Kathi Meyer-Baer
Kathi Meyer-Baer was a musicologist, librarian and bibliographer, "arguably the most significant, and surely the most productive, female musicologist of her generation."
Early years
Katharina Gertrud Meyer was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin on July 27, 1892. Her father Martin was a banker and her mother was Gertrud. She attended a private girls' school and studied music at the Stern Conservatory, studying piano with Frieda Kwast-Hodapp and music theory with Wilhelm Klatte. Upon graduating high school in 1911, she began studies at Berlin University where her professors included Hermann Kretzschmar and Johannes Wolf. When it was time to submit her dissertation to Kretzschmar, he rejected it saying he could not accept a dissertation from a woman during wartime. Josephson also believes that anti-Jewish sentiment led Kretzschmar to reject her dissertation. Upon the advice of Wolf, she transferred to Leipzig University and submitted her dissertation to Hugo Riemann. After qualifying exams she was granted a doctorate in 1916. Her dissertation was published the following year with the title Der chorische Gesang der Frauen, mit besonderer Bezugnahme seiner Betätigung auf geistlichem Gebiet. 1. Teil bis zur Zeit um 1800. It was published in 1917. She was only the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in musicology.Wartime conditions in Berlin proved inhospitable, so Kathi moved to Munich in 1917, initially living with her sister Dora Edinger. She began lecturing at local women's clubs and began publishing articles. Turbulent political conditions made her move back to Berlin. There she published a few music reviews for the Neues Frauen Zeitung from 1919 to 1921.
Career in Europe
In 1921 Dora and her family moved to Frankfurt and Kathi went to help them get settled. After a concert featuring her former singing teacher Ludwig Landshoff, Kathi met choral director Margarete Dessoff and her brother Albert Dessoff, who was in charge of the Frankfurt-based Rothschild Library. This led to a meeting with Paul Hirsch, an industrialist who had the largest private library in Europe. Upon hearing that she was rejected for a teaching position at Goethe University Frankfurt, Hirsch offered her a position as librarian of his private library. She accepted the position and functioned as librarian from 1922 until 1936. Although not a trained librarian, her extensive research in the Prussian State Library informed her ideas about organization and maintenance of the Hirsch Library. She recognized that the library was "not merely an accumulation of treasures, but a living institute." Her responsibilities included acquisitions and organization of the library as well as helping users with research. Among such users were eminent musicians such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Zoltán Kodály, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter among others. Additionally she helped Hirsch with hosting meetings of bibliophilic and music societies as well as helping with the programming of concerts and recitals.Her assumption as the Hirsch librarian increased her reputation so that she became reviewer for the Frankfurter Zeitung. From 1922 through 1927 she contributed over 300 articles to the newspaper. Thereafter, because of cost-cutting streamlining, she contributed far fewer articles. At times she also contributed to the Neue Musik-Zeitung and the Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Gemeinde Frankfurt. She published her first book in 1925, Das Konzert, ein Führer durch die Geschichte des Musizierens in Bildern und Melodien. Eventually recognizing that an appointment to an academic position as a musicologist was not available to her, she enrolled in the Prussian State Library's librarian program, and after passing a state exam was granted certification as research librarian in 1928.
She curated the scholarly portion a large exhibition Musik im Leben der Völker held from June 11 through August 28, 1927. Meyer-Baer wrote the forward to the exhibition catalog. The exhibit received extensive coverage in the German press.
The year 1928 also saw the publication the first volume inventorying the Hirsch Library. The second volume appeared in 1930.
Receiving a grant from the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft allowed her to work on her next book Bedeutung und Wesen der Musik, which was published in 1932. Although intended as a two-volume history of music aesthetics, only one volume was published.
In 1932, she mounted the exhibit Musik um Goethe on the centenary of the poet's death at the Manskopfschen Musikhistorischen Museum. She curated a third exhibit devoted to the work or Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama opening in 1933 two weeks after the Nazis were elected to the government.
In 1934 Sophie Drinker read Meyer-Baer's dissertation. Drinker wrote to Mayer-Baer suggesting she expand her dissertration into a history of women making music. From there a relationship developed, initially entirely by correspondence, with Drinker requestion material for a book and Meyer-Baer dutifully providing copies.
The Baers arrived in Paris on March 30, 1938, intending to settle, but the collapse of the government made them look elsewhere. They arrived in New York on March 24, 1940, and soon after met up with Harry and Sophie Drinker.
In the United States
Through the connection established with Sophie Drinker, she and her husband Henry Drinker functioned as sponsors for the Baers' immigration, although they would not guarantee financial security. Nevertheless, the Baers initially settled in Philadelphia to maintain connection with their Drinkers and to establish a base from which they could seek employment.Eventually the Baers settled in New Rochelle. Carl Engel was able to offer Kathi a temporary editorial position at G. Schirmer, Inc.. With the end of that job in sight, in 1941 she applied to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars in the hope of finding an appropriate job. The Committee contacted administrators at the New York Public Library who had been keeping a position open in the hope of hiring Otto Erich Deutsch. By April 1941 they decided to offer a job to Mayer-Baer while leaving open the possibility of hiring Deutsch in the future should he be able to come. With funds supplied by the Emergency Committee Meyer-Baer began a one-year appointment at the Library in the Music Division on November 1, 1941. Towards the end of her year, Carleton Sprague Smith, the head of the Music Division, met with the Emergency Committee and advised not to renew Meyer-Baer's grant, saying that among numerous inaccuracies in her work, she was "unsuitable" as a librarian or a teacher.
Having arrived in the United States under the sponsorship of the Drinkers, Meyer-Baer's contact and relationship with Sophie increased. They discussed various issues related to the preparation of Drinker's book. Although Meyer-Baer's work temporarily ceased while she was employed by the New York Public Library, their collaboration resumed once that job ended. After November 1942 there was no communication until Spring 1944 when Drinker communicated to Meyer-Baer that she had finished her book having decided to take her research in a different direction. Meyer-Baer was incensed, believing that the two were collaborating. David Josephson, Meyer-Baer's biographer, devoted many pages detailing how their relationship fell apart and the emotional harm it had on Meyer-Baer.
After the Drinker fiasco, Meyer-Baer's next major accomplishment was publication of the fourth volume of Paul Hirsch's library, Katalog der Musikbibliothek Paul Hirsch, Frankfurt am Main. In 1947 she was awarded two fellowships, $1,500 from the International Federation of University Women for examining incunabula at the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the British Museum, and $500 from the American Council of Learned Societies for travel related to her inventory of music incunabula. Of all the people Meyer-Baer knew professionally, the one who had the greatest impact was Paul Hirsch. Not only had Hirsch hired her as his librarian, but he had given her professional encouragement as well as being a very supportive friend and colleague. Hirsch's death in 1949 left a large lacuna in Meyer-Baer's life. "Henceforth, she would carry on life as an independent scholar very much alone, supported here and there by sympathetic minds inside and outside her field. But she would never fill the voice left by Hirsch's death. Her loss was beyond calculation."
In 1955 Meyer-Baer resumed work on a manuscript and received a grant of $900 from the American Philosophical Society to assemble images from Princeton and Harvard for what would be her final book, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death. Although published in 1970, she was busy with numerous projects resulting in articles and an exhibition cataloged on musical incunabula.
In July 1976, while visiting her son in Atlanta, Meyer-Baer fell and broke her knee. Eventually her son George brought her to a nursing home in Atlanta. There she fell into dementia and died on January 3, 1977. Her husband Curtis had died on November 9, 1976, having fallen at home.