The Publishers.
511 publishing houses · eleven regions · five centuries of the printed score · one editorial standard.
Where the printed score begins.
In May 1501, Ottaviano Petrucci's press in Venice issued Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A — the first book of polyphonic music ever printed with movable type. Ninety-six chansons by the leading composers of the late fifteenth century, set in three impressions per page (staff lines, notes, text) on rag paper that survives today, more or less intact, in the great libraries of Europe.
Petrucci's invention did for music what Gutenberg's invention did for the Bible: it transformed a manuscript culture, copied note by note, into a printed one. Within fifty years his Venetian competitors — Antico, Gardano, Scotto — had improved the method to a single impression. By 1600 the printed part-book was the working medium of every choirmaster, every chapel master, every itinerant lutenist in Europe.
"The note in the press is not the note on the page. The note in the press is the note in your hand, your room, your evening."
By the time Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf set up his press in Leipzig in 1719, the printed score had been in continuous evolution for two hundred and eighteen years. The houses that followed him — Schott in 1770, Ricordi in 1808, Boosey in 1816, Schirmer in 1861, Bärenreiter in 1923, Henle in 1948, Hal Leonard in 1947 — were continuing a project that was already old.
Know the house by its colour.
Five colours, five editorial traditions. A serious musician's bookshelf reads as a coded library before a single page is opened. Pull a score from a stack and you can name the publisher before you read the spine.
Henle Blue
The Urtext standard. Source-manuscript editions, fingerings by leading interpreters, the supreme engraving and binding that earns its desk-side residency.
Bärenreiter Brown
The other urtext. The Neue Bach-Ausgabe, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, the Beethoven Werke — the historical-critical edition tradition.
Schirmer Yellow
The yellow Schirmer Library Edition — the affordable, durable American teaching score that lines every conservatory shelf in the country.
Boosey Green
The Boosey & Hawkes spine — Britten, Stravinsky, Bartók, Copland, Bernstein. The dominant English-language new-music house of the twentieth century.
Ricordi Red
Casa Ricordi — every major Italian opera from Rossini through Puccini. The rental library that supplied La Scala and the operatic world.
Hal Leonard Blue
The largest sheet-music publisher in the world. Fifty-plus imprints under one roof — choral, band, methods, songbooks, distribution for half the houses on this page.
The shelf, as you'd find it.
Pull a score from a serious musician's bookshelf and you can name the publisher before you read the spine. The five colours below form the working library of every conservatory in the world.
Editorial traditions.
An imprint on the title page tells you who edited the score, who paid the engraver, and whose scholarly tradition shaped the bar lines, the slurring, the dynamics. The houses below define the six major editorial traditions in the catalogue we hold.
Urtext — the source text.
Editions worked from the autograph manuscripts and first editions. No editorial fingerings imposed on the text; no slurring "corrections." The composer's text as he wrote it, with critical apparatus separately presented for the scholar.
Performance editions.
Annotated for the working musician — fingerings, bowings, breath marks, dynamics, articulation. The interpretive tradition of the great teachers and performers, made portable and reproducible.
The American school.
From the yellow Schirmer Library through Hal Leonard's grade-level method books and the Berklee tradition — the editions of American music education, from elementary band rooms through the conservatories.
Choral & church.
The week-in, week-out repertoire of the American church choir loft and the school chorus rehearsal hall. Anthems, hymn arrangements, sacred and secular concert works for SATB, SAB, TTBB and unison voicings.
Concert band & wind.
The American symphonic-band literature and its European wind-band cousins. Curnow, Sparke, Hazo, Barnes, Saucedo — the grade-level commissioned repertoire that defines modern band programs.
Italian opera.
Casa Ricordi from 1808 — Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi (acquired 1839), Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo. The rental library that supplied La Scala, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan and the operatic world for two hundred years.
A chronology of music publishing.
From the first printed polyphony in Venice in 1501 through the global digital distribution of today — eighteen moments that built the catalogue every conservatory, school, choir and church uses every week.
First printed Gradual
A liturgical chant book at Constance — woodcut musical notation, the technique that precedes movable type.
Petrucci · Venice
Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A — the first book of polyphonic music in movable type. Ottaviano Petrucci's press inaugurates printed music as we know it.
Attaingnant · Paris
Pierre Attaingnant develops single-impression printing — the technique that dominates the next two centuries.
Breitkopf · Leipzig
Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf founds the press that becomes Breitkopf & Härtel — the world's oldest continuously operating music publisher.
Schott · Mainz
Bernhard Schott begins printing Mozart firsts. Two and a half centuries of definitive editions from the Rhine.
