Communications

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

I would like to correct two errors in my article " 'Why Then All The Difficulties!': A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer" that appeared in vol. 65, no. 2 (December 2008). Kathi was not the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Musikwissenschaft. She was the second. The first was Bertha Antonia Wallner, who earned the degree at Munich University in 1910 and, quoting from the manuscript of my forthcoming book on Meyer-Baer, "went on to a modest career as a scholar of Renaissance and Baroque German court and church music, and as an editor of keyboard music." My footnote to that statement is: "Wallner (1876–1956) is remembered today for her editions of Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas and miscellaneous keyboard works of Mozart (with Walther Lampe) for Henle, and for her facsimile-based edition of the fifteenth-century Buxheim organ book (Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch. MS Mus. 3725 Bavarian State Library, Munich. Documenta Musicologica, Series II [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1955]). For a full list of her publications, see the entry in Riemann Musik Lexikon, 12th ed., ed. Wilibald Gurlitt, "Personenteil L-Z" (Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne, 1961, 886).

In addition, on p. 262, fn. 114, A. Beverly Barksdale, the Toledo Museum director, was a man, not a woman. It was my mindless reading of "Beverly" that did me in.