Around 3,000 books, music scores, journals, brochures and other documents from the 18th to 20th centuries have been preserved in Alban and Helene Berg’s library at the Alban Berg Foundation. The core collection is located in the composer’s study, which is inscribed on Austria’s national heritage list and still in its original condition. It is here that Alban Berg worked closely with these materials, also during the genesis of his works. Numerous volumes are annotated with extensive handwritten comments and other markings that will now allow a greater insight into Berg as a reader. In the Wissenszentrum Alban Berg [Knowledge Centre], central parts of this collection have been elaborately restored and fully scanned in the first project phase, financed by the Austrian Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport with funds from the European Union. A total of 1,885 digital representations, including a number of everyday items as photographs and 3D scans, are now available for members of the public to view.

Besides a broad interest in classics like Beethoven and Wagner, but also contemporaries such as Krenek, Mahler, Pfitzner, Schönberg, Schreker, Richard Strauss and Zemlinsky as documented by the music scores, the literary volumes bear witness to an unusually varied range of other interests, such as in Ibsen, Dostoevsky and Strindberg. Editions of works by Altenberg, Büchner, Hauptmann and Wedekind, which Berg used or intended to use as texts for compositions, as well as a well-thumbed edition of the encyclopaedia Meyers Konversationslexikon with a remarkably large number of traces left by its use, are especially insightful. Digital representations of three-dimensional objects in the collection – which has been given protected status by the Austrian Federal Monuments Authority – illustrate the reality of historic everyday life, while recording the context of the compositional process and the general intellectual horizon of the composer and his era.

The works can be accessed on the new Kulturpool portal and also on the Alban Berg Foundation website, which is now also fully available in English:

https://kulturpool.at/institutionen/alban-berg-stiftung

https://absw.at/datenbank

Enquiries: Dr Daniel Ender, Secretary General

ender@albanbergstiftung.at

wissenszentrum@albanbergstiftung.at