Since its foundation in 2006, exil.arte—later institutionalized as the Exilarte Center at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna—has evolved into one of the world’s leading institutions for the recovery, preservation, and reintegration of music suppressed by National Socialism. What began with a commemorative concert dedicated to Alma Rosé has, over two decades, expanded into a multifaceted program of concerts, exhibitions, conferences, publications, and archival acquisitions.
The following year-by-year chronicle (2006–2026) documents the institution’s development, illustrating how exil.arte gradually broadened its activities from local concerts to international collaborations, from memorial projects to systematic research, and from individual artistic initiatives to an institutional archive of global significance. These central themes recur throughout: the restitution of silenced voices, the embedding of scholarly inquiry within performance practice, the cultivation of international networks, and the negotiation of memory culture across disciplines and continents.
2006
The activities of the exil.arte association began on 14th November, 2006, with a program dedicated to the memory of Alma Rosé, the celebrated Viennese violinist who, after a distinguished interwar career, became conductor of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, where she perished in 1944. The two-part event bore the title My name is Alma Rosé — please don’t forget me, taken from an inscription on a portrait discovered in the Jewish Museum Vienna by dancer and choreographer Edward Arckless.
In honor of Rosé’s centenary, Arckless choreographed an original work set to music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, including his Songs of Farewell, performed by soprano Mary-Lou Sullivan Delacroix. The second half of the evening featured Mark Neikrug’s chamber drama Through Roses, performed by actor Martin Schwab with the First Women’s Chamber Orchestra of Austria under Neikrug’s direction. Staged at the Haus der Musik, the program inaugurated exil.arte’s activities as a testimonial force by combining remembrance and artistic innovation.
2007
In its first full year, exil.arte organized a series of concerts at the Haus der Musik with works by Ursula Mamlok, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Zeisl. In addition, performances this year especially emphasized the works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose 110th birthday and 50th yahrzeit were commemorated.
On 29th November, the inaugural Hollywood in Vienna concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus highlighted Korngold’s pioneering film scores. The following day, 30th November, exil.arte hosted the symposium Vienna in Hollywood with John Mauceri, Brendan Carroll, Michael Haas, and Gerold Gruber. Throughout the year, exil.arte’s hosted a total of eleven cultural events, firmly establishing the association’s dual role as a concert presenter and scholarly platform.
2008
From 18th to 20th January, exil.arte met in Paris with Voix Étouffées and the Center for Ostracized Music in Rostock, led by Volker Ahmels, forming the nucleus of Project ESTHER (European Strategies for Holocaust Remembrance), later joined by the Royal College of Music (London) and De ungas musikförbund (Finland).
In April, exil.arte participated in the University of London’s congress Music, Oppression, and Exile: The Impact of Nazism on Musical Development in the Twentieth Century, the proceedings of which were published later in 2014 by Böhlau Verlag in the exil.arte book series.
On 5th May, exil.arte presented Never a Child in the Austrian Parliament on Gedenktag gegen Gewalt und Rassismus im Gedenken an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (the Day of Remembrance against Violence and Racism in Memory of the Victims of National Socialism). Organized at the invitation of National Parliament President Barbara Prammer, the Youth Orchestra of the Werkskapelle Laufen-Gmunden-Engelhof, prepared by Gerold Gruber and Lukas Haselböck, performed works by Walter Arlen, Hans Gál, and Ernst Krenek. Survivor testimonies and a reading from Ilse Aichinger’s The Greater Hope complemented the program. Additional concerts, dedicated to Walter Arlen and Viktor Ullmann were held at the ACF in Rome and at the Jewish Museum Vienna.
2009
Two major collaborations shaped exil.arte’s year. With Voix Étouffées, conducted and directed by Amaury du Closel, exil.arte organized concerts in Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic, paving the way for a larger European tour in 2010.
In partnership with the Jewish Museum Vienna, Michael Haas curated a year-long concert series. The opening event, on 9th February, The Sun is Sinking, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Erich Zeisl’s death. A subsequent program on 8th May, So Your Journey to America Begins…, was also dedicated to Zeisl. Another program titled Ostracized Music presented works by Erwin Schulhoff, Simon Laks, Alexander Zemlinsky, Ernst Toch, and others in Schwerin and Rostock.
