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| Founded | 1901; 124 years ago (1901) |
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| Country of origin | Austria |
| Headquarters location | Vienna |
| Publication types | Sheet music |
| Official website | universaledition.com |
Universal Edition (UE) is an Austrianclassical musicpublishing firm. Founded in1901 inVienna, it originally intended to provide the core classical works and educational works to the Austrian market. The firm soon expanded to become one of the most important publishers ofmodernist andcontemporary classical music.
Universal Edition was founded on 1 June 1901 inVienna.[1][a] It was formed by the publishersBernhard Herzmansky (himself from theDoblinger [de] firm),Adolf Robitschek [de] andJosef Weinberger [de] as an attempt to compete with theLeipzig-based publishersBreitkopf & Härtel andEdition Peters.[1] UE itself describes this as an attempt to "simply to counter the predominance of the foreign music trade in Vienna with a domestic music publishing house".[2] In a financial boost for UE, the Austrian Ministry of Education gave a 5 July 1901 decree that Austrian music schools should prefer UE editions over those by German publishers.[1] The firm's creation was announced next month in theNeues Wiener Tagblatt:
"Die neue Musikausgabe, welche unter Zusammenwirken der hervorragendsten Interessenten des österreichisch-ungarischen Musikverlages gegründet wurde, [...] [wird] sowohl die Werke der Classiker wie auch die hervorragendsten Werke instructiver Art umfassen [...], denen sich Schöpfungen bedeutender moderner Meister, [...] anreihen werden." | "The new music publisher is a joint venture founded by leading publishers of Austria-Hungary. [...] As well as publishing the classics and significant instructive works, it will also publish compositions by important modern masters ..." |
| —Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 9 August 1901, p. 6[b] | —Translation byNigel Simeone inGrove |
In 1904, UE acquired Aibl publishers, and so acquired the rights to works byRichard Strauss,Max Reger, and other composers. The arrival ofEmil Hertzka as managing director in 1907, who remained until his death in 1932, really pushed the firm towards new music. Under Hertzka, UE signed contracts with a number of important contemporary composers, includingBéla Bartók andFrederick Delius in 1908;Gustav Mahler,Arnold Schoenberg andFranz Schreker in 1909. Mahler'sSymphony No. 8 was the first work UE acquired an original copyright to.Anton Webern andAlexander von Zemlinsky were signed in 1910,Karol Szymanowski in 1912,Leoš Janáček in 1917 andKurt Weill in 1924. Through their association with Schoenberg, it also published many works byAlban Berg.
The firm's avant garde directions continued afterWorld War II, when UE published works by a number of significant composers, among theseLuciano Berio,Pierre Boulez,Morton Feldman,Mauricio Kagel,György Kurtág,György Ligeti andKarlheinz Stockhausen. Later important additions to the catalogue includeHarrison Birtwistle,Friedrich Cerha,Georg Friedrich Haas,Cristóbal Halffter,Georges Lentz,Arvo Pärt,Wolfgang Rihm,David Sawer,Gisela Selden-Goth, andJohannes Maria Staud.
UE have also published several significant historical editions, including the complete works ofClaudio Monteverdi. In collaboration withSchott, they have published the Wiener Urtext Edition series since 1972. Originally consisting of works for one or two performers by composers fromJohann Sebastian Bach toJohannes Brahms, the series was later expanded to include a limited number of later works, such as theLudus Tonalis ofPaul Hindemith.
On 19 October 2007, Universal Edition entered legal proceedings against theInternational Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), an online entity which seeks to make musical scores in thepublic domain available digitally. In response to acease-and-desist letter from Universal Edition demanding that certain scores still covered by Austrian copyright be removed, IMSLP closed itself voluntarily, amidst controversy that UE's demands lacked reasonable legal grounds. While Austrian copyright governs works published up to 70 years after its composer's death, IMSLP is hosted in Canada, where copyright lasts twenty years fewer. The Internet Law professorMichael Geist wrote a column for the BBC, suggesting UE's actions lacked reasonable legal ground.[3] The International Music Score Library maintained that UE's actions lacked legal justification, and reopened on 30 June 2008.
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