3 - ‘De-Germanising’ Music Publishing: Dukas's Beethoven in Wartime France

Summary

On 19 October 1915, Superintendent Jules Manouvrier settled down in a large building on the Place Louis Lepine, on the Île de la Cité, to conduct an interview. The building was the Parisian home of the Préfecture de Police and the man to be interrogated was the music publisher Max Eschig. Born and brought up in the Duchy of Troppau, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Eschig had moved to Paris in 1906. Arriving in the French capital, he had founded a music publishing house, with financial assistance from the German publisher Schott. For much of the early twentieth century, his firm provided a central outlet in Paris for the distribution of foreign works and editions, being the exclusive representative in the city for Schott of Mainz, Simrock of Berlin and Karczag of Vienna. Eschig quickly made a name for himself as a leading publisher of French-language versions of Viennese operetta, but he also held the rights to notable French works, including Gustave Charpentier's opera Julien, Alfred Bachelet's lyric drama Scemo and Ravel's early piano works Jeux d’eau, Miroirs and Pavane pour une infante défunte.

Amidst a wartime climate in which foreigners were viewed with increasing suspicion, particularly those with known associations with enemy countries, continued business made Eschig a target for surveillance from a government fearful of espionage. That Eschig had applied for French nationalisation in 1912 and had been legally granted residence in 1913 made little difference. Still officially an immigrant hailing from enemy territory, in the eyes of the law his continued presence and trading in Paris was problematic. Suspicions that the publisher continued to send money from sales of editions back to Austro-German firms meant that the police had little option but to keep close surveillance on his business operations.

A month earlier in September 1915, the Parisian-based publishing house of Jacques Durand published the second in his series of two volumes of the Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by the composer Paul Dukas. On a surface level, these two events taking place in the music publishing world, just weeks apart, might seem to have little in common.