my name is Jean Caprio Leo it work for CF Peters corporation I've been there
for about 40 years I'm the vice president for new music and writes CF
Peters Corporation is the company that I actually worked for but it's part of a
larger group called the addition Peters group which is located in New York
London and Leipzig Leipzig being the home of the company in Germany the
company started in 1800 it sounded by a couple of gentlemen Hofmeister and COO
nel this was in Leipzig which was at the time a center for printing in Germany
books as well as music they ran the company for a few years maybe 20 years
something like that I don't have the exact numbers on that but it was what
from them by a gentleman named called Friedrich Peters that's where the
company got its name and it's remained to that name since then call Friedrich
Peters became ill he didn't live every long he owned the company for a very
short period of time ran it for a very short period of time but that's it ended
up being the name of the company to this day it went through the hands of a few
other people and then ended up with a gentleman named max Abraham and he is
the one who ran it for the longest period of time that was during his time
running the company that he started this thing called edition Peters which is the
green cover and this is the hundred and fiftieth anniversary
the idea behind edition Peters or the green cover series was to create an
Edition that would be available to more people to make printed sheet music
available to more people what made it possible were advances in the printing
process at the time printing was very expensive and printing music was
difficult he was the first one to adapt it
printing music on a large scale he was able to sell music at one-fifth the
price of what it had been sold previously and there were people in the
office who thought that this was crazy but it was his intention to just get
music to more people and by volume make up the difference and and it was a
tremendous success it was printed on high-quality paper and well edited and
well laid out and it quickly became the standard for that type of publication
this is when the green cover started which is kind of like our coke can
it's the coke can of the music classical music world it's this iconic green cover
and he started with a hundred different publications from the very beginning
Bach that was one of their major Bach was not alive at the time he was you
know just being lost to history he published his own music he kind of was
in the pre publishing phase of music history
so Hofmeister income well one of their specific ideas was to publish Bach
Beethoven was a major figure who wasn't that that well-known at the time and
Peter's published Beethoven's first symphony his septet and some of his
piano sonatas some of his early work but also Mendelssohn was from Leipzig and
Peters was actually located in the same house that Mendelssohn lived in for a
while after Mendelssohn passed away they moved they actually expanded the
business into his old apartment so they were actually located in Mendelssohn's
apartment Grieg is a hugely important composer
Edvard Grieg for Peters he went to school in Leipzig he's a Norwegian
composer one of his teachers recommended him to max Abraham so max Abraham heard
these piano pieces I believe there were piano pieces like them and it's like
Greg's opus one and from the very beginning that was this relationship
with Peters and Peters ended up publishing all of Greeks works there's a
place in in in the Leipzig office that's called the Greek apartment now they've
reopened it there's a piano up there and they have concerts up there and Greg
used to live part of the year in Leipzig either in a hotel that Max Abraham would
put him up in and he'd have any had a piano and an office in in the Peters
office and he was going up there and right and I just bring the pieces
downstairs and they would publish them so it was really a close relationship
Max Abraham when he started the addition Peters series he was printing things in
the public domain at that point so when Schumann's works Robert
Schumann's works became public domain he printed all of them Schumann's widow was
still alive clara schumann who was also a composer and a great pianist herself
and Max Abraham felt a an obligation to compensate her for the use of her
husband's music he was not legally obligated he just felt morally obligated
you know people just they would print your music that was very difficult to
protect your music at the same time things weren't quite as organized what
we would consider work-for-hire Beethoven's first symphony was brought
on a work-for-hire basis that he just wrote the piece and gave it to them you
know they paid him whatever they thought it was affair whatever they negotiated
and that went on like that for a long time and and the same thing was
happening with Greek but max Abraham again in a kind of enlightened way
realized that if the piece was a huge success he owed the composer more than
that initial fee so he started to pay them what amounts to royalties really
and in the case of Greek and this was with no legal obligation again I mean he
just decided that this was the right thing to do and that's what he did as
things became in the public domain they added them to this addition Peters
catalog it wasn't where they did their contemporary composers though Greek was
not part of the addition Peters when he first came out as far as I know they
have these other books that are pink so if we do it to this day when a composer
