Peters
German firm of music publishers. Its origins go back to the ‘Bureau de Musique’ opened in Leipzig in 1800 by F. A. Hoffmeister and A. Kühnel (which issued Forkel's monograph on Bach and Beethoven's opp. 19-22 and 39-42); under Kühnel alone (1770-1813) Spohr's first works were published. The business was purchased by Carl Friedrich Peters (1779-1827) in 1814, then successively taken over by C.G.S. Böhme (1828), J. Friedländer (1860) and Max Abraham (1880), under whom it achieved a worldwide reputation for efficiency and quality, with Grieg, Wagner, Brahms, Bruch and Sinding in the catalogue. Abraham's nephew Henri Hinrichsen (1868-1942) directed the firm from 1900, acquiring works by Wolf, Mahler, Reger, Pfitzner, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss; his son Max founded the London branch in 1938 (as Hinrichsen Edition) and his son Walter the New York branch in 1948, while Johannes Petschull established a firm at Frankfurt in 1950. The original Leipzig firm, state-owned under the GDR, promoted the work of contemporary composers in eastern Europe (Eisler, Khachaturian, Shostakovich); the American one publishes Babbitt, Cage and many avant-garde composers.
