"Why then all the difficulties! a life of Kathi Meyer-Baer.(Interview)

ABSTRACT

Kathi Meyer-Baer (Berlin 1892-Atlanta 1977) was arguably the most significant and surely the most productive female musicologist of her generation. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in musicology (in 1916), studying at Berlin University but receiving the degree at Leipzig University. She worked at Paul Hirsch's private library in Frankfurt as resident professional scholar and bibliographer, and with him produced one of the great music catalogs of the century. She published five books, four of them major contributions to women's choral music, music aesthetics, musical incunabula, and musical iconography; more than thirty scholarly articles; and hundreds of newspaper reports, reviews, essays, and obituaries. She married at forty-one, had a son at forty-three, fled Nazi Frankfurt with her family for Paris at forty-five, and arrived in New York at forty-seven; those four events defined the rest of her long life. Sadly, her double identity as woman and Jew worked against her in her adopted homeland as it had done in the homeland that had banished her. In the end, she had no choice but to live her life as an independent scholar. She did so with grace, courage, perseverance, and enormous productivity.

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I first encountered Kathi Meyer-Baer while digging among the files of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of the New York Public Library. The Emergency Committee was established in New York shortly after the formation of a Nazi government in Germany, with the purpose of helping to secure academic positions in the United States for scholars dismissed from their academic positions in Germany, and from 1938 in German-occupied Europe and in Italy, on racial or political grounds. Among the hundreds who applied for funding from the Emergency Committee during its twelve years of operation were thirty-eight musicians and music scholars, all but one of them men. The exception was Meyer-Baer. (1)

To spend time with these people is to live in a world of heartbreak and humiliation, fear and displacement, courage and reconstruction; a world of souls torn from family, friends, teachers, colleagues, students, home, neighborhood, language, food, dress, job, and library, then deposited into an alien culture and forced to make their place in it. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, all were unique in their stories. The degree of success of their adaptation, to their new homes depended on many factors, among them age, personality, grit, connections, mastery of English, and sheer luck. (2) Alfred Einstein, Curt Sachs, Manfred Bukofzer, Leo Schrade, Edward Lowinsky, and Karl Geiringer would build distinguished careers here. Gerhard Herz would find his niche here with ease, Paul Nettl and Alfred Sendrey would find theirs only after years of struggle. Others would eventually find their way and leave traces, however light, of their lives. All but one found teaching positions, however modest. The exception, again, was Meyer-Baer, and in the absence of academic offspring she all but disappeared after her death.

To happen upon Meyer-Baer is to discover a fascinating woman and scholar. She was arguably the most significant, and surely the most productive, female musicologist of her generation. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in musicology. She worked at Paul Hirsch's magnificent private library in Frankfurt as resident professional scholar and bibliographer, and with him produced one of the great music catalogs of the century. She published five books, four of them major contributions to women's choral music, music aesthetics, musical incunabula, and musical iconography; more than thirty scholarly articles; and hundreds of newspaper reports, reviews, essays, and obituaries. She married at fortyone, had a son at forty-three, fled Nazi Frankfurt with her family for Paris at forty-five, and arrived in New York at forty-seven; those four events defined the rest of her long life. Sadly, her double identity as a woman and as a Jew worked against her in her adopted homeland as it had done in the homeland that had banished her. In the end, she had no choice but to live her life as an independent scholar. She did so with grace, courage, perseverance, and enormous productivity.

Meyer-Baer was seventy-eight when the Princeton University Press published her last book, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death, in 1970. A final article appeared in Music Review the following year. (3) The last trace she left was a foreword, dated 3 February 1975, to a reprint of her early Bedeutung und Wesen der Musik. (4) Then she vanished. When The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians came out five years later, the Meyer-Baer entry by Alec Hyatt King gave her birth date, 27 July 1892, but no death date. Perhaps she was still alive? But when I found some of her traces in the New York Public and the British Libraries more than a decade later, she could no longer have been among the living. What had happened to her? My inquiries yielded nothing. One person remembered only that she lived in the eastern United States during the 1970s. Another thought she had settled in Flushing, New York. A third remembered her dimly from the 1960s. Several others drew a blank. No known necrology had noted her death. The Princeton University Press had lost touch with her estate after it took Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death out of print, and had kept no file on it or her. A year and a half later I finally found her son George M. Baer, who was now living in a hacienda three hours east of Mexico City, and with him the key to her life. It has been a fascinating dig.