"Why Then All the Difficulties!": A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer

Abstract

Kathi Meyer-Baer (Berlin 1892–Atlanta 1977) was arguably the most significant and surely the most productive female musicologist of her generation. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in musicology (in 1916), studying at Berlin University but receiving the degree at Leipzig University. She worked at Paul Hirsch's private library in Frankfurt as resident professional scholar and bibliographer, and with him produced one of the great music catalogs of the century. She published five books, four of them major contributions to women's choral music, music aesthetics, musical incunabula, and musical iconography; more than thirty scholarly articles; and hundreds of newspaper reports, reviews, essays, and obituaries. She married at forty-one, had a son at forty-three, fled Nazi Frankfurt with her family for Paris at forty-five, and arrived in New York at forty-seven; those four events defined the rest of her long life. Sadly, her double identity as woman and Jew worked against her in her adopted homeland as it had done in the homeland that had banished her. In the end, she had no choice but to live her life as an independent scholar. She did so with grace, courage, perseverance, and enormous productivity.