George Newman
Music publisher and refugee from the Nazis who rescued rare books and manuscripts from Austria
GEORGE NEWMAN, who has died aged 96, was an Austrianborn music publisher and copyist who came to Britain after the Anschluss of 1938; he brought with him not only priceless manuscripts that would have been burnt by the Nazis, but also the liberal ethos that the German occupiers sought to extinguish.
Newman was 14 when Adolf Hitler made a speech on a specially erected wooden balcony in front of Vienna town hall that led to the Nazi occupation and the persecution of Austrian Jews. Seventy-five years later he recalled the occasion, describing “an eerie stillness that was so tangible you could feel it”.
A few days after that event he arrived in London carrying more than 50 first editions, including works by Franz Werfel, Oskar Jellinek and Felix Salten, the creator of Bambi, as well as signed limited editions of plays by Arthur Schnitzler. He also rescued a privately printed edition of Sigmund Freud’s early letters and theatrical scripts by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, all of which would have been destroyed.
Later he was responsible for the design and layout of the text on all new Boosey & Hawkes music publications and produced the orchestral parts for operas such as Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel and Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities. He also had to update the legal imprints and the advertisements printed on the back cover of sheet music.
Despite Newman’s best endeavours, some composers left the delivery of their works to the last minute, including Benjamin Britten, whose score of Gloriana for the Coronation in 1953 arrived only days before the soloists, chorus and orchestra needed their individual parts. Once, he was boarding a bus when the loose-leaf manuscript of Britten’s ballet The Prince of the Pagodas slipped from his clutch, but the individual pages were, fortunately, gathered up by a fellow passenger.
He later turned freelance, on one occasion helping Leopold Stokowski to prepare an edition of Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain. He worked with all the major publishers including Schott, and on a visit to their office in Mainz he sat in the chair once used by Richard Wagner; Breitkopf & Härtel, Beethoven’s publisher, for whom he copied out the orchestral parts for Busoni’s piano concerto; and Schirmer in New York, where he was once occupied until the small hours copying a symphonic poem by Leonard Bernstein appropriately called The Age of Anxiety.
Meanwhile Newman was watching out for engravers’ jokes, such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni being given a “daughter” instead of “laughter”.
In 1950 the premiere of Finzi’s setting of Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality at the Three Choirs Festival was almost abandoned after staff at Gloucester Cathedral spotted “Immorality” in the parts and sent them back for 200 correction strips to be stuck over the offending words.
Gradually computer software took over Newman’s trade, but he left a lasting legacy. “For years to come, orchestras worldwide will play from pages that I and my employees enscribed,” he wrote in his memoir, Finding Harmony (2013). “And once in a while a musician may spot another of my legacies on the music stand: hidden somewhere on the page, tiny enough to escape the proofreader, dances a happy dog or rabbit.”
Hans Georg Rudolf Michael Neumann was born in Vienna on January 18 1924, the son of Paul Neumann, a district judge, and his wife Theresia (née Braunthal); he had an older sister, Eva. Their father, who in 1939 delivered a eulogy at Freud’s funeral, was also managing director of the publishing house Paul Zsolnay Verlag, giving his son access to the manuscripts he smuggled out of Austria.
The family lived in a modern apartment with views over the Vienna Woods. Newman described his liberal Jewish upbringing as enlightened, adding: “There were no observances of any kind … no hint of orthodoxy.” He was educated at Döblinger gymnasium in Vienna. On a visit in 2018 he recalled that despite being “a real dunce”, once in England he was top of the class because the pre-war English schoolboys “were no longer being taught the accents in ancient Greek”.
Two days after Hitler’s speech he was playing Monopoly with a friend when he was summoned by his mother and told to grab his violin. They boarded a train and made their way via Zurich to Britain, where Eva was at Oxford and where he anglicised his name.
His father, who remained in Austria to wind up his business affairs, was detained for three months, but smuggled poems out of his prison cell on scraps of tissue paper and joined the family later.
Having had an English governess in Vienna, Newman arrived with more than just the rudiments of the language; he had read, with help, Treasure Island and the Doctor Dolittle books. Yet boarding at Magdalen College School, Oxford, was a culture shock. “It wasn’t just English words that I had to speak, but also what I had to swallow,” he said. “On my very first evening I thought I was being offered black coffee, but as I raised the cup to my lips, I had a terrible shock. I asked a boy, what is this? ‘Bovril’, he replied.”
After a couple of terms reading History at St Catherine’s College,
Oxford, he joined the RAF. However, he was disappointed not to be accepted for flying duties because of his Austrian nationality for fear of reprisals should he have been shot down and captured. Instead, he served as a sergeant-interpreter with a disarmament unit taking over Luftwaffe bases during the final months of the war.
Back in Britain he finished his degree and then taught at inner London secondary schools while seeking careers advice from his father’s contacts, including the publisher Victor Gollancz. He joined Boosey & Hawkes in 1950 and was thrust into the rough and tumble of the company’s printing presses and instrument factory at Edgware, north London.
Newman, who was known as Hansi, was a great lover of opera, art and books. He sold his stamp collection and began to collect antiquarian prints, first editions of music, original lithographs, etchings and engravings. On holiday in the south of France in 1954 he knocked on Marc Chagall’s door. They became friends, and over the following five summers Newman bought a series of signed lithographs from the artist at a nominal price.
He began visiting Austria in the 1980s, making visits to the Salzburg Festival. In 2013 he donated hundreds of books and documents to the nation during a ceremony at the National Library in Vienna.
Since the age of eight he had played the violin, and later the viola, and was still playing until a few weeks before his death. He brought to his old style of playing a Viennese lilt, just as his German was spoken with a strong, prewar Viennese accent.
George Newman met Patricia Carroll, a pianist, at a concert at the Austrian Cultural Institute in London. They were married in 1959 and settled in Wimbledon, where their home was a mélange of Vienna, Oxford and London, filled with musical soirées, art and books. She died in 2017 and he is survived by a son and two daughters.