Franz Schubert's Entry in the Viennese Death Records

In a recent blogpost I dealt with the fate of Beethoven's third will and the thievish activities of the Viennese amateur researcher Robert Franz Müller (1864–1933). I also addressed the fact that the entry concerning Beethoven's death in the Vienna Totenbeschauprotokoll has already been stolen before 1922. In a bout of boundless optimism, I wrote the following concerning the loss of this document:

We find ourselves wondering how Mozart's and Schubert's entries in Vienna's death registers ever could survive into the 21st century.

I have to correct myself. The Schubert entry has also been stolen, and I remember having already noticed this more than ten years ago, but I forgot about it. Similar to the Beethoven entry, a whole leaf (folio 80) has been cut from the 1828 register and had to be replaced with information taken from p. 1140 of the Wiener Zeitung of 25 November 1828. Of course, this replacement is insufficient, because, contrary to the official death records, the lists in the Wiener Zeitung never give places of birth and times of death of the deceased.

The replacement of Franz Schubert's entry in the death records of the Vienna City Council (A-Wsa, Totenbeschreibamt, 163, S, fol. 80)

The typewritten replacement of the stolen page begins with the following statement:

The missing and in itself worthless leaf was cut out by a user in an act of vandalism. The missing data have been completed from the Wiener-Zeitung.

This is followed by the wrong date "18. November 1828" and the substitute list beginning with Schubert's name.

The original text of Franz Schubert's entry in the Totenbeschauprotokoll is not completely lost. The words that are missing in the Wiener Zeitung (concerning the place of birth and the time of death) survive in the following unpublished (and undigitized) entry in the Bahrleihbuch of St. Stephen's concerning the composer's obsequies on 21 November 1828.

The entry concerning Schubert's obseqies and burial in the Bahrleihbuch of St. Stephen's (A-Wd, Bahrleihbuch, 1.11.1828-31.10.1829, fol. 32v)

[Den 21. November (1828)]

Schubert / Franz
Es ist der H[err] Franz Schubert Tonnkünstler / und Compositeur ledig hier gebürtig alt 32 Jahr / den 19. November nachmittags um 3 1/4 Uhr auf / der Neuwieden Nr° 694 Pf.[arre] Sonenhof verschied[en] / und am Nervenfieber beschaut worden
Wurde im Dorffreydhof Währing beerdiget
Bezahlt worden nach 2. Klaß, 5. Rubrik  .  .  .  20 f 27 [kr]

[translation:]

The musician and composer Franz Schubert, unmarried, born here, aged 32 years, died on 19 November at 3:15 p.m. at Neuwieden No. 694 in the Sonnenhof parish [St. Joseph in Margareten] and was inspected of nervous fever.
He was buried in the village cemetery in Währing
Paid for according to the 2nd class, 5th category .  .  20 florins 27 kreuzer

The unpublished entry concerning Schubert's death in the church record's of St. Josef zu Margareten shows two things: 1) Schubert's body was first supposed to be buried in the Matzleinsdorf cemetery and 2) Schubert only received the anointing of the sick, but not the last rites.

The entry concerning Schubert's death and obsequies in the records of St. Josef zu Margareten: "[Ort, wohin, und Tag, an welchem die Begräbniß geschehen.] den 21tn November in Matzleinsdorfer. [Anmerkungen] Erhielt blos die letzte Oehlung." (St. Josef zu Margareten, Tom 7, fol. 312). The late change of Schubert's burial place is similar to the burial of Ignaz von Seyfried, who was initially supposed to be buried in the Schmelz cemetery, but eventually received a grave opposite that of Beethoven in Währing.

Schubert was not buried on 21 November 1828. The exequies at Margareten, the transport to Währing, and the second consecration at St. Gertrud's Church in Währing took too long for the burial to take place on the 21st. Schubert's body was put into the morgue at the Währing cemetery and buried the following day, on Saturday November 22nd. The entry "21tr 9ber" in the Währing burial register (Währing, Tom 4, fol. 280) only refers to the date of the obsequies.

It is very unlikely that Robert Franz Müller had access to the original death records. Until 1922 – when the protocols were transferred to the City Archive and the thefts were noