Published listings and catalogs on Schoenberg

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Rufer

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Josef Rufer, a student of Schoenberg's intermittently from 1919 through 1929, compiled the first and still most comprehensive list and description of Schoenberg's music, text, and art works. First published in 1959 in German, Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs was quickly translated into English by another Schoenberg student, Dika Newlin, and the translation was published in 1962. Both out of print for some years now, the German edition was reprinted in paperback in 1988. This standard reference work will be found in virtually every music library. The 1988 printing may still be available from the publisher and better music book stores.

The focus of Rufer's work is on comprehensive listings and descriptions of Schoenberg's music manuscripts as well as simple listings of his textual manuscripts. Rufer was one of the earliest scholars to gain access to Schoenberg's legacy and his Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs attempts to present at least Schoenberg's textual writings in an arrangement similar to Schoenberg's own. The contents of the German printings of Rufer go so far as to include some of Schoenberg's original categorical designations for his text manuscripts; but not everything listed in each category was categorized by Schoenberg since Schoenberg's own organizational activities were incomplete at the time of his death in 1951. The German printings of Rufer are preferred to the English edition because of the original language titles which are not available in the English edition. Rufer's greatest failing is the lack of an index. Susan L. Sloan (Assistant Archivist of the Institute, 1987-1990) indexed the English edition of the work as annotated by Leonard Stein (Schoenberg's student and Director of the Institute, 1974-1991). Her index is available only in the Archive.

Rufer should be the first stop for any scholar pursuing Schoenberg research. For researchers interested in the location of original manuscripts, Rufer is extraordinarily complete and still accurate, with the clarification that materials listed as being in Schoenberg's legacy are now in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute. The Institute uses Rufer's alphanumerical designations where ever possible, in order to assist users in locating and identifying manuscripts in the Archive.

Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute

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Numerous articles on Schoenberg's legacy and other materials at the Institute have appeared in the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, generally under the rubric of "From the Archives". Articles have dealt with scores, texts, recordings, photographs, paintings, correspondence, satellite collections, and Schoenberg bibliography..

A complete contents listing of the Journal may be found elsewhere at this site.

ASI Preliminary Catalog

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The Schoenberg Institute began to produce RLIN cataloging in about 1980. A cataloging grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1985, provided the impetus to print a catalog, generated from RLIN cataloging records, of the materials in the Archive cataloged through 1986. That Preliminary catalog, produced on demand, is available from the Institute at cost. The catalog is divided into seven sections which are generally bound in three volumes. Each section is arranged alphabetically.

There are two caveats to using the catalog successfully: first, upper case (subject) and lower case (author & title) entries are not intermixed alphabetically so users must always look in two locations in order to assure that all applicable entries are located; second, full descriptions for each item are given in only one place, under the so-called "main entry", making implicit in all “added entries” that the user go back to the main entry for complete information. Uneven coverage of various parts of the collections in the Archive combined with the age of this catalog make it indispensable for some categories of material, and of marginal use for others. The most detailed information is found in the sections describing Schoenberg's music manuscripts, annotated books and scores, and the reference books in the Reading room of the Institute. Coverage, due to age, is not as good in the sections on photographs and recordings. Lists of text manuscripts with little subject analysis is found in the section on Schoenberg's text manuscripts. Other categories of material are almost completely absent because they were not cataloged at the time of publication including: unannotated books and scores, programs, clippings, articles, posters, and other ephemera, film and video material.

Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen

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Schoenberg began to put together notes for his so-called autobiography in about 1932. This autobiography, titled at one point Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen (Life History in Encounters) consists of several pages sketching out a conceptual outline and an additional 70 pages or so of mostly incomplete descriptions of his relationships to many people throughout his life up to about 1945. In actuality, most of descriptions consist of little more than a name and possibly a category into which the name fits such as Schurken (Villains). Some of the individuals Schoenberg’s encounters intended to describe are: Alban Berg, Albert Einstein, Paul Hindemith, Heinrich Jalowetz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Karpath, Oskar Kokoschka, Serge Koussevitzky, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Gustav Mahler, Thomas Mann, Milenkovic, Olga Novakovic, Josef Polnauer, Erwin Ratz, Walter Rubsamen Josef Rufer, Arthur Schopenhauer, Franz Schreker, Robert Gordon Sproul, Erwin Stein, Richard Strauss, Arturo Toscanini, Anton von Webern, Egon Wellesz, Franz Werfel, and Alexander von Zemlinsky.

Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, brought her father’s concept to fruition in her massive book Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen. Few people knew Schoenberg as intimately as she, and fewer still are as closely acquainted with his legacy. Nuria Schoenberg-Nono's work has collected together the most significant documents (nearly 1,500 items) from throughout Schoenberg’s life and stitched them into an engaging monograph which presents the many sides of Schoenberg. This is probably the best published source to consult for the largest variety of photographs as well as facsimiles of materials (mostly from Schoenberg’s legacy) relating to Schoenberg. Available in German only.

Neighbour

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Oliver Neighbour, who worked at the British Library for over forty years and was superintendent of the Music Room of the Library from 1977 through 1987, contributed the article on Schoenberg to the New Grove dictionary. His summary of Schoenberg's life and work give an excellent context to any more in-depth work a scholar might wish to pursue. But particularly useful are the lists at the end of the article, especially the list of Schoenberg's works. This list of musical works was updated for the monographic offprint which appeared three years after the initial 20 volume dictionary's publication. It also appears in the German monograph translated by Sebastian Loelgen. There is no more concise or complete list of works published anywhere than this compilation. The works list, like those for other composers listed in Grove, is arranged by genre. It is followed by a less detailed list of Schoenberg's textual writings, as well as a fairly extensive bibliography on Schoenberg, an excellent beginning to any literature search on Schoenberg.

Arnold Schönberg Gesamtausgabe

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Established in West Berlin in 1966 (a year prior to the death of Schoenberg's widow, Gertrud), the Arnold Schönberg Gesamtausgabe ("Complete Edition") has undertaken to publish all of the musical works of Schoenberg. The publication consists of two series (Reihen): "A" (folio size), comprising scores to the complete works, piano arrangements made by the composer, unfinished performable works, and some fragments in large format; and "B" (quarto size) comprising first drafts, sketches, rough copies, smaller fragments, and the critical apparatus (Kritische Berichten). Volumes in this still-unfinished distinctive grey-bound set appear about two per year.

This German-only series of volumes is the final word regarding Schoenberg's musical oeuvre. The editors of the Gesamtausgabe spare no pains to examine and document in tremendous detail all relevant sources for all of Schoenberg's music. There are extensive tables explicating deviations of pitch, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, dynamics, meter, etc. from the final version of each work. It would be foolhardy to begin the examination of any Schoenberg music without first consulting the pertinant Gesamtausgabe volumes.

Maegaard

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In his three-volume dissertation on the development of Schoenberg's twelve-tone oeuvre, the Danish musicologist, Jan Maegaard, put together an extremely useful catalog with very clear and informative descriptions of Schoenberg's pre-American compositions. The manuscript sources are clearly laid out and the commentary makes identification of specific physical characteristics of all of the works he details a very simple matter. Maegaard's descriptions of Schoenberg's sketchbooks are especially useful. The catalog is arranged chronologically for the most part. Schoenberg's textual sources are dealt with in particular depth. Volume one constitutes the catalog itself and is highly recommended groundwork for anyone dealing with any of the pre-American works (i.e. before 1934). Unfortunately, the lack of an easily locatable index of the works (i.e. at the back of the volume) mars an otherwise excellent reference. Schoenberg's American works could stand a similarly detailed treatment. Maegaard's work is not available in English.

Christensen

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Jean and Jesper Christensen's Catalog of text manuscripts takes a significant portion of Schoenberg's literary legacy and gives detailed physical and content descriptions and, for the first time, Schoenberg's own designations for many of his text manuscripts. The organization of the literary legacy at the time the Christensens were working on their Catalog was quite different than what it is now. Only since their Catalog was published has the legacy itself been reorganized to resemble, as closely as possible, Schoenberg's own arrangement. Schoenberg's overarching organizational principles for his text manuscripts are now clearer than they once were, thus making the Christensens' Catalog of this part of the legacy particularly useful.

