Inspired by Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday, which is currently being celebrated worldwide, the new exhibition at the mdw’s Exilarte Center sheds light on the social and cultural milieu inhabited by the Second Viennese School’s founder. Particular attention is paid to both Alexander Zemlinsky and Schönberg’s pupil and eventual assistant Richard Hoffmann.

In 2016, the association exil.arte was integrated into the mdw as the Exilarte Center for Banned Music. Exilarte is a place for the reception, preservation, and presentation of as well as research on those composers, performers, musicologists, and theatre artists who were branded as “degenerate” by the National Socialists and/or persecuted due to the racist Nuremberg Laws.

An exhibition by the Exilarte Center for Banned Music at the mdw with a wide range of images, sheet music, and documents from Kreisler’s life as well as a simultaneously published catalogue will celebrate the ongoing Fritz Kreisler Memorial Year by highlighting aspects such as Kreisler’s family history, his period in Vienna, and his special knack for media relations.

Who doesn’t know them: Marta Eggerth and Jan Kiepura, the dream-couple of movies, opera, and operetta, the superstars of the mid-20th century. Their voices enthralled the masses, interwove multiple genres, and converted people to opera and operetta in an era where both were thought to have long been on their last legs.

Austrian musicologist Gerold W. Gruber is the founder and head of the mdw’s exil.arte Centre. exil.arte functions as a point of contact and interface for research on as well as the reception, preservation, and presentation of works by Austrian composers, musicians, and music researchers who were deemed “degenerate” by the Third Reich.