Peters Carl Friedrich, *30 March 1779 Leipzig, †20 November 1827 Sonnenstein (Bavaria), German bookseller. A publishing company, Bureau de Musique, has been bearing his name for over 200 years (with its own engraving shop, printing house and shop selling printed books and musical instruments); it was founded on 1 December 1800 in Leipzig by F.A. Hoffmeister (1754–1812) and A. Kühnel (1770–1813). They published the first collected edition of piano and organ works by J.S. Bach, Mozart quartets and quintets, and works by Haydn and Beethoven. From 1805, Kühnel himself ran a company called Neuer Verlag des Bureau de Musique von Kühnel; according to a printed catalogue from 1812, he published the schools of M. Clementi, J.B. Cramer, I. Pleyel, J.G. Albrechtsberger, P. Rode, R. Kreutzer and L. Mozart and works by Beethoven, Cherubini, Haydn, Mozart, Hoffmeister, Spohr, Spontini and 4 volumes of Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler by E.L. Gerber. Peters purchased the company from Kühnel’s heirs on 1 April 1814, named it Bureau de Musique von C.F. Peters and continued the publishing policy of his predecessor for 13 years, printing the editions he had started and expanding the assortment to include works by J. Hummel, G.Ch. Grosheim, A.A. Klengel and F. Ries. Political conditions were not conducive to the development of the company, and at the end of his life Peters, plagued by difficulties, was sent to an asylum. After his death, the publishing house was bought in 1828 by the manufacturer Carl Gotthelf Böhme (*24 January 1785 Burgstädt, †20 July 1855 Leipzig) and from then on the company never returned to the Peters family, although it has retained its original name to this day. Böhme, in cooperation with C. Czerny and M. Hauptmann, continued to publish the works of J.S. Bach, among others took the initiative to publish all his organ works in 9 volumes, edited by F.C. Griepenkerl and F.A. Roitzsch. In his will, Böhme created a foundation from the company, headed by A.Th. Whistling under the supervision of the Leipzig city council, from which the publishing house was bought by the Berlin bookseller J. Friedländer in 1860. He initiated the modernization of the printing process by using lithography.
In 1863, Max Abraham (*3 July 1831 Gdańsk, †8 December 1900 Leipzig) became the co-owner and manager of the company. He had already fully exploited the invention of the lithographic printing press, and in 1867 he named the company Edition Peters. Thanks to increased production and cost reduction, in cooperation with C.G. Röder, he published the most important works from all genres of classical and contemporary music, including arrangements that were popular with amateur musicians, and the publishing house quickly gained international fame. In 1878, he published works by F. Mendelssohn, in 1880 by F. Chopin, in 1887 by R. Schumann. In 1881, he acquired the exclusive right to publish his works from E. Grieg. Thanks to professional contacts and friendships with musicians and teachers who helped him in editing, he published works by R. Wagner, J. Brahms, M. Bruch, M. Moszkowski and Ch. Sinding. Copyright-free publications were published in a green cover, while works for which he had acquired publishing rights were issued in a pink cover. In 1876, he bought the publishing house of G. Heinze, including the company of F. Whistling and B. Friedel, and in 1886 the publishing house of G.W. Körner, and in 1893 the company of F. Whistling’s widow. On 1 October 1893, Abraham created a musicological library called Musikbibliothek Peters, which in 1901, together with the building, was donated to the Leipzig city authorities as a foundation (in 1953, Musikbibliothek Peters was attached to the city library in Leipzig). In 1895, Abraham published the first issue of “Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters,” which was published until 1940, edited successively by E. Vogel, R. Schwartz, K. Taut and E. Schmitz. The following people collaborated with the magazine: G. Adler, H. Besseler, F. Blume, E. Bücken, F. Chrysander, A. Einstein, F.G. Feilerer, H. Kretzschmar, H. Mersmann, H.J. Moser, H. Riemann, C. Sachs, A. Schering, and J. Wolf. Reissued in 1956, it was published in Leipzig as “Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft” edited by W. Vetter, and in 1978 the original title was restored.
From 1891, Abraham’s nephew, Henri Hinrichsen (*5 February 1868 Hamburg, †30 September 1942 Oświęcim) worked in the publishing house as a secret commercial advisor. In 1894, he became co-owner, and after Abraham’s death, sole owner of the publishing house, developing it thanks to his far-sighted editorial policy and passion for art. In 1903 and 1905, he acquired publishing rights to the songs of J. Wolff, in 1918, he bought the publishing house of J. Rieter-Biedermann and obtained publishing rights to works by G. Mahler, H. Pfitzner, M. Reger (1928), A. Schoenberg, R. Strauss (1932). In 1930, he began publishing source texts, but constantly reissued editions of classical music. He also distinguished himself by establishing a foundation that, in 1926, enabled the acquisition of the collection of the Heyerliche Musikinstrumenten Sammlung from Cologne for the institute of musicology at the University of Leipzig.
