Biographical Sketch
The ardent music collector and mountain climber Hans Moldenhauer was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1906 and died in 1987. During the course of forty years he established the Moldenhauer Archives, a substantial collection of musical and literary documents dating from the twelfth to the twentieth century.
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, he embarked upon a career in music collecting, performing, and writing, and 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 retinitis pigmentosa and told he would soon be blind, he focused much more of his energy on acquiring the materials for the growing Moldenhauer Archives.
Moldenhauer procured manuscripts from composers such as Alban Berg, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Witold Lutosławski, and obtained numerous items from the archives of Gustav Mahler, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Arnold Schoenberg. He 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 Webern. Hans Moldenhauer died in 1987.
The Moldenhauer bequest to the Library of Congress in 1987 consisted of more than 3,500 music manuscripts, letters, and other materials. The Library also received funds to produce a volume, now published, The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial: Music History from Primary Sources: A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, edited by Jon Newsom and Alfred Mann (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2000) [ISBN 0-8444-0987-1].