From 15th to 29th June, Exil.arte co-organized a Bohuslav Martinů festival with mdw, Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Center Vienna, and the Vienna Concert Society. The program included concerts, a symposium, and an excursion to Olomouc.
As the final major event of the year, between 9th–10th October, the first International Film Music Symposium was held at the mdw, pairing live performances of film scores with workshops on exiled composers such as Max Steiner and Korngold, as well as discussions about the past and future of film music.
2010
In 2010, exil.arte launched its YouTube channel, by posting Hans Gál’s Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 46, filmed in the Austrian Parliament on the National Day of Remembrance.
That year also saw the release of exil.arte’s first CD, The Right Tempo (chamber music by Gál), followed by twelve additional recordings in collaboration with Gramola, Toccata Classics, and EDA Records. These included programs devoted to Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann, Vilém Tauský, Julius Bürger, Hans Winterberg, Walter Arlen, and later the anthology Treasures from the Exilarte Center.
On 6th May, a concert was held at the Arnold Schönberg Center featuring works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, and Gál, alongside excerpts from Zeisl’s unfinished opera Job, based on Joseph Roth’s novel. This program exemplified the association’s practice of integrating canonical exiled composers with those still in the process of rediscovery.
Later that year, exil.arte was awarded the Bank Austria International Arts Prize and the Golden Stars Award by the EU Commission. In his laudatory remarks, Thomas Angyan, the director of the Wiener Musikverein at the time, praised the association for “allowing silenced voices to speak again, and powerfully bringing those who were put to silence back to our ears—and thus to our hearts.”
2011
In 2011, exil.arte further consolidated its dual focus on scholarly inquiry and artistic restitution. The year began with the release of Lost Generation—a recording of works by Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann, and Vítězslav Tauský in collaboration with the English Chamber Orchestra. This production enriched the association’s growing discographic contribution to the revival of exiled and ostracized composers, complementing its broader academic activities.
From 24th to 27th May, exil.arte inaugurated its season with the symposium After Mahler’s Death, which assembled leading figures from both scholarship and performance. Among the participants were Gerold Gruber, Michael Haas, Thomas Hampson, and Morten Solvik. Fortunately, Marina Mahler, the granddaughter of the composer, was a featured guest at the Symposium. The conference explored the cultural and aesthetic landscapes shaped by Gustav Mahler’s legacy, situating the challenges of exile and suppression within a wider narrative of early twentieth-century musical modernism.
On 6th November, the Vienna Volkstheater hosted a concert devoted to the works of Walter Arlen. On this occasion, Arlen formally bequeathed his estate to the Vienna Municipal Library, dedicating his copyrights to the future Exilarte Center. This symbolic gesture not only underscored the personal trust placed in the association’s mission but also secured an important archival foundation for its future institutional development.
The year concluded with exil.arte’s five-year jubilee concert at the Haus der Musik. The program featured works by Fritz Kreisler, Hans Gál, Michael Graubart, Ernst Krenek, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Marc Lavry, and Sándor Kuti, thus presenting a cross-section of canonical and exiled composers. The Hungarian violinist Orsolya Korcsolán appeared both as featured performer and guest of honor, lending the concert an international resonance. The jubilee concert reinforced the association’s commitment to historical remembrance and living artistic practices.
2012
With the expansion of its institutional activities, exil.arte began its publishing program in 2012 through a new collaboration with Böhlau Verlag. The first two volumes set the tone for the series: Brendan G. Carroll’s Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Last Prodigy, revised and translated into German by Gerold Gruber, and Peter Wegele’s The Film-Composer Max Steiner. Together, they emphasized the centrality of film music and exile in the twentieth century.
From 27th to 29th September, exil.arte joined with the association Ostracized Music the project ESTHER in Schwerin for the symposium Continental Britons: Persecuted, Displaced, Forgotten?. Scholars of international renown, including Albrecht Dümling, presented new research on Jewish composers displaced to the United Kingdom. The proceedings, published by Böhlau Verlag in 2015, bore the evocative title …And Listed in Every Lexicon as “British”: Proceedings of the Symposium on “Continental Britons”.