goes into the public domain we'll put together our own Edition we're not
reprinting other people's music will Rhian grave it will re-edit it and
produce a new edition of this public domain in the Peters Edition when they
were doing the first edition Peters the books with the green covers edition
Peters number one was the well-tempered clavier but it's edited by charnae who
didn't necessarily honor all the Baroque practices he was editing from a
different point of view as time went by became more interested in producing
editions that were closer to as close as we can get to the original you look at
box manuscripts there's no diminuendo and crescendo 's and things like that
there's a whole school of thought about producing what they call or text
editions and and Peters actually did some of the first or Tex editions they
did an art exhibition of the Bach inventions that was one of the things
they did and I I'm not sure if that whole process was interrupted by the war
or what exactly happened but then Peters didn't do our text for a while an
important fact about the company is that max Abraham was Jewish and his nephew
Henry Henrickson took over the company he ran it with in partnership with max
for a while of course during the Nazi era they gradually started to lose their
rights this was an old company and and they had at this point on
company for probably close to 100 years I don't remember exactly when max took
over but a long time and they were a major part of the cultural life of
Leipzig they considered themselves Germans obviously they began to be like
everybody else persecuted all the other Jews at the time in Germany I should say
first of all two of the children left as things started to get more and more
difficult Walter Henrickson came to New York City
and max Henrickson went to London eventually set up what are the offices
now in London and New York they were independent companies at that time and
the rest of the family stayed because of Arian ization they ended up having to
sell the company at extremely bad rates to people who were sanctioned by the
Nazis to own the company they ended up actually getting out of the country but
they only made it as far as Holland and then the Nazis invaded Holland and they
eventually all were captured and went to concentration camps and I believe 11
members of the Henrickson family perished during the Holocaust
what happened was Leipzig was in the eastern zone after the war when the
country was broken up into West Germany and East Germany Peters moved to
Frankfurt which was on the West that became the new headquarters but they
never moved back to Germany but they did own part of the German company
Walter stayed in New York and ran CF Peters corporation max Henrickson stayed
in London and ran the CFP Peters Ltd and to complicate matters even more the
Russians or the the East Germans decided to keep the Leipzig firm running so
there was also the East German version of Peters so there was four offices in
operating independently after the unification of Germany they
reunified that the East and West Peters companies and eventually now they've
moved back to Leipzig closed the Frankfurt office and they're are back in
the same building that they had pre-war ultimately we were able to reunify the
entire company into a single entity and now it is a single entity although we
have three different offices we are bringing new composers into the company
on a regular basis part of my main job is working with the
living composers from George crumb and I knew John Cage and they were also
interested in the whole tradition of Peters there's a font that we use to
write the composer's name it's a proprietary font that we call Peters
drawn and composers want to see their name in Peters drawing you know like
Beethoven's name is in Peters frond they want their names to be in Peters
drawing and to be on the green cover you know everybody's studied coming up
and they've seen the Peters publications and and most likely use the Peters
publications so so it is a matter of pride for them I always tell composers
you don't need to be published really until you're getting performed they
really go hand in hand I think the first group of people that
has to be convinced that a composer is good is the musicians and the musicians
want to play their music then it's up to the musicians to convince the audience
that the music is good and worthy of their time I always tell composers well
if you can handle supplying the music to your musicians yourself if it's not a
burden then maybe you don't need a publisher yet you need a publisher when
you don't want to be running out to Kinkos anymore when you don't want to be
doing all the administrative work yourself when you need the time to
compose because there's people who are waiting for their commission and and
that becomes a problem after a while if you're a young and demand composer
meeting your obligations as a composer is essential Peter is compared to a
place like Busey is very small so attracting young composers they have to
be a special type of person who either is interested in music that we've done
in the past or is interested in more of a boutique experience where they know
they can call me up and get me on the phone I want them to want to come to
Peters for the right reasons and not to be disappointed when they get here I
think it's an honorable thing to to try and bring beauty to the world and I
guess that's what we're all trying to do and I think you know institutions like
these I hope go on for a long time they obviously had a place in our culture and
I hope that they continue to