© Robert TorresJosef Weinberger is one of the leading publishers in the field of entertaining musical theatre.
Since the publishing house was founded in Vienna in 1885, operetta has been our domain. We offer all operettas by Emmerich Kálmán, Franz Lehár, Paul Abraham and many other representatives of this special genre. Another focus of our repertoire is our range of musicals, from West Side Story to Sweeney Todd, Dr. Zhivago to Zorro. Our close collaboration with Music Theatre International at our London West End location is of utmost importance in this regard.
We also serve the spoken theatre genre, with all of Ingmar Bergman's plays, works by Arthur Miller and a host of other authors (mainly in English).
In addition, concert works of serious music characterise our publishing catalogue. Josef Weinberger recognised the value of both E and U from the very beginning: in 1899, he acquired the rights to the operettas of Johann Strauss, but also published the early symphonic works and songs of Gustav Mahler during those years. To this day, we offer arrangements and instrumentations of Mahler's works as well as his orchestral retouches, alongside British composers such as York Bowen, Paul Patterson and Stephen Hough, and almost the entire compositional oeuvre of pianist Friedrich Gulda. A wide variety of works from Bach to classical modernism are available from us in arrangements by Andreas N. Tarkmann.
In the late 1960s, we founded our own record label, Wiener Musikproduktion, whose repertoire encompassed a wide variety of contemporary popular music and quickly became a driving force in the Austrian pop scene. It began with releases of folk music (Sulmtaler Spitzbuam, Linzer Buam, 3 Mecky's) and Viennese cabaret (Cissy Kraner, Fritz Muliar, Otto Schenk). Subsequently, more and more artists found their way into the catalogue who, for their part, referred to ‘new trends’ in popular music, such as folk rock (Milestones, Golem, Mogi D.), the dialect wave (One Family, Erich Bernhardt), progressive rock (Maybe Hair), easy listening (Ernst Kugler, ORF Big Band, Toni Maier), free jazz (Peter Wolf, Reform Art Unit, Masters of Unorthodox Jazz) and new wave (Halogenhammer, Flimp).
An important part of our work today is what publishers have been doing for centuries: producing sheet music. We do this with the aim of achieving high, practice-oriented quality in music notation, editing and processing. We see sheet music as a medium for disseminating the works of our authors. We want to live up to your trust in our work every day and ensure that your works are transformed into images and sound – on stage, in concert halls, online, in film, television and radio, in schools, in private music lessons and in home music-making.
