instructor in the U. S. Army’s newly formed 10th Mountain Division, Rosaleen took over his private teaching. Shortly after, she joined him as a Red Cross nurse where he was stationed at Camp Hale, Colorado, and they were married there in 1943. Camp Hale was a spectacular and rugged base situated on the Eagle River 100 miles west of Denver, surrounded by mountains and with winter temperatures of 30 degrees below zero. During training there, Moldenhauer suffered frostbite and was unable to join his Division when it was sent into combat in Italy

After his honorable discharge from the Army in August 1943, he and Rosaleen returned to Spokane, where they resumed their musical activities. In 1946, the Spokane Conservatory, which he had founded in 1942, was incorporated as educational institution. Having earned his bachelor’s degree in music as Whitworth College’s first student under the G.I. Bill in 1945, and receiving in the same year an honorary doctorate from Chicago’s Boguslawski College of Music, he completed his doctoral dissertation, "Duo-Pianism," at Roosevelt University’s Chicago Musical College. Published in 1950, it remains a unique and important study.

At about this time, with the onset of an illness diagnosed as retinitis pigmentosa--an hereditary disease that is incurable, progressive, and eventually leads to blindness--he started to build the great collection of musical documents for which he is best known. Albi Rosenthal, a longtime friend and an eminent dealer in music manuscripts, recalls that Moldenhauer began collecting in the early 1940s and recollects the story that, even as a boy, he was teased by his father for his preoccupation with his "little bits of paper." But he decided to embark on serious collecting after the prognosis that he might lose his sight completely within two years. By giving him an urgent incentive to make the most of his failing eyesight, it was, in his opinion, a fortuitous misprognosis without which he might neither have conceived the project of his Archive nor pursued it with such urgency. Happily, however, the process which was predicted to take two years took more than twenty.

The Moldenhauer Archives had become legendary in the 1960s with Moldenhauer’s acquisition of the Anton Webern papers. After the death of Schoenberg in 1951, increasing interest in his music extended to the work of his two great pupils, Alban Berg and Webern. Webern had remained particularly obscure even for a twelve-tone composer of the time. Not only had the source of his few published works, as with other contemporaries, been cut off by the war, but being ethnically, if not musically, unobjectionable to the Nazis, he had chosen to remain in his native Austria where, his music banned, he earned a living as a proofreader. Then, the war over, at the age of sixty-one and at the peak of his creative powers, he stepped out of his house one evening to smoke a cigar and, apparently misunderstanding an order to identify himself--it was September, 1945 at the beginning of the occupation--was shot and killed by an American soldier.

In 1959, on a visit to Webern’s last home in the Austrian village of Mittersill, Moldenhauer began investigating the then still mysterious circumstances of Webern’s tragic death. It marked the beginning of his long association with the Webern family, which began in 1961 to give him the composer’s papers. His research led first to the publication of an article in the New York Times, then a book, The Death of Anton Webern, and, finally, to his and Rosaleen’s major Webern biography in 1978. Speaking of this labor in 1987, he recalled his ambivalent feelings toward not Webern the artist but the man whose national loyalty and unshaken pride in his noble lineage during the Nazi regime--the Webern genealogy is among the manuscripts Moldenhauer acquired from Webern’s heirs--he felt to be morally questionable. And he recalled the anger it caused him, which Rosaleen, who occasionally even suggested that he abandon the biography, could not fully share.

Raised a Christian by Christian parents, he was proud of his Jewish lineage. Among his last major acquisitions was the holograph score of Schelomo, the only major Bloch manuscript not already in the comprehensive Bloch collection at the Library of Congress. He dictated the following note in his catalog:

The manuscript was acquired in tribute to Rabbi Solomon Weil, to his son Abraham Weil (first Jewish tax collector in Royal Bavarian employ and honorary citizen of Leimersheim in the Palatinate) and to his eldest daughter, Thekia Weil. A Christian, she married Richard Moldenhauer and became the mother of Hans Moldenhauer.

In January 1987, Moldenhauer ruminated over the placement of his remaining Archives. He had given careful consideration to finding appropriate institutions for certain parts of the Archives. His Richard Strauss, Reger, Pfitzner, and Berg manuscripts were already in Munich. He had just offered his Loeffler and Castelnuovo-Tedesco materials to the Library of Congress, which has the virtually complete manuscripts of both composers, and an important group of Brahms manuscripts, in consideration of the Library’s exceptional Brahms collection, was to follow.

Yet he was hesitant in settling on a home for certain other pieces. In 1984, most of his Webern manuscripts had already joined the significant twentieth-century collections at the Sacher Foundation in Base!, but he had set aside a portion of them, along with other jewels he had reserved as a memorial collection to Rosaleen, for the crown--his "Taj Mahal"--that he had planned for her, and these he finally decided to keep with the body of that memorial collection that is now at the Library of Congress.

But old conflicts continued to disturb him, and when he spoke of the "out and out contest between the old and new world" it seemed that he was referring not only to external pressures but to his continuing inner struggle to reconcile his love for the world that had rejected him with the loyalties he had developed in his adopted nation. He recounted a conversation of some ten years earlier with a former classmate who had said, regarding certain portions of his Archives still in Spokane: "Strictly speaking, those things belong in Germany," to which Moldenhauer had responded: "Strictly speaking, so do I."

Over the years during which Moldenhauer sold and donated parts of his Archives, various other items found homes away from the places in which, strictly speaking, one might expect them to be. Besides Brahms’s, manuscripts of other German masters, including Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Wagner came to the Library of Congress, along with those of composers of virtually every other nation. Yet the sketches for Hindemith’s Hérodiade, commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress, are in Basel. Important American pieces that complement the Library’s holdings are at Harvard. It cannot be entirely without deliberation on Moldenhauer’s part that at least some of these things occurred, and it is certain that at the end he foresaw the constructive possibilities of such distributions.

During his lifetime, he established the Moldenhauer Archives in nine institutions in the United States and Europe. While he probably never envisioned a single repository for his Archives, the matter of unification was of deep concern to him, as was the matter of continuity. He did not wish to have the fruits of his and Rosaleen’s labors scattered in such a way that they would be inaccessible through a central institution, nor did he want the acquisition of new archival materials to cease when he could no longer personally direct the activities of the Moldenhauer Archives. It was his hope that the Library of Congress could provide not only a home for the very substantial remainder of his Archives not already in other institutions, but that it could continue in his name the role he had played for nearly four decades in acquiring, cataloging, and preserving archival materials that are the primary sources for musical research. This we are able to do, thanks to the bequest of a fund that came with the Archives and the continued generosity of Mary Moldenhauer. Above all, it was his hope that this volume, much of which we planned with him, would be the cornerstone of a cooperative program supported by all custodians of the Moldenhauer legacy.

Jon Newsom
Chief, Music Division