Casa Ricordi · Milan
Giovanni Ricordi opens the house that will publish every major Italian opera from Rossini through Puccini.
Boosey · London
Thomas Boosey founds the firm that becomes Boosey & Hawkes. Britten, Stravinsky, Bartók, Bernstein, Adams.
Ricordi acquires Verdi
Casa Ricordi acquires the rights to Nabucco, beginning a relationship that will produce twenty-eight operas including Aida, Otello, Falstaff.
G. Schirmer · New York
Gustav Schirmer founds the firm that becomes the foundational American classical-music publisher — the yellow Schirmer Library Edition.
Henle Urtext · Munich
G. Henle Verlag begins; in 1948 the firm publishes its first true Urtext edition — and resets the standard for the next century.
Universal Edition · Vienna
Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Janáček. The Second Viennese School publishing home.
Bärenreiter · Kassel
Karl Vötterle's house resets Bach scholarship — the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, the Beethoven Werke.
Hal Leonard · Milwaukee
Harold & Roger Edstrom found the company that becomes the world's largest sheet-music publisher and distributor.
Carl Fischer Centennial
After 80 years in operation, the New York band publisher consolidates the American wind-band concert repertoire.
Universal acquires Schott
The first wave of major-label consolidation; the Mainz catalogue joins the Vienna catalogue under one roof.
Daybreak founded
Hal Leonard launches Daybreak Music, marking the rise of large-scale sacred-choral imprints in the American market.
Henle Library app
G. Henle launches the digital edition — Urtext on tablet, with fingering overlays selectable by interpreter.
Digital distribution
ArrangeMe, ScoreXchange, Hal Leonard digital-first imprints. The score follows the player anywhere — but the editorial standard remains.
By region.
The publishing houses we hold, grouped by their editorial home. Click any name to open its full edition list in the catalogue.
German & Austrian tradition.
Italian opera house.
French editions.
British & Irish.
American imprints.
Dutch & Belgian wind-band.
Nordic & Scandinavian.
Slavic editions.
Sacred & choral specialists.
Method & method-book houses.
Percussion & instrument houses.
Where the canon lives.
Five houses, three centuries. The editorial homes of Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Britten, Stravinsky and the music we play and listen to every day. Each spotlight opens that publisher's complete catalogue.
Breitkopf & Härtel
The world’s oldest music publisher.
Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf founded his press in Leipzig in 1719. Within fifty years his son Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf had revolutionised music printing again — fragmenting movable type into separate pieces for noteheads, stems, beams and ledger lines, allowing a flexibility that single-impression had never offered.
By the time Gottfried Christoph Härtel joined the firm in 1795 — renaming it Breitkopf & Härtel — the house was the principal publisher of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The complete editions of all three composers issued from Leipzig in the decades that followed; the firm essentially defined what a complete edition means.
Today the Leipzig house holds the historic-critical edition tradition. The Breitkopf urtext lines, the Partitur-Bibliothek (the standard rental library for German orchestral repertoire), and the Edition Breitkopf trade catalogue continue more than three centuries of unbroken editorial work.
Mozart Gesamtausgabe · the 1877 complete edition
Beethoven Gesamtausgabe · the 1862 critical edition
Partitur-Bibliothek · the standard German orchestral rental library
Schott Music
Two and a half centuries on the Rhine.
Bernhard Schott founded his press in Mainz in 1770. The first Mozart-firsts — Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte in piano-vocal score — issued from Schott in the 1790s.
In the nineteenth century the Mainz house held Wagner. The original publication of Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1873, the libretti, the rehearsal scores — Schott's distribution of the Ring is what allowed the cycle to be performed outside Bayreuth at all.
Twentieth-century Schott published Stravinsky, Hindemith, Henze, Ligeti, Stockhausen. Today, as part of Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, the catalogue runs from urtext editions of the eighteenth century through commissioned new works that premiere this season.
Mozart operas in piano-vocal score · 1790s
Hindemith, Henze, Stockhausen, Ligeti · the 20th-century German tradition
The Eulenburg Miniature Scores · the conductor's pocket library
Casa Ricordi
Every major Italian opera, two centuries.
Giovanni Ricordi opened his copying shop in Milan in 1808, supplying La Scala with manuscript parts. By 1825 he had organized the first systematic Italian music-publishing firm; by 1839 he had purchased the rights to Nabucco and begun the relationship with Giuseppe Verdi that would produce twenty-eight operas over half a century.
Casa Ricordi was — and remains — an Italian institution. The firm held Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Boito, Catalani, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea, Giordano, and Puccini. Five generations of Ricordis ran the house personally until 1994.
