Schoenberg House
The Schönberg House is at Bernhardgasse 6 in the municipality of Mödling in Lower Austria . The villa was the residence of the composer Arnold Schönberg from 1918 to 1925 . The building is a listed building and now serves as a museum with a permanent exhibition of pictures, display boards, video and audio stations as well as original furniture and instruments.
Schönberg's time in Mödling
Arnold Schönberg moved into the villa at Bernhardgasse 6 in the spring of 1918, where he and his family lived in an apartment for 200 kroner a month. The apartment was on the mezzanine floor and consisted of several rooms. One by one, Schönberg furnished a bathroom, an anteroom and a glazed veranda himself. In the composer's study there was a piano, a harmonium, violins, viola and violoncello, his entire library, a desk and a standing desk, which he often worked on.
In autumn 1918 Schönberg founded an "Association for Private Musical Performances" in Mödling, of which he became President. There were 19 members of his Vienna School and Friends Association on the board. The association organized non-public concerts at which the expression of applause / displeasure was prohibited and works were repeated several times in order to make it easier for the audience to access modern music. In addition to his work as a music teacher at the Schwarzwald'schen Schulanstalten (until 1920), Schönberg also received private students for composition lessons in his Mödlinger house. They included Alban Berg and Anton Webern , Max Deutsch , Hanns Eisler , Hanns Jelinek , Fritz H. Klein , Rudolf Kolisch , Paul Amadeus Pisk , Josef Polnauer , Karl Rankl , Erwin Ratz , Josef Rufer , Rudolf Serkin and Viktor Ullmann . Schönberg's students often made the 15-kilometer journey from Vienna to Mödling on foot.
In addition, Schönberg in Mödling often received visitors from abroad, for example from Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud : “He invited us to Mödling near Vienna. We spent a wonderful afternoon there. (…) Schoenberg spoke in detail about his work, especially his operas ›Happy Hand‹ and ›Expectation‹, the scores of which I had just bought. (…) The walls of his apartment were full of pictures that he had painted himself: faces and eyes, eyes everywhere! ”(Milhauds report on the visit in June 1922)
Arnold Schönberg's house in Mödling achieved historical importance because it was there that he developed his “method of composition with twelve tones that are only related to one another”. “When Arnold Schönberg gathered a few close friends and students in his Mödlinger Heim on a February morning in 1923 to present the basics of his method to them and to explain them using a few examples from his most recent compositions, a new chapter began in the history of music. "(Josef Polnauer, 1959)
After the death of his wife Mathilde on October 18, 1923, Schönberg planned to move to Vienna, but could not find an apartment, so he had to stay in Mödling. He shared it with his son Georg, daughter Trudi, son-in-law Felix Greissle and grandson Arnold, who was born in September. In a request for an apartment swap to the Vienna City Councilor Anton Weber on December 28, 1923, Schönberg explained why he wanted to move urgently: “My apartment was getting too tight for me; a) I was missing a reception room; b) I was missing a bedroom; c) my study (this must serve as my bedroom!) no longer has space to hold the books, sheet music and instruments necessary for my work and is completely unsuitable for holding rehearsals. (...) We have 7 rooms together; which does not exceed the legal restriction, since we are 5 people, three of whom work in the apartment. "
On August 28, 1924, Schönberg married Gertrud Kolisch, the sister of his pupil Rudolf Kolisch, in the Evangelical Parish Church in Mödling . On his 50th birthday on September 13, 1924, a laudatory article about him appeared in the local press, which praised the "tremendous upheaval in the field of music as a whole": "May Mödling also know who it has been hosting for years."
In August 1925, Schönberg was appointed to succeed Ferruccio Busoni as head of a master class for composition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin. At the beginning of October he gave up his apartment in Mödling and lived with his brother-in-law Rudolf Kolisch in Vienna until he finally moved to Berlin in late 1925 / early 1926.
Further use as a museum
Schönberg's Mödlinger house was to be demolished in the 1970s. Thanks to an initiative of the music critic Walter Szmolyan and the publisher Elisabeth Lafite , however, the building was listed in 1972 and bought by the International Schönberg Society (ISG). Subsidies from the State of Lower Austria, the City of Mödling and the City of Vienna, as well as the Federal Ministry for Education and Art, made it possible to buy and renovate the building, which then housed the ISG office and a research center. On June 6, 1974, the then Minister of Science and later Federal Chancellor Fred Sinowatz opened the Schönberg House in the presence of Nuria, Ronald and Lawrence Schoenberg .
In addition to the exhibition of Schönberg's own instruments donated by the heirs, a research library was set up with a duplicate of the estate filmed in Los Angeles. In addition, the ISG regularly organizes concerts with works from the Vienna School, including regular Schönberg serenades, and organizes composition and interpretation courses in the Schönberg House.
In March 1997, the International Schönberg Society contributed the house to the newly established Arnold Schönberg Center Private Foundation as a donor.
Picture gallery
Sign at the entrance of the Schönberg House
Memorial plaque on the Schönberg House in Mödling
Death mask of the composer Arnold Schönberg
Information board at the entrance
Arnold Schönberg Monument in Mödling
Web links
- Website of the Arnold Schönberg Center , accessed on February 16, 2016
Coordinates: 48 ° 4 ′ 45.4 ″ N , 16 ° 17 ′ 4.1 ″ E