Graphic Quarter - Music Publishers

In the 19th century, Leipzig developed into a first-rate European music metropolis. The publishing industry, which was primarily located in the Graphic Quarter east of Leipzig's city center, played a particularly important role. The oldest institution and also the oldest music publisher in the world was the Breitkopf publishing house. It was founded in 1719 by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf.

After Gottfried Christoph Härtel took over the publishing house in 1795 (which was then called Breitkopf & Härtel), close contacts were established with Ludwig van Beethoven and later with some of the main representatives of the "romantic" generation such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. The CF Peters publishing house is also closely linked to Leipzig's music history. It was founded in 1800 by Franz Anton Hoffmeister and Ambrosius Kühnel as the "Bureau de Musique" and published important editions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach in the first half of the 19th century. Another institution that still exists today is the Friedrich Hofmeister music publishing house, named after its founder. Hofmeister learned at Breitkopf & Härtel and then worked in Kühnel and Hoffmeister's "Bureau de Musique". In his own publishing house he published early works by Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, among others.

In 1900, the Graphic Quarter reached its peak in expansion, but was unfortunately largely destroyed by the Second World War. After 1949, many publishing houses migrated to the western part of Germany. Today, there is once again a branch of the Breitkopf & Härtel publishing house in Leipzig. CF Peters and the Hofmeister publishing house returned to their founding location, Leipzig.