The World's Oldest
Music Publisher

The 300-year history of Breitkopf & Härtel holds lessons in craftsmanship, strategy, and survival.

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THERE'S AN UNDERGROUND bank safe somewhere in Germany—only a few people know where—holding the most valuable archives of Breitkopf & Härtel, the three-century-old music publisher now based outside Frankfurt. The less rarefied records occupy some 300 meters of shelving in the State Archives in Leipzig, the company’s original home, by far the archives’ largest stock on any subject. As paper trails go, Breitkopf & Härtel’s is one of the longest in its own industry or any other, dating back to 1719. Indisputably the world’s oldest music publisher and just off its 300th anniversary year, the company is best known for publishing the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schubert, and a long list of other greats, often within the composers’ own lifetimes. It survived—barely—the upheaval in Germany during and after World War II, starting almost from scratch in a new home when the war was over. As the “founding father” of music publishing, Breitkopf & Härtel pioneered techniques that would later be taken up by every other publisher in the sector—and there’s nothing wrong with that, says Nick Pfefferkorn, managing partner of Breitkopf & Härtel. “At some point, someone invented the automobile, and today there are numerous companies that all build good cars,” he says. “The important thing is to continue being innovative.”

"I see the invention of music type printing
as the birth of music publishing
in the way we know it today."

For perspective’s sake, Johann Sebastian Bach was 39 when the company now known as Breitkopf & Härtel set up shop in Leipzig. The founder, Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, got into the publishing business when he married Maria Sophia Müller, whose family print shop dated back to the 1500s. His first traceable music publication, by the church musician Georg Christian Schemelli, dates back to sometime before 1740. It was his son, however, who would revolutionize music publishing. In 1754, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf introduced the first moveable type for music scores—a development compared to the invention of the printing press. “[With the printing press], the spreading of knowledge was suddenly feasible quickly and inexpensively—and, above all, accessible to everyone,” says Pfefferkorn. “The same, all of a sudden, applied to music. Up to this time, notes could only be passed on in handwriting. I see the invention of music type printing as the birth of music publishing in the way we know it today.”

Publishing the great composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Breitkopf & Härtel also developed industry-changing technologies from its original home in Leipzig, Germany.

By the turn of the 19th century, Christoph Gottlob Breitkopf had turned over the operation to the Härtel in the company name: Gottfried Christoph Härtel. At that point, Breitkopf & Härtel had published compositions by the Bach sons as well as the collected works of Mozart, followed by “Complete Editions” for Franz Joseph Haydn, Muzio Clementi, and Jan Ladislav Dussek. The introduction of its now-famous Complete Editions “made the complete oeuvre of the respective composers accessible for the first time,” says Pfefferkorn, “and still defines our comprehension of music history and music philology today.” During the first half of that century, the company also forged a publishing contract with Ludwig van Beethoven, produced the first comprehensive scholarly edition of Bach, and brought forth works by a new generation of composers—Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt—followed a few years later by compositions from Wagner and Brahms. By the 1860s, it had published Complete Editions for Handel, Palestrina, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and many others.

During this same period, at least two footnotes from Breitkopf & Härtel history would leave their imprint on the music industry at large. One was the publication of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, or “AMZ,” a German-language journal considered the leading music periodical of its time. Published through much of the 19th century, it’s credited with a profound influence on the classical music of the day. “The frequently printed reviews of sheet music and performances by composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven shaped the canon of ‘Viennese Classicism,’” Pfefferkorn says. “Without the AMZ, this would probably never have happened.”

The second historical footnote, largely forgotten today, is that Breitkopf & Härtel once doubled as one of the largest piano manufacturers in Europe. “Musicians such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt commended the grand and upright pianos from Breitkopf & Härtel,” says Pfefferkorn, “and quite a few of the piano manufacturers still known today learned their craft at Breitkopf & Härtel.” By the second half of the 19th century, however, new manufacturing methods had revolutionized piano making, and company management had to decide whether to invest in a modernized operation or exit the piano segment. In 1872, they elected to give it up and rededicate the company solely to music publishing.

Breitkopf & Härtel was once a leading piano maker as well as a publisher.

From the 1890s onward, Breitkopf & Härtel expanded rapidly, establishing international branches in Brussels, London, and New York. A complete catalog published in 1903—known as the “Breitkopf Bible”—ran to 1,200 pages of available editions. A new Leipzig factory boasting the latest technical developments in publishing was commissioned in 1913, and the company came to employ around 1,100 people worldwide.