The year also featured several significant concerts. On 15th November, the Center for Intercultural Encounters at the Synagogue of Baden hosted a memorial concert for Fritz Kreisler. On 28th November, the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra performed works by Schubert, Dvořák, Schulhoff, Gál, and Tauský at the Musikverein Vienna. The season concluded on 13th December with a concert by soprano Ethel Merhaut.
2013
One of the highlights of 2013 was the publication of Michael Haas’s landmark study Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis. The book provided a comprehensive account of the stylistic currents and historical trajectories of Jewish composers suppressed under National Socialism, many of whose estates would later be acquired by the Exilarte Center.
In October, exil.arte continued its cooperation with the Project ESTHER by organizing the symposium In the Anschluss: Musical, Artistic and Pedagogical Strategies for Holocaust Mediation at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The event featured lectures, workshops, roundtables, and a variety of concerts. Among the latter was Iron & Coal, performed 17th October, a project by singer-songwriter Jeremy Schonfeld based on the recollections of his father Gustav, a Holocaust survivor. On 19th October, another concert highlighted the music of Hermann Leopoldi, the renowned composer and cabaret artist who fled to the United States in 1938.
At the end of the year, exil.arte inaugurated the Exit to Mexico concert series. Dedicated to Gilberto Bosques, the Mexican Consul General who facilitated the escape of thousands of persecuted Austrian- and German-Jewish people, the series combined artistic homage with historical recognition. The first concert took place on 23rd May in Baden and was followed in 2014 by further performances in Paris, Mexico City, Mérida, and New York, including performances at Carnegie Hall and the Austrian Cultural Forum.
2014
While the international Exit to Mexico and Exit to USA tours continued, 2014 also witnessed the launch of a new Vienna-based initiative: the Echo of the Unheard (Echo des Unerhörten) concert series. Its premiere recorded at the ORF Radio Kulturhaus and performed by violinist Stefan Koch and pianist Scott Faigen, was devoted to the composer and pedagogue Richard Stöhr. By foregrounding a figure emblematic of Viennese tradition and the history of exile, the series established a model for subsequent programs dedicated to neglected voices.
The same year also brought another major contribution to exil.arte’s book series from Böhlau Verlag. Eric Levi’s The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music offered a broad analytical perspective on the cultural and stylistic consequences of National Socialist persecution, thereby situating the work of individual exiled composers within a global history of twentieth-century music.
2015
The Echo of the Unheard series continued in 2015 with concerts dedicated to Bruno Walter, Hermann Leopoldi, Hans Gál, and a special program devoted to ostracized female composers (Verfemte Komponistinnen), including Vally Weigl, Rosy Wertheim, Ruth Schönthal, Ursula Mamlok, Henriëtte Bosmans, and Maria Hofer. Moderated by Irene Suchy, these concerts highlighted exil.arte’s growing emphasis on gendered perspectives within the field of exile research.
On 24th December, exil.arte expanded its digital presence by uploading the documentary website Film Music and the Exile. The project featured interviews with eyewitnesses, historians, and leading contemporary film composers such as Rudy Behlmer, Richard Bellis, Bruce Broughton, John Burlingame, Brendan Carroll, Danny Elfman, Hans Hurch, Annette Kaufman, David Newman, and John W. Waxman. The series documented the historical and ongoing significance of émigré traditions in film music.
exil.arte also co-organized the symposium in Schwerin, titled Music – Lost & Found: Did 1945 also Mean the End of Multistylistism in Composition?, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The conference explored themes of nationalism, pedagogy, and aesthetics in postwar composition. Its proceedings were later published in 2017 by Verlag Der Apfel, further extending the scholarly reach of exil.arte’s work.
2016
The year 2016 was marked by a series of significant developments that foreshadowed a new institutional phase in exil.arte’s history. The most notable early event was the rediscovery of a piano once owned by composer and musicologist of Byzantine music Egon Wellesz and his wife, the art historian Emmy Wellesz. Built in February 1909, the instrument had originally been purchased as a wedding gift by Emmy’s father, Ludwig Stross. When the Wellesz family fled Austria for exile in England, they brought the piano with them to Oxford, where it remained until Egon’s death in 1974. Subsequently, it was entrusted to family friend and musician Leslie Thompson, and later inherited by his daughter Rachel Thompson. Initially planning to auction the piano, she was persuaded by Gerold Gruber—alerted to the situation by Tanya Tintner, widow of the composer and conductor Georg Tintner—to donate the instrument to the newly founded Exilarte Center. In June 2016, the piano was transported to Vienna, where it became both an archival object and a symbol of the cultural continuity preserved through exile.
