Moldenhauer, Hans, 1906-1987

Hans Moldenhauer emigrated to the United States in 1938, settled in mountainous Spokane, Washington, in 1939, and served in the U.S. Mountain Troops during World War II. In 1942, as he embarked upon a musical career in collecting, performance, and writing, he founded the Spokane Conservatory. In 1943 he married his piano pupil, Rosaleen Jackman, to whose memory he would later dedicate his Archives. When Moldenhauer was diagnosed with the incurable eye disease known as retinitis pigmentosa and told he soon would be blind, he dedicated much of his remaining energy to acquiring the monuments of “Music History from Primary Sources,” as he called the growing Moldenhauer Archives. Hans Moldenhauer procured manuscripts from composers such as Alban Berg, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Witold Lutoslawski, and obtained numerous items from the archives of Gustav Mahler, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Arnold Schoenberg. Moldenhauer acquired the Webern Archive in the 1960s and with his wife Rosaleen wrote the seminal biography Anton Webern, A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York: Knopf, 1978), along with other publications on Anton Webern.

At the time of the collector’s death in 1987, the Moldenhauer Archives included many thousands of items that are now housed in nine institutions around the world: in the United States, at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Washington State University, and Whitworth College; in Basel, Switzerland, at the Paul Sacher Foundation; in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Zentralbibliothek; in Munich, Germany, at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; and in Vienna, Austria, at the Stadtarchiv und Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Hans Moldenhauer was born in Mainz, Germany, on December 13, 1906 and died in November 1987 in Spokane, Washington. He completed five years of study of music under Hans Rosbaud at the Mainz Municipal College of Music. In 1918 he immigrated to the United States, where he settled in Spokane, Washington. After serving in the United States Army he returned to Spokane and was Whitworth College’s first student under the G. I. Bill and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1945.

In 1942 he founded the Spokane Conservatory of Music. With his late wife, pianist Rosaleen Moldenhauer, he inaugurated a series of duo-piano programs on radio which lasted 12 years. He received his doctorate in musicology from the Chicago musical College, Roosevelt University. His thesis, Duo-pianism, published in 1950, remains the only text in the field.

His great research accomplishment was the formation of the Moldenhauer Archives, embodying some 100,000 music manuscripts, letters and documents of unique importance to musical biography and literature.