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Torn Between Cultures: A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer by David Josephson (review)

Torn Between Cultures: A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer. By David Josephson. (Lives in Music Series, vol. 9.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2012. [xiv, 323 p. ISBN 9781576471999. $36.] Illustrations, selective bibliography of the writings of Meyer-Baer, bibliography, index. Kathi Meyer-Baer (1892-1977) was a Jewish-German musicologist and librarian. She was a productive scholar, publishing five books and numerous articles from 1917 to 1975 on topics as wide-ranging as choral music, aesthetics, musical incunabula, and the basse danse. Like many scholars in her generation, she immigrated to the United States via France during the Second World War, and was one of the seventeen musicians and music scholars helped by the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. Yet, unlike the others aided by the committee, such as Alfred Einstein and Edward Lowinsky, she never found a permanent academic position-perhaps because she was the only woman-and knowledge of her life and works seems to have vanished from the records. Although important enough for inclusion in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, these entries are cursory and outdated. What David Josephson has uncovered in this in-depth biographical monograph is a narrative that tells us not only about Meyer-Baer's life and career, but also is an engaging case study of musical emigres, German and American musicological institutions, and academic miscommunications. Josephson focuses primarily on Meyer-Baer's life, rather than her works, dividing the book chronologically and geographically: the first section, entitled "Germany," details her education and the beginning of her career; "France," the slimmest section, focuses on the Baer family's two years in France; the third and largest section, "America," delves into her life in the U.S.A., her search for an academic position, and her continued research. Josephson relies on archival material from three main sources: the Baer Family Collection in Santa Maria de Xalostoc, Mexico; the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University; and the Paul Hirsch Collection at the British Library in London. The items cited by Josephson are primarily letters, from which he quotes extensively, letting Meyer-Baer and her colleagues, especially Paul Hirsch and Sophie Drinker, speak for themselves. As Josephson notes, Meyer-Baer's gender did influence her career, especially at the beginning: Professor Hermann Kretschmar blocked her dissertation at Berlin University in 1915, claiming that "to accept her dissertation would be to give a female student an unfair advantage in wartime over her male counterparts" (p. 8). In order to complete her doctorate, Meyer-Baer transferred to Leipzig University, a move sponsored by Hugo Reimann, where she spent just a single day taking exams. After her struggle to submit her dissertation, it is not surprising that she faced the same resistance a few years later, when her Habilitation application, necessary' to qualify for a university job, was rejected. In the meantime, Meyer-Baer strung together a few lectures and began publishing articles. After a chance introduction at an after-concert party, she came in touch with Jewish-German businessman Paul Hirsch (1881-1951) and visited his impressive private music collection. Shortly thereafter, he offered her a position as librarian, thus beginning "the most stimulating decade of her professional life" (p. 24). Josephson suggests that it was "no accident" (p. 294) that Meyer-Baer found employment with a Jewish patron, given the anti-Semitic climate of 1920s Berlin. Meyer-Baer enjoyed her time at the library and immediately began working toward the publication of a multivolume catalog of the library's holdings, no small task with some twenty thousand items, and a series of facsimiles of its rare scores and treatises, which started to come out in print in 1922. …