Adolf Martin Schlesinger

Adolf Martin Schlesinger (4 October 1769 – 11 October 1838) was a German music publisher whose firm became one of the most influential in Berlin in the early nineteenth century.

Schlesinger was Jewish, and was born Aaron Moses Schlesinger in Sülz, Silesia. He began in the book business in Berlin in 1795, operating from his house and founded a music publishing house there, the Schlesinger'sche Buchhandlung, in 1810, initially situated in Breite Strasse. The firm expanded over the next decade to include leading composers such as Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Felix Mendelssohn. It also published military music for the Prussian state.

Schlesinger's ongoing lobbying on the issue of musical copyright (prompted by copyright infringement of his publication of Weber's Der Freischütz), was a major factor in the introduction of the influential Prussian copyright law of 1830. The prosperity of the business enabled the firm to move in 1823 to spacious premises at no. 34, Unter den Linden, where the mahogany fittings were designed by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

A contemporary description of Schlesinger represents him as 'a short, stout, portly gentleman, whose energy, entrepreneurial spirit and business sense one immediately noticed when he fixed one with his single eye (the left one was missing).'

In 1824 Schlesinger launched a music magazine, the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, with Adolf Bernhard Marx as editor. On Marx's advice, he undertook the first publication of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion after Mendelssohn's pioneering revival of the work (from manuscript sources) in 1829.

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