It all came to a screeching halt one night in December 1943, when Allied bombs descended on Leipzig, leaving Breitkopf & Härtel’s main headquarters in ruins. “Just imagine,” says Pfefferkorn: “the world’ s largest music publisher was abruptly faced with nothing.” The company suffered immense losses, including some of its valuable original archives—though some historical treasures survived thanks to publisher Hellmuth von Hase, who’d had the foresight to stow them in nearby villages for safekeeping. But as Soviet troops marched into Leipzig, soon to be part of communist East Germany, Hase himself would have to flee, bringing with him only his wife, three daughters, a secretary, and two trucks’ worth of music notes—all that remained of the 230-year-old Breitkopf & Härtel.

After a 1943 bombing,
"the world’s largest music publisher
was abruptly faced with nothing."

From a new home base in Wiesbaden in the western part of Germany, the company began to rebuild. In 1947, Hase was granted a publishing license from the American authorities governing that sector of postwar Germany. The war’s repercussions, however, had changed music publishing in more ways than one. For one thing, competing German publishers that hadn’t been uprooted—among them Bärenreiter Verlag and the newly founded G. Henle Verlag—gained ground as Breitkopf & Härtel struggled to regroup.

For another, the German music engraving tradition centered in Leipzig had been all but wiped out by the catastrophe of war. “Prior to World War II,” Pfefferkorn explains, “Germany was the stronghold of music engraving. Nearly all publishers—not only from Germany—had their sheet music engraved in Leipzig. In the aftermath of the war, this craft almost came to a standstill; people simply had other things to do than engrave new notes into lead plates. The challenge was to secure one’s own survival.” As the worst of the devastation abated, demand for printed music gradually returned—but the skilled engravers didn’t, at least not right away. Displaced by the war or doing other kinds of work for survival’s sake, they left a vacuum in music publishing that would be filled by a stopgap technique known as Notaset. The industry relied on this method of “rubbing” notes onto the page using transparent transfer sheets until traditional engraving was able to resume.

"You can’t define yourself
by the achievements of the past,
which simply cannot be repeated today."

In hindsight, this collision of technology and big-picture forces might have revealed a glimpse of the future for music publishing. Starting in the 1990s, computer notation software began delivering an easy, inexpensive method for printing notes to paper. What publishers had to consider was whether it was also the best method—and which finer points could be lost if traditional techniques were no longer taught and learned. For Breitkopf & Härtel, the keeper of centuries-old compositions preserved only in the written record of the composer’s intentions, it’s a weighty question. Today, computer engraving has replaced the bulk of the work once done by hand, though the company maintains a distinctive “house style” and fine-tunes each edition with careful manual edits. “It’s often thought that anyone can produce notes on their computer, since the computer provides us with a (supposedly) perfect note image,” says Pfefferkorn. “Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Publishers today are faced with the challenge of maintaining an awareness of superior aesthetic and technically perfect notation. Failure in doing so could result in the complete loss of knowledge of this craft in ten years.”

Three centuries of innovation and persistence carried Breitkopf & Härtel to a milestone anniversary in 2019.

Today, the Breitkopf & Härtel catalog spans some 15,000 titles, among them the Urtext editions prized as the most accurate representations of the classical canon. Its selection draws from orchestral and stage music of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, along with piano titles, chamber music, and an expansive educational library. In addition to its main publishing house in Wiesbaden, the company maintains a warehouse, distribution hub, and administrative office in Taunusstein, Germany, which coordinates orders, shipping, rentals, and performance concerns worldwide. It also—once again—has a small branch in Leipzig. Observances to mark their 300th anniversary took Pfefferkorn and his team around the world, from festival concerts in Wiesbaden and Leipzig to exhibitions in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Boston—with events set for Taiwan and Beijing in 2020. An anniversary film produced to celebrate the milestone was honored this past year at Deutsche Wirtschaftsfilmpreis, the German Business Film Awards.

“Of course, as the world’s oldest music publisher, we are very proud of our history and keep reminding ourselves of it,” says Pfefferkorn. “It would be a mistake, however, to confine Breitkopf & Härtel to this 300-year history only. You can’t define yourself by the achievements of the past, which simply cannot be repeated today.

“The business of a music publisher is of a long-term nature,” he adds. “Decisions and investments made today cannot be expected to lead to financial success tomorrow. In fact, all traditional publishing houses live on the investments and decisions our forefathers made a long time ago. This is the foundation of a healthy day-to-day business. I think Breitkopf & Härtel has always focused on continuity, while generally keeping our hands off fast—and sometimes tempting—promises of success.”

www.breitkopf.com