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The Pazdírek dynasty was active in music publishing in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states for 100 years.
Bohumil Pazdírek (1839—1919) first worked for the publishers Spina, Lewy, and Doblinger. He started a firm in Vienna as early as 1868 under the pseudonym J.P. Gotthard, but sold it to Doblinger in 1880. Bohumil and his brother František Pazdírek (1848-1915) published the monumental 34-volume Universal-Handbuch der Musikliteratur from 1904-10, with some help from a third brother, Ludevít Raimund Pazdírek (1850-1914). Ludevit founded his own concern in 1879 in Horní Moštěnice, moving from there to Bučovice, Olomouc, and ultimately to Brno in 1911.
This firm, known as Edition Pazdírek, was managed from 1919 by Ludevít's son Oldřich Pazdírek (1887-1944). The catalogue at first concentrated on church music and instructional material; the main composers were contemporary Moravians such as Ševčik and Janáček. There was also an importrant series of historical works by Bohemians, such as Benda, known as Musica Antiqua Bohemica in the 1930s. In conjunction with Melantrich of Prague (see Wikipedia) it ran MelPa (Melantrich-Pazdírek) from 1936-1949. Edition Pazdírek was nationalized 1949, shortly after Oldřich Pazdírek's death.
