Warfare, for all its accompanying destruction, misery and death, has always created opportunities, especially in the world of commerce. Within months of the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914, the French music publisher Jacques Durand was faced with a devastating collapse in sales. As Debussy despondently observed in October, ‘who is thinking about buying music? People are much more concerned about potatoes…!’ This book focuses on Durand's response to the crisis, one that was to prove hugely rewarding in both commercial and artistic terms. Within six months of the outbreak of hostilities, his company had produced, in exceptionally challenging conditions, the first volumes of an audacious publishing venture designed to exploit a massive gap in the market, opened up when the French government banned the sale of ‘enemy’ publications. These included the immensely popular editions of the classical music repertoire produced by such German publishers as Peters, Breitkopf & Härtel and Litolff, which dominated the French market. It was with the express aim of replacing these that the Édition Classique A. Durand & Fils was launched.

In what was surely a conscious decision to distance the Édition Classique from association with these proscribed enemy editions, Jacques Durand chose to clothe it in a distinctive livery, its uniform blue-speckled covers and elegantly restrained typeface contrasting strikingly with the assertive Teutonic typography and plain background that characterise the covers of the Peters and other German editions (for illustrations, see Chapter 3, pp. 82 and 94). By contrast, some of Durand's French competitors – notably Maurice Senart, in his Édition nationale de musique classique – chose blatantly to imitate the visual appearance of the Edition Peters.

Designed and advertised as a ‘Popular’ edition, Durand wanted his new venture to have a broad reach of mainly amateur and student markets. In this respect, it was not unique, as we will see. However, Durand's achievement was distinctive on several levels. He had a particular place in the music publishing market and a highly distinguished rostrum of contemporary composers in his catalogue on whom he could draw for this project. Yet his achievement goes beyond these essentials and prompts various questions. What enabled Durand to establish the Édition Classique as arguably the standard edition for performers at all levels?

From its inception, Durand's Édition Classique had strong connections with educational institutions, and particularly with the Paris Conservatoire. The Conservatoire had been directly involved in wider French discussions during the First World War on the need for French editions of music to replace those of German firms, such as the Leipzig-based Breitkopf & Härtel and Litolff. It is thus unsurprising that so many volumes in Durand's Édition were edited by professors at the Paris Conservatoire. As noted in Chapter 2, a large part of Durand's focus in the Édition was on works for pedagogical use, ranging from pieces for young pianists, to graded anthologies, and methods, studies and exercises for a range of instruments. Chapter 9 explores the reciprocal relationship between Durand's Édition and music education and performance. It considers the important involvement of educational institutions in shaping the output of Durand's series. It also explores the efforts of Durand and the Département des Beaux-Arts to encourage dissemination of French editions to educational institutions beyond the capital city.

The focus then moves from pedagogy to performance, although the demarcations are not clear-cut since most performers also taught, both at the major institutions and privately. Among the Édition Classique's editors were many performers. Some were well-known figures, such as Marguerite Long (pianist), Louis Fleury (flautist) and Louis Fournier (cellist). Others advised on instrumental technique (violinist, Augustin Lefort) or piano fingering (Blanche Selva). All were active as performers, often in small ensembles, or with major orchestras. This chapter considers the repertoire they edited and their role in disseminating the edition through performance. Although it can be hard to pinpoint exactly which editions were used for particular performances, we can establish the repertoire they promoted in their professional lives.

Chapter 9 homes in on the case of Robert and Gaby Casadesus who owned and used many volumes of the Édition Classique alongside other contemporary editions. It is easy to determine which scores Robert used in his international concert circuit because of the detailed annotations on the scores, with lists of cities and dates where he performed. Drawing on documents at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in the musical press in France, Britain and the Americas, we identify concerts in which these works figured, and discuss Robert Casadesus's particular approach to performing this repertoire.

On 19 October 1915, Superintendent Jules Manouvrier settled down in a large building on the Place Louis Lepine, on the Île de la Cité, to conduct an interview. The building was the Parisian home of the Préfecture de Police and the man to be interrogated was the music publisher Max Eschig. Born and brought up in the Duchy of Troppau, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Eschig had moved to Paris in 1906. Arriving in the French capital, he had founded a music publishing house, with financial assistance from the German publisher Schott. For much of the early twentieth century, his firm provided a central outlet in Paris for the distribution of foreign works and editions, being the exclusive representative in the city for Schott of Mainz, Simrock of Berlin and Karczag of Vienna. Eschig quickly made a name for himself as a leading publisher of French-language versions of Viennese operetta, but he also held the rights to notable French works, including Gustave Charpentier's opera Julien, Alfred Bachelet's lyric drama Scemo and Ravel's early piano works Jeux d’eau, Miroirs and Pavane pour une infante défunte.

Amidst a wartime climate in which foreigners were viewed with increasing suspicion, particularly those with known associations with enemy countries, continued business made Eschig a target for surveillance from a government fearful of espionage. That Eschig had applied for French nationalisation in 1912 and had been legally granted residence in 1913 made little difference. Still officially an immigrant hailing from enemy territory, in the eyes of the law his continued presence and trading in Paris was problematic. Suspicions that the publisher continued to send money from sales of editions back to Austro-German firms meant that the police had little option but to keep close surveillance on his business operations.

A month earlier in September 1915, the Parisian-based publishing house of Jacques Durand published the second in his series of two volumes of the Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, edited by the composer Paul Dukas. On a surface level, these two events taking place in the music publishing world, just weeks apart, might seem to have little in common.