Of the dozens of family-run music publishers that flourished in Paris in the early twentieth century, only a handful remain, including Editions Enoch et Cie and Editions Lemoine. Both of these houses, over one hundred and two hundred years old, respectively, have survived, in part, by specializing in the music of French composers, and by forging close personal relationships with living musicians whose works they publish. In addition to selling print copies of their editions, they rent instrumental parts of their published orchestral scores and charge fees when their editions are used for public performances. Given the drastic decline of Paris’s once-vigorous print music publishing industry, musicians will be heartened to learn that a relatively recent addition to this dwindling cadre of publishers, the eponymous Bureau de Musique Mario Bois, is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.
In 1979, Jacques Barzun wrote an introduction for the Da Capo Press reprint of Cecil Hopkinson’s Dictionary of Parisian Music Publishers, self-published by the author in London in 1954. Even knowing Barzun’s extraordinarily catholic interests, his panegyric on the deeply obscure Hopkinson and his Dictionary seems peculiar until one realizes how vital Hopkinson’s earlier Berlioz Bibliography was to Barzun’s magisterial two-volume treatment of the composer, published in 1950.
“He retained intellectual independence and full freedom for his imagination.”
Barzun describes how Hopkinson, loath to apply his education in engineering to his family’s construction business, established himself as the proprietor of First Editions Books in London. Here he sold first editions
