Ernst Roth

Ernst Roth (1 June 1896 – 17 July 1971) was a music publisher for Universal Edition in Vienna and Boosey & Hawkes in London, and became the company's director in 1968. He also wrote about music and translated.

Career

Roth was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a Jewish family from Bohemia. He received his first piano instructions at age five. His first language was Czech but his education, from kindergarten to university, was in German. Starting in 1915 he studied law, philosophy and music theory at the Karls-Universität Prag (the German branch of the Charles University in Prague). He was promoted in law in 1921 and continued studies of musicology in Vienna with Guido Adler. After military service in World War I, he was, from the early 1920s, publisher of the Wiener Philharmonischer Verlag.