The ardent music collector and mountain climber Hans Moldenhauer was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1906, and died in 1987. Over the course of forty years he established the Moldenhauer Archives, a matchless resource of musical documents that encompasses music history from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, and about which Moldenhauer said, “the Archives includes not only bricks, but the mortar,” referring to both the great musicians and critical but lesser-known figures that hold it together.

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 retinitis pigmentosa and told he would soon be blind, he focused much more of his energy on acquiring the monuments of “Music History from Primary Sources,” as he called the growing Moldenhauer Archives.

Hans Moldenhauer procured manuscripts from composers such as Berg, Brahms, Beethoven, Liszt and Lutoslawski, and obtained numerous items from the archives of Mahler, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and 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 Webern.

At the time of Hans Moldenhauer’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; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich; the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich; and in Vienna at the Stadtarchiv und Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek. The Moldenhauer bequest to the Library of Congress in 1987 consisted of over 3,500 music manuscripts, letters, and other materials and was the greatest composite gift of musical documents yet received. The Library also received the 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].