The Paul Hirsch Music Collection
Thursday, April 17, 2025
The following was originally published on the Music Blog of the British Library (Creative Commons Attribution Licence):
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.
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.
For more on Hirsch’s musical interests and some highlights from his collection, see the Music Blog of the British Library.
[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 online
[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).
See Paul Hirsch in the RISM database (RISM Catalog | RISM Online).
Image: Paul Hirsch, Katalog einer Mozart-Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1906. British Library Hirsch 442. Available online.
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