The grand German publishing house of J. G. Cotta goes back to 1659, when Johann Georg Cotta acquired the management of the bookshop of Tübingen University through marriage. At about the same time he established his own publishing business, and the name “J. G. Cotta” soon became attached to both the retail store and the publishing firm. In the 1790s Cotta became associated with Schiller, and soon after with Goethe, of whose collected works it published the third edition in 1806–10. In the latter year, the firm moved from Tübingen to Stuttgart (where it remains today under the name Klett-Cotta). Subsequently it published the collected works of Herder, Schelling, and Pestalozzi, and works by Hölderlin, Hebel, Kleist, Rückert, and other important German literary figures. The firm remained in family control until 1889, when it was sold to Adolf and Paul Kröner. In 1905, when Schenker proposed his New Musical Theories and Fantasies, Adolf Kröner was its sole proprietor.

Schenker’s association with the name of Cotta lasted fifteen years. That he was conscious of the prestige that this brought him is clear from the deferential tone that he adopted in his letters, and the readiness with which he accepted Cotta’s advice. The contrast between this and the manner he adopted toward Universal Edition and Drei Masken Verlag is striking.

The Schenker–Cotta correspondence comprises 325 items. The selection below covers the twelve months from initial contact in 1905 to publication of Theory of Harmony in 1906, and concludes with some of the final communications of 1920 and 1921. It therefore passes over the correspondence concerning Counterpoint. To summarize the latter briefly, on September 23, 1908, Schenker submitted the manuscript for that volume, with some material, including the Introduction, still to come. Only two weeks later he proposed publishing what he had submitted plus his Introduction as “the first half-volume” so as to catch the Christmas trade, leaving the smaller second half-volume to be delivered the following Easter. He had made a similar proposal for Theory of Harmony, against which Cotta had advised. They balked again this time, but eventually acquiesced.