Throughout the year, the concert series Echo of the Unheard (Echo des Unerhörten) continued with programs dedicated to Egon Wellesz, to the operetta tradition, and to composers from the former Yugoslavia. These concerts broadened the repertoire of neglected works, highlightingthe transnational and stylistically diverse dimensions of musical exile.
The year concluded with an event of both commemorative and programmatic significance. On 25th November, the symposium 10 Years of exil.arte — What’s Next? was convened, coinciding with an anniversary concert at the ORF Radiocafé, where the Echo of the Unheard series had been hosted and filmed for the past decade. The Adamas Quartet performed works by Rosy Wertheim, Alexandre Tansman, and Hans Krása. At the close of the concert, a major announcement was made: exil.arte would move into a permanent institutional home at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, with facilities dedicated to archives, research, and exhibitions. After a decade of activity as a society, exil.arte was thus formally transformed into the Exilarte Center, based in the historic building of the former Vienna Music Academywhich is housed within a wing of the Wiener Konzerthaus since 1913. This transition marked the culmination of the association’s first decade of work and the beginning of its consolidation as a university-based research center.
2017
The official opening of the newly established Exilarte Center was marked in 2017 by its inaugural exhibition, Wenn ich komponiere, bin ich wieder in Wien (When I compose, I return to Vienna). The title, drawn from a statement by composer Robert Fürstenthal, framed this exhibition, which was devoted to artists who had been excluded from working or studying at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna during the catastrophe of the Nazi era. The exhibition opened with Requiem for the Homeless, a poem by André Singer, and included biographical profiles of the featured artists. At its symbolic core stood the recently recovered Wellesz piano, surrounded by archival documents including Gestapo files on the Aryanization of the Wellesz household. In this way, the exhibition articulated the Center’s mission to unite archival objects, personal testimonies, and artistic legacies within a framework of institutional remembrance.
Parallel to the opening of its collections, two major scholarly milestones were achieved. First, the volume Music: Lost & Found was published, by Verlag Der Apfel derived from the 2015 symposium in Schwerin. Second, Mandelbaum Verlag issued the first published edition of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s correspondence: Dear Papa, how is you? The Life of Erich Wolfgang Korngold in Letters, edited by Lis Malina. Although the Korngold ephemera collection would not physically enter the archive until 2022, the correspondence has already become a vital research resource, particularly for the work of Nobuko Nakamura, Exilarte’s current Korngold Research Fellow.
In March 2017, the Exilarte Center participated in the 20th International Congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS) in Tokyo. A roundtable discussion entitled Music in Exile: East Meets West, convened by Ulrike Anton, Gerold Gruber, Karl Vocelka, Takashi Yamamoto, and Junko Iguchi, examined the impact of Jewish émigrés not only on individual national cultures but also as a cultural bridge between Eastern and Western hemispheres. On 20th March, as part of the Tokyo Spring Festival at Ishibashi Memorial Hall, Exilarte presented a concert of works by Herbert Zipper, Marius Flothuis, Béla Bartók, Mieczysław Weinberg, and Hans Gál. Moderated by Gerold Gruber, the program featured performances by Ulrike Anton (flute), Shoko Kawasaki (piano), and the Precious String Quartet, exemplifying Exilarte’s integration of scholarship, performance, and international dialogue.
Throughout the year, the Echo of the Unheard (Echo des Unerhörten) concert series continued, with programs dedicated to Ernst Toch, Walter Arlen, Ernst Krenek, and Alexandre Tansman. By juxtaposing canonical figures with less familiar émigré voices, the series once again exemplified Exilarte’s dual mission of restitution and reintegration into contemporary cultural life.
