Music Archives
Jorge E. López, Breath – Hammer – Lightning, 1989–1991; score, detailAkademie der Künste, Berlin © Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk, 2016
The first Schnabel Trio, Berlin 1904: Alfred Wittenberg, violin, Artur Schnabel, piano, and Anton Hekking, celloAkademie der Künste, Berlin, Photo: August Scherl
Hanns Eisler, Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben, 1941, dedicated to Arnold Schönberg; autograph score, detailAkademie der Künste, Berlin © C.F. Peters Ltd & Co. KG, Leipzig
Hans Zender, Don Quijote de la Mancha. 31 theatralische Abenteuer, 1989; autograph score, detailAkademie der Künste, Berlin © Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden
Abel Ehrlich, Werktagebuch XXVII; from the archival holdings, not yet processedAkademie der Künste, Berlin © Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk, 2016
Collection Profile
- Present and former Members of the Akademie der Künste
- Students of master classes in music composition with Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Arnold Schönberg, Franz Schreker and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny
- Composers, performers, and musicologists driven into exile from Germany
- Leading figures in New Music
- Representatives of operetta and chanson in the 1920s
- Performers as well as performers / composers
- Theoreticians, journalists and writers, and promoters
- Thematic and institutional collections
- Individual manuscripts
Heinz Tiessen, Weltstadtrhythmus. Concert piece for piano, c. 1928Akademie der Künste, Berlin © Kistner & Siegel, Brühl
Paul Dessau, film music Awodah, 1934/35Akademie der Künste, Berlin © Maxim Dessau
Acquisitions History
The Royal Prussian Akademie der Künste first established a ‘music section’ in 1833, but the history of the Music Archives itself only began over 120 years later when the Archives for Workers’ Songs was founded at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. In 1963, the Hanns Eisler Archive was then integrated into the archival collection, adding the first artistic estate of a composer into the holdings. In 1970, this was supplemented by other archives, including those of Akademie members Ottmar Gerster and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny.
In the 1970s, the West Berlin Akademie der Künste acquired the personal papers of Heinz Tiessen and Hermann Scherchen, its two first archives of musicians. In 1989, these could then be supplemented by the papers of the music critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt and Bernd Alois Zimmermann . In the early years after German reunification, the archives of Boris Blacher, Berthold Goldschmidt and Kurt Singer, as well as that of East German composer Paul Dessau, became a part of the Akademie der Künste’s holdings in West Berlin.
In 1993, with the merger of the two Academies in former East and West Berlin, their entire archival holdings relating to music were brought together as a Music Archives Department. This continued to expand the existing collection areas (personal papers from Academy members, New Music and music in exile), and added new priorities such as, for example, music theory and operetta / chansons. From 1998, the Music Archives Department acquired the archives of the Artur Schnabel family of musicians, as well as archival holdings of other performing artists / composers (Eduard Erdmann, Michael Gielen, Johannes Kalitzke) and performing artists (Wilhelm Kempff, Ferdinand Leitner). In recent years, the Music Archives has successfully integrated holdings on electroacoustic music (Feedback-Studio, Hans-Peter Haller) as well as graphic notation (León Schidlowsky, Erhard Karkoschka) to supplement the main collection area of New Music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which has been steadily expanded by many artistic estates and personal papers either donated during the artists’ lifetimes or bequeathed to the Archives on their death (Peter Ablinger, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Johannes Fritsch, Friedrich Goldmann, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Giselher Klebe, Friedrich Schenker, Hans Zender).