Authors

Viktoria Zora¹;  ¹ Independent Researcher, UK

Discussion

World Wars, October’s Revolution and political events of the 20th century caused waves of political migrations across Europe and the US and disrupted the publication of Russian music in the first half of the 20th century. Pre-revolutionary Russia enjoyed a wealth of music publishing houses, including Bessel, S.A & N.K. Koussevitzky and P. Jürgenson, which operated with international copyright and had a worldwide commercial scope. For example, Jürgenson, founded in 1861, kept stocks in Leipzig, London and Paris and distributed its music worldwide. Music publishing historically relied on German expertise, but the First World War forced many music publishers with German surnames to go out of business in Russia, enabling for instance Serge Koussevitzky to acquire in 1914 the publishing house of A. Gutheil. After the October 1917 Revolution Bessel and Koussevitzky companies relocated to Paris, while Jürgenson was nationalised alongside all other pre-revolutionary Russian publishing businesses. After his migration Koussetitzky founded the ‘Édition Russe de Musique’ in Paris and ‘Russischer Musikverlag’ in Berlin. The Soviet nationalisation of music publishing businesses in 1918 resulted in the formation of Gosmuzizdat (State Music Publishing), which after the Russian civil war (1917-22) became known as Gosizdat Muzsektor. In the 1930s the state controlled music publishing was restructured into Muzgiz (State Music Publishers) and Muzfond (Music Fund of the USSR). The 1938 invasion and incorporation of Austria into Germany caused some of the most talented of Universal Edition’s Jewish staff to emigrate from Vienna, some of whom were re-employed by the British music publishing firm Boosey & Hawkes in its London and New York offices. With its newly acquired Jewish editorial expertise Boosey & Hawkes purchased in 1945 Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian catalogues (Édition Russe de Musique, Gutheil), and founded in London the Anglo-Soviet Music Press, which with a special agreement with Moscow managed to publish newly composed Soviet works on the same day they were released in the USSR. The Second World War temporarily ceased German dominance in music publishing, while the physical destruction created tremendous shortages in publishing infrastructure. In 1946 Muzgiz published more than 300 classical music works in Leipzig using German publishing facilities. The paper will consider how the social disruption and war-time destruction of publishing facilities created new opportunities for some Western and Soviet state music publishers to publish Russian music; how the movement of expertise and political climate have made some Western businesses to flourish, while others to perish; what nationalisation of music publishing businesses has meant for Soviet Russia and how the Soviet state published and disseminated in the West its new Soviet music.