The appendices contain transcriptions of two of Schoenberg's own lists of manuscripts. These make clear Schoenberg's intentions when, in the early 1930's before his emigration to the United States, he began to organize his text manuscripts. It was at that time that he started to assign dates, titles, and subject categories to all of his text manuscripts. The principle categories Schoenberg used are defined in Appendix I as: Musik Theorie; Künste; Deutungen; Denkmäler; Vermischte Gedanken; Natur; Sprachliches; Aphorismen; Anekdoten; Moral; and Biographisches. While the Christensens' Catalog goes a long way toward mapping out Schoenberg's literary manuscripts, a considerable portion (at least half) of this part of his legacy is not dealt with at all. The Institute uses Schoenberg's, and thus the Christensens', designations where ever possible, in order to assist users in locating and identifying manuscripts in the Archive.

Ritter Catalog

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Schoenberg's paintings and drawings have been exhibited more and more often in recent years. With the encouragement of Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Thomas Zaunschirm compiled the first complete catalog of Schoenberg's two-dimensional works of art. The primary catalyst for the creation of the catalog was an exhibition, "Arnold Schönberg, das bildnerische Werk", originating at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna from 20 September to 17 November 1991 in conjunction with another exhibit, "Arnold Schönberg, sein Leben, seine Musik" at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. This marked the first occasion that all of Schoenberg's paintings and drawings were publicly exhibited together. The catalog, which lists over 300 items, reproduces virtually all of the paintings and drawings in excellent true color. Many of the paintings will not be unfamiliar to the casual scholar, however, the quality of the reproductions far surpasses those previously appearing elsewhere.

The bibliography included in the volume draws together all of the significant (and much not so significant) published work on this relatively unknown aspect of Schoenberg. Although the analyses and ordering of the images have been criticized and the volume lacks complete scholarship regarding exhibition history, this work comes as close to a true catalogue raisonnée as is likely to appear for Schoenberg in the forseeable future.

The catalog, published originally in both German and English in the same volume (as is obvious from the dual language title), has also appeared in another version, in Spanish and Catalan, prepared for an exhibition of the same collection from 16 September to 1 November 1992 in Barcelona. This version improves part of the image ordering problem from the German and English version and includes a Schoenberg self-portrait not present in the first version. For those who can find it and understand Spanish or Catalan, this second version is preferable to the first. Another version appeared in combination with the same exhibition, this one severely abridged and in Spanish only.

Shoaf

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Shoaf's Discography is the best source of information regarding published sound recordings of Schoenberg's works. Now in its second edition, the Discography gives detailed information on sound recordings from the first commercial recording, a piano roll of Walter Gieseking performing the second piece of Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11 (probably recorded in 1922), to Gunther Schuller's 8-track tape of the First Kammersymphonie, op. 9 (released in 1975), to Misha Rachlevsky's Chamber Orchestra Kremlin compact disc performance of Verklärte Nacht, op. 4 (recorded in Moscow in November 1993). This site maintains more current information on commercial recordings than the published version.

Each citation marked with an asterisk in the Discography indicates that Shoaf physically inspected the recording in question. Since much of the research in compiling the Discography was done at the Institute, the asterisk also generally indicates recordings in the Archive. Unfortunately Shoaf does not list video recordings, film, or Schoenberg voice recordings. Nor, by definition, are purely "archival" recordings listed since the Discography is intended as a general reference rather than a guide to the collection at the Institute.

Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN)

Serious on-line cataloging of the collections in the Schoenberg Institute began in about 1980. Until RLIN input ceased in 1998, 9,249 cataloging records were input. This cataloging, available on the international bibliographic utility, RLIN (located in Northern California), comprised the Archive's descriptions of record for those materials cataloged. Access to RLIN is restricted to individuals and institutions with a valid account. Hundreds of libraries, mostly in the United States and Canada but also in Europe, use RLIN as their bibliographic utility. Even though RLIN is primarily intended as a technical processing tool generally accessible to library personnel only, many libraries make RLIN available to patrons either at the reference desk or as an adjunct to their catalog. The other two major bibliographic utilities in use in the United States are OCLC and WLN. The Institute's cataloging is not yet available on either of these networks. Individuals interested in gaining access to RLIN should consult their local library for specific information.

The RLIN database, which has been in use nationally since 1972 should be viewed as an electronic union catalog that includes many of the materials held by the members of the Research Libraries Group, Inc., as well as by other institutions including the Library of Congress. Catalog descriptions for materials at the Schoenberg Institute will be found in seven different RLIN files:

A Preliminary Catalog, generated from the RLIN database, was published in 1986. A card catalog of the Institute's RLIN cataloging was available only in the Archive. The RLIN database was also directly accessible in the Archive.