Henri’s eldest son, Max Hinrichsen (*6 July 1901 Leipzig, †17 December 1965 London) became co-owner of the company in 1931, but already in 1937 he moved to London, where the following year he founded a branch called Hinrichsen Edition Ltd. Published major works by ancient and contemporary English composers. In 1944–61, the “Hinrichsens Musical Year Book” was published irregularly, containing documentation of musical life and materials on the history of music. In 1965, M. Hinrichsen was the first music publisher to become an honorary member of the Trinity College of Music in London. After his death, the management of the London branch was taken over by his wife Carla (*15 May 1922 Lawrence, California, †2 December 2005 London). In 1975, the company name was changed to Peters Edition. In 1976, Jonson Dyer became the company’s director, and in 1995, Nicholas Riddle.
Henri’s second son, Walter Hinrichsen (*23 September 1907 Leipzig, †21 July 1969 New York), emigrated to the United States in 1936, and in 1948 founded C.F. Peters Corporation in New York and headed it until the end of his life. In addition to his own production, he published publications of other American companies and acted as a representative of many European publishing houses in the United States. The corporation issued, among others: works by: J. Cage, H. Cowell, F. Peeters, A. Czerepnin and H. Villa-Lobos. W. Hinrichsen also owned Henmar Press Inc. and Talzehn Music Corporation in New York. After his death, the publishing house was run by his wife, Evelyn (*30 November 1910 Chicago, †2005), who continued to maintain the company at a high level; her son Henry Hans Hinrichsen took over the company in 1978, followed by Stephen Fischer in 1983 and Nicholas Riddle (who was also director of the London branch) in 1998.
Henri’s youngest son, Hans Joachim Hinrichsen (*22 August 1909 Leipzig, †18 September 1940 Perpignan), joined the company in Leipzig in 1933, but in 1939 he and his father had to leave it due to Nazi persecution. After they died in the extermination camps, the owners of the publishing house were Henri’s sons Max and Walter, but the company was managed by Johannes Petschull (*8 May 1901 Diez an der Lahn, †9 January 2001 Falkenstein), who was its co-owner from 1939, and in 1940 he also bought the publishing house H. Litolff. The war destroyed most of the publishing production, but the company was launched in March 1947; in 1949, the company in Leipzig was nationalised, and the previous owners lost their ownership rights and the Volkseigener Betrieb Edition Peters publishing house was established under compulsory state management. In 1949–69, the company in Leipzig was headed by Georg Hillner (*19 June 1896 Leipzig), from 1969 to 1983 Bernd Pachnicke (*8 May 1938 Dresden), from 1983 Norbert Molkenbur (*15 April 1938, †6 December 2009). In addition to reissues of items from old catalogues, it published world-famous urtext publications from Vivaldi to Scriabin, as well as a wide range of contemporary works, promoting mainly composers from Eastern Europe. At the same time, a western company called C.F. Peters, which published mainly opera and choral music (the “Das Singwerk” and “Canticum” series) and source editions (including the “Das Erbe Deutscher Musik” series), also distributed publications by VEB Edition Peters from Leipzig. In 1971, the publishing house in Frankfurt am Main was merged with the M.P. publishing house. Belyaev. In 1974, Edition Schwamm joined the company. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, disputes began over the ownership of the company in Leipzig, and in 1993 it finally came under the control of a company from Frankfurt. It was still managed by J. Petschull and Karl Rarisch, and the previous director of the Leipzig company, Norbert Molkenburg, became the representative of the company’s branch in Leipzig.
In the following years, various attempts were made to unite Peters’s separate companies, in which the director of the London and New York branches of the company, N. Riddle, played an important role. The companies and their owners reached an agreement in 2010, resulting in the creation of Edition Peters Group. Since then, the majority of the Group’s shares have been owned by the Hinrichsen Foundation, founded by Carla Hinrichsen in 1976 – meaning that profits from its operations support music education and artistic performances – while the remainder is owned by Christian Hinrichsen, Walter’s grandson. Since 2011, more and more company branches have been moved to Leipzig; in 2013, an agreement was concluded between the city of Leipzig and the heirs of Henri Hinrichsen, according to which the Peters Music Library found a permanent place in Leipzig. In 2014, the Frankfurt office was closed and Leipzig became the company’s headquarters again.
Literature: H. Lindlar Carl Friedrich Peters. Musikverlag. Zeittafeln zur Verlagsgeschichte 1800–1867–1967, Frankfurt am Main 1967; H.-M. Plesske Der Bestand Musikverlag Carl Friedrich Peters im Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Leipzig 1970; Edition Peters 1800–1975. Daten zur Geschichte des Musikverlages Peters, red. B. Pachnicke, Leipzig 1975; I. Lawford-Hinrichsen Music Publishing and Patronage – Carl Friedrich Peters. 1800 to the Holocaust, Kenton (Middlesex) 2000; S. Fetthauer, Musikverlage im „Dritten Reich“ und im Exil, 2nd ed., Hamburg 2007.