2018
2018 marked a milestone of growth of the Exilarte Center’s archival collections. In the course of that year alone, twelve estates were acquired, representing roughly one quarter of the Center’s present holdings. This unprecedented expansion secured important primary sources for the study of exile and suppressed music, reinforcing the institution’s role as a central repository for émigré legacies.
In parallel, Böhlau Verlag published the fourth volume of the exil.arte book series: Hugo Kauder (1888–1972): Composer | Music Philosopher | Theorist, authored by Karin Wagner and edited by Gerold Gruber. The monograph brought renewed scholarly attention to Kauder, an émigré composer and theorist whose intellectual and artistic contributions had long been marginalized. His work also became a focus of the following year’s Echo of the Unheard concert series, reflecting the close alignment between the Center’s archival, editorial, and performative activities.
On 15th May 2018, the Echo of the Unheard series featured a program devoted to the music of Jan Urban and Gustav Lewi. These performances further extended Exilarte’s mission—through its model of integrating archival recovering, scholary dissemination, and performance practice—to restore visibility to unjustly forgotten figures.
2019
Exilarte’s international outreach in 2019 centered on Exilarte in China, a symposium held at the China Conservatory of Music and devoted to the composer Wolfgang Fraenkel. Banned as a Jewish composer of so-called “degenerate” twelve-tone music, Fraenkel fled to Shanghai in 1939, where he became a key figure in the city’s wartime cultural life. The symposium included interviews with former students—among them Duan Pingtai, Zhou Guangren, and Wang Zhenya—and featured performances of Fraenkel’s works alongside art songs by Deng Erjing, Tan Xiaolan, Li Yinghai, and Luo Zhongrong. By situating Fraenkel within both the European exile tradition and Chinese musical modernity, the event underscored a new understanding of the transnational reach of exile studies and the enduring cultural bridges created by forced migration,
In October 2019, Exilarte participated in Vienna’s Long Night of Museums—a night when museums and other cultural institutions are open until midnight and can be explored by buying one ticket—thereby, opening its archives and exhibitions to a wider public, strengthening the institution’s role as a mediator between scholarship and cultural memory.
The Echo of the Unheard concerts from 2019 presented works by Michael Graubart and André Singer, reaffirming the series’ commitment to restoring neglected voices through both live performance and documentation.
The year’s major exhibition, based on acquisitions from the Lahr von Leïtis Academy & Archive, focused on the collaborative careers of director Erwin Piscator and choreographer Maria Ley-Piscator. On view until June 2020, the exhibition illuminated the intersection of exile, political theater, and dance, while highlighting the ways in which exiled artists shaped twentieth-century performance culture across Europe and the United States.
2020
During the global pandemic, the Exilarte Center pivoted to digital programming, adapting its mission of preservation and dissemination to new virtual formats. Michael Lahr of the Lahr von Leïtis Academy & Archive offered online tours of the exhibition on Erwin and Maria Ley-Piscator, while Ulrike Anton guided audiences through the 2020 exhibition devoted to the film careers and social networks of tenor Jan Kiepura and soprano Marta Eggerth. To accommodate remote audiences, Iby Jolande-Varga developed a 360° digital guide—a pioneering initiative that has since become standard practice at the Center, ensuring accessibility for international viewers and researchers.
The Echo of the Unheard series likewise continued in 2020, beginning with a January program dedicated to Alban Berg, Philip Herschkowitz, and Herschkowitz’s students Edison Denisov and Elena Firsova. Performed by Ulrike Anton (flute), Sara Hershkowitz (soprano), and Elisabeth Leonskaja (piano), the concert highlighted Herschkowitz’s formative influence on later generations of composers and underscored the enduring interconnections of Viennese modernism and Soviet musical culture.
In the same year, the Center presented Johanna Mertinz’ book Exodus of Talent: Heinrich Schnitzler and the Deutsches Volkstheater Vienna 1938 – 1945, which further exemplified Exilarte’s commitment to promoting new research that links exile research and the broader cultural history of twentieth century Europe.
2021
In March 2021, amid ongoing restrictions on public gatherings, the Exilarte Center expanded its digital presence with a livestreamed concert from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. Dedicated to women composers, the program featured works by Ruth Schönthal, Vally Weigl, Nancy Van de Vate, Gabriele Proy, and Katherine Hoover. Performed by Ulrike Anton (flute), Miyuki Schüssler (piano), and Armin Egger (guitar), the concert emphasized the underrepresentation of women’s contributions within the broader history of exile and twentieth-century composition.
On 5th May, Exilarte participated once again in the Austrian Parliament’s Day of Remembrance against Violence and Racism in Memory of the Victims of National Socialism. The commemorative program included works by Hans Gál, Ruth Schönthal, Helmut Jasbar, Ursula Mamlok, Gabriele Proy, Alexandre Tansman, Walter Bricht, and Vally Weigl. The performers—Ulrike Anton, Miyuki Schüssler, Isabella Schwarz, Floris Willem, and Nicolás Bernal-Montaña—underscored the symbolic integration of exiled, suppressed, and contemporary voices within a national ritual of remembrance.
A further milestone was the publication of Exilarte’s first exhibition catalogue: My Song for You: Marta Eggerth and Jan Kiepura between Two Worlds (published by Verlag Der Apfel). This richly illustrated volume accompanied the 2020 exhibition and documented the artistic and cultural networks of Eggerth and Kiepura, thereby extending the reach of the Center’s curatorial work into a permanent scholarly resource.
2022
In April 2022, the Exilarte Center returned to the United States with a concert tour that enhanced its international profile. Performances were held at the Center for Jewish History as well as the Austrian Cultural Forums in New York and Washington, D.C. The programs featured works by Hans Gál, Erwin Schulhoff, Alexandre Tansman, Julius Bürger, and Robert Fürstenthal—composers whose legacies exemplify the breadth of exile experiences and the transatlantic impact of émigré musical culture.
In May, Exilarte partnered with the Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, and the mdw to present the workshop and concert Songs from Testimonies. Composer, musician, and musicologist Zisl Slepovitch alongside with Stephen Naron, the director of the Fortunoff Archive shared their work with the Fortunoff Archive in collecting and preserving survivors’ testimonies. Slepovitch also led a performance of songs once sung in villages and towns, ghettos, and concentration camps across Central and Eastern Europe. This event highlighted the intersections of oral history, archival practice, and performance, bridging scholarly inquiry with living memory.
On 13th September, the exhibition Fritz Kreisler—A Cosmopolitan in Exile: From Prodigy to “King of Violinists” opened at the Exilarte Center. By tracing Kreisler’s extraordinary trajectory from Viennese child prodigy to one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated violinists, the exhibition illuminated both the cosmopolitan reach of Austrian musical traditions and the musical transformations imposed by exile.
2023
On 13th April 2023, the Exilarte Center presented an Echo of the Unheard concert dedicated to Julius Bürger (later Burger), a Viennese composer who fled to the United States in 1938 and whose work remained largely unrecognized until its rediscovery in 1994. While other concerts during the year featured works by Walter Bricht, Robert Fürstenthal, Hans Gál, Walter Arlen, and André Singer, Bürger became the subject of a major concert on 18th August in the ORF Großer Sendesaal with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by Gottfried Rabl, the program offered a comprehensive presentation of Bürger’s music and positioned him within the broader canon of émigré composers.
The significance of these efforts was further amplified by the release, in August 2024, of the documentary Julius Bürger – Expelled and Rediscovered. A Viennese Composer Returns. By pairing live performance with audiovisual documentation, Exilarte reinforced its dual mission of restitution and dissemination, ensuring that Bürger’s legacy would continue to resonate both within academic research and in the public sphere.
From 3rd to 5th November, Exilarte marked the 150th birthday of Arnold Schoenberg with a major symposium in Shenzhen, China. The program brought together musicologists Gerold Gruber, Joseph Auner, Severine Neff, and Ulrike Anton, who lectured on Schoenberg and two of his students, Wolfgang Fraenkel and Julius Schloss. Both Fraenkel and Schloss had continued their careers as music teachers in exile in Shanghai, exemplifying the transnational diffusion of Schoenberg’s pedagogical legacy. Complementing the scholarly sessions were concerts: Schoenberg’s chamber works on 3rd November, and Tod Machover’s opera Schoenberg in Hollywood on 4th November.
In late 2023,Michael Haas published his second major monograph on exile: Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler (Yale University Press). Expanding on his earlier Forbidden Music (2013), Haas’s study further strengthened Exilarte’s scholarly foundation while contributing substantially to the international historiography of exile studies.
2024
Beginning in March 2024, Arnold Schoenberg once again assumed a central role in Exilarte’s public programming, this time as one corner of the special exhibition Triangle of the Viennese Tradition: Zemlinsky – Schönberg – Hoffmann. The exhibition examined the interconnected social world and divergent careers of Schoenberg, his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, and his student Richard Hoffmann. It contextualized three generations of Viennese modernism within the broader dynamics of exile and legacy. The exhibition was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue of the same name, published by Böhlau Verlag, thereby anchoring its curatorial narrative in a durable academic resource.
In summer 2024, Exilarte appeared for the first time at the Amadeus Festival Vienna. On 29th June, Nadia and Liuba Kalmykova (violins) and Kasumi Yui (piano) performed a program featuring Shostakovich, Moritz Moszkowski, Hans Gál, and Pablo de Sarasate. Later, on 30th August, Exilarte collaborated with the Aron Quartet at the Chamber Music Festival of Vienna. This concert included a selection of Lieder by Walter Bricht, with the composer’s daughter Dana Bricht in attendance—an occasion that poignantly bridged archival restitution with living family memory.
Meanwhile, the Echo of the Unheard series continued with wide-ranging programs featuring works by newly rediscovered composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Wolfgang Fraenkel, Erich Zeisl, Ruth Schönthal, Hans Winterberg, Ilse Weber, Pavel Haas, György Ligeti, Jean Françaix, and Egon Lustgarten. By juxtaposing canonical modernists with lesser-known émigrés, the series once again highlighted the pluralism of twentieth-century musical voices silenced or displaced under the pressures of exile and political oppression.
2025
The Echo of the Unheard concert series continued in 2025, opening with a program dedicated to Robert Fürstenthal, who was earlier a key subject in the exhibition “I return to Vienna when I compose” in 2017,and extended performances on 9th April and 22nd May. In keeping with the series’ long-standing mission, these concerts reaffirmed Exilarte’s commitment to restoring the visibility of émigré and marginalized composers within the broader cultural landscape.
The exhibition Erich Zeisl: Vienna’s Lost Son in Foreign Lands was he Center’s principal curatorial undertaking for the year.The project traced Zeisl’s early life in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt, his brilliant prewar career, the family’s struggles to secure an affidavit for emigration to the United States, and the relative obscurity he endured there despite his contributions to the Hollywood film industry during the war years. As with all of Exilarte’s museum projects, the exhibition was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, thereby extending its curatorial research for a broad community into a permanent academic resource.
Looking ahead, the year 2025 also announced the preparation of further publications in 2026: monographs on Wilhelm Grosz, Richard Fuchs, and Hans Winterberg, as well as an English translation of Hugo Kauder (1888–1972): Composer | Music Philosopher | Theorist. Exilarte’s 2025’s initiatives exemplify the Center’s sustained role as a curatorial and editorial center for the recontexualization for exiled musical legacies in scholary spaces.
The trajectory of exil.arte/ Exilarte Center from 2006 to 2026 demonstrates how a single initiative rooted in remembrance could grow into a major international research and cultural center. Over two decades, the association-turned-institution has succeeded in uniting academic research, archival practice, and artistic performance. Exhibitions, catalogues, recordings, and conferences have made exiled composers visible to a broader public, not only a scholarly one.
At the same time, Exilarte has become a model of how cultural memory can be enacted: through the recovery of estates and musical legacies, through the cultivation of transnational partnerships from Vienna to Shanghai and New York, and through digital innovations that make collections accessible worldwide. The Center’s work highlights the losses inflicted by exile and persecution in addition to the resilience, adaptability, and enduring vitality of those silenced voices.
Looking toward the future, many planned publications and new exhibitions confirm that Exilarte remains committed to expanding both the scope and depth of exile research. The years 2006–2026 form not an endpoint, but a foundation: a living archive and a platform that continues to reshape the historiography of twentieth-century music.