The Ricordi archives in Milan — the autograph manuscripts, the rehearsal letters, the production photographs, the costume designs — constitute the most important opera archive in the world. The publishing operation, now part of Universal Music Publishing Classical, continues to issue the standard performing editions of every opera in the catalogue.
Puccini · all 12 operas from Le Villi through Turandot
Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini · the bel canto canon
Verismo · Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea, Giordano
Boosey & Hawkes
The English-language new-music house.
Thomas Boosey founded his music-importing business in London in 1816, originally distributing Italian opera scores. The firm became Boosey & Hawkes in 1930, merging Boosey & Co. (1816) with Hawkes & Son (1865), and by the 1940s was the principal English-language publisher of contemporary classical music.
Boosey & Hawkes built the twentieth-century English-language catalogue: Stravinsky from The Rake's Progress onward, Britten's entire output, Bartók from 1939 forward, Copland, Bernstein, Lutosławski, Penderecki, Górecki. The list of premiere commissions runs from Peter Grimes in 1945 through Doctor Atomic in 2005.
The firm today operates from London, Berlin and New York, holding the world rights for a catalogue of more than 14,000 works. The hire library — the rental scores and parts for symphonic and operatic performance — is the single most-rented contemporary catalogue in the English-speaking world.
Stravinsky · the Rake, Mass, late serial works
Bartók · post-1939 American period
Copland, Bernstein, Adams, Reich, Glass · the American new-music canon
Bärenreiter
The historical-critical edition.
Karl Vötterle founded Bärenreiter in 1923 in Augsburg, moving the firm to Kassel after the war. From the outset Vötterle's project was scholarly: the systematic publication of the historic critical edition (HKA) — a complete edition of a major composer's works based on every surviving manuscript and authorised source.
The Neue Bach-Ausgabe (1954–2007), the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1955–1991), the Beethoven Werke (still in progress), the Schubert New Edition, the Schumann New Edition, the Dvořák complete works — Bärenreiter has shaped how the twentieth and twenty-first centuries read the great composers of the German tradition.
Today the Kassel house holds urtext editions of more than 130 composers, plus the standard performing editions used by orchestras and chamber ensembles worldwide. The Bärenreiter brown cover has become a guarantee of editorial rigour.
Neue Mozart-Ausgabe · 1955–1991
Beethoven Werke · in progress, the next-century standard
Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvořák · complete critical editions
The making of an edition.
The word urtext — German for original text — was coined in the 1890s by the musicologist Heinrich Schenker. The idea was simple: an edition of a piece by Bach, Mozart or Beethoven should present the composer's own text, not the well-intentioned annotations of nineteenth-century editors. No added slurs, no editorial fingerings, no "corrected" dynamics.
The making of an urtext begins with the autograph — the composer's own manuscript. The editor compares the autograph with the first edition (the Originalausgabe), with any other authorised copies the composer corrected, with first performance parts, with sketches and continuity drafts. Conflicts are resolved by close textual study of the composer's habits of revision.
"A performer wants the composer's text. A scholar wants every textual variant. A great edition gives both — the text in front, the apparatus behind."
The result is a clean musical text — the Notentext — at the front of the volume, with a critical commentary at the back. The performer plays from a score that contains only what the composer wrote; the scholar reads the apparatus to know exactly how each editorial decision was reached.
Henle, Bärenreiter and Wiener Urtext define this standard for the classical canon. Editions Durand and Universal develop performance editions in parallel, often with the composers themselves still alive. Schirmer and Hal Leonard, for their part, build the educational editions — fingered, phrased, graded — that take the canon out of the conservatories and into the practice rooms of every school in America.
Composer and publisher.
Bach and Bärenreiter. Verdi and Ricordi. Britten and Boosey. The composer-publisher relationship is the editorial spine of Western music — twenty-five canonical pairings, each linking to the publisher's catalogue.
The working shelf.
Eight imprints whose catalogue alone exceeds one hundred and ninety thousand editions — the houses we draw on every day. Each opens that publisher's full edition list.
A–Z directory.
Every publishing house we currently hold, alphabetical. Search by name or jump to any letter — the catalogue opens with a click.
Every publisher. Every imprint.
All 511 publishing houses whose editions we currently stock — from the world's oldest (Breitkopf, 1719) through the contemporary American and European imprints that define the modern catalogue.
Every imprint. Every edition. One catalogue.
511 publishing houses across eleven regions. One hundred and seventy-five thousand live editions. The working catalogue of every conservatory, school, choir and church we serve.