Moldenhauer Collection

German-born American musicologist, music collector and mountaineer, Hans Moldenhauer (1906-1987) was born in Mainz, Germany in 1906 and died in 1987. He graduated from the Musikhochschule in Mainz where he was a pupil of Hans Rosbaud. In 1938, Moldenhauer emigrated to the United States, and ultimately settled in Spokane, Washington. In 1942 he commenced a career in musical performance, collecting and writing and founded the Spokane Conservatory. He married his piano student, Rosaleen Jackman, to who he would later dedicate his archives, in 1943. Moldenhauer’s music career was briefly interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served as an instructor for the 10th Mountain Division. Following the war, he earned a B.A. from Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington in 1945 and D.F.A. in musicology from the Chicago Musical College (now part of Roosevelt University) in 1951. Over the course of forty years, Moldenhauer assembled an unparalleled collection of primary sources documenting the artistic thoughts and compositional process of celebrated and lesser-known figures of western music dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. The collection includes music manuscripts, sketches and quotations in addition to correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, printed programs, manuscript texts and other documents of historical interest. He acquired manuscripts of Berg, Brahms, Beethoven, Liszt and Lutoslawski, and as well as several items from the archives of Mahler, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Schoenberg. In 1960 he acquired the Webern Archive and co-authored with his wife Rosaleen, “Anton Webern, A Chronicle of His Life and Work” (New York: Knopf, 1978).