The Arnold Schönberg collection

Arnold Schönberg was critical of the phonograph disc. When this medium began to enjoy widespread success in the 1890s, he had already gained a broad knowledge of the repertoire by studying scores and playing music with friends. Sound storage media were not only a prohibi­tively expensive luxury, they were rather uninteresting for accomplished musicians owing to their considerable technical limitations. Schönberg’s daughter Nuria re­members that the composer hardly used the gramo­phone, even in later years while in the United States.

The disadvantages of the phonograph disc were evident: the earliest recording of a work by the composer, his tone poem Transfigured Night, op. 4 for string sextet, was released in 1925 on seven sides of discs. Besides the continual inter­ruptions in the musical flow, the sound quality was only moderate, and compro­mises had to be made particularly in the case of works with rich orchestration.

Nevertheless, Schönberg recognized the potential of these discs at a very early stage. While planning peda­gogical projects, the composer recommended record­ings as an aid to studying, for example in order to learn orchestration using the classical masters as an example. He also hoped to achieve wider communication of his own works. For the recording of Pierrot lunaire that was released by the prestigious label Columbia – the only published commercial production under Schönberg’s direction – he even suggested that a score of the work should be included with the discs, with the aim of enabling listeners to examine the work more closely.

Early sound storage media from Schönberg’s collection often contain test record­ings for radio broadcasts and only excerpts of the compositions played. In the USA radio broadcasts of Schönberg’s works were occasionally recorded using microphones placed on the radio itself. Even though the quality of the recording seldom lived up to the technical standards of the day, these discs are important sources for reproduction aesthetics – espe­cially when the pieces were played by performers who had a closer relationship with the composer.

In addition to the recording of Arnold Schönberg’s entire string quartets by the Kolisch Quartet, which was al­ready widely known, they also include early radio perfor­mances with excerpts from the Chamber Symphony, op. 9 and the Serenade, op. 24 conducted by Fritz Stiedry. These productions give an idea of the performance theory in the Viennese School, whose flexible style of per­formance serves to illuminate compositional structures and therefore the understanding of a work.

Beyond its musical significance, the Estate testifies to Schönberg’s transatlantic biography. The earliest audio documents stem from the composer’s time spent in Berlin and his increasing commitment to the radio, whose po­ten­tial for broad­casting contemporary music to a larger audience was recognized by Schönberg at a very early stage.

Despite his criticism, Schönberg was open to technical innovations and used sound recording media in various ways. While in exile in the USA, he made voice record­ings of greetings together with his wife Gertrud and daughter Nuria. These recordings were to be sent as self-cut discs to Schönberg’s mother-in-law Henriette Kolisch who still lived in Vienna at the time. In his final years, Schön­berg used wire coils to dictate letters and works of music theory for transcription by his assistants. And after the war, phonograph discs were an important means of communication with the Old World. The composer re­ceived several audio documents from Europe with record­ings of its revived concert life, which gave him hope that his works would live on even without his direct influence.

Vienna, as the city of Schönberg’s birth and also the birthplace and namesake of the Viennese School, was chosen: in early 1997, the Arnold Schönberg Center Privat­stiftung was founded by the City of Vienna together with the Inter­nationale Schönberg Gesellschaft. After the collection had been moved from Los Angeles and the Arnold Schönberg Center had been opened in March 1998, the archive was made available to researchers, composers, musicians and the general public for scholarly research and studies.

In 2011 Schönberg’s Estate was inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

In cooperation with the Arnold Schönberg Center, the Österreichische Mediathek took over the composer's record collection for digitization and digital long-term preservation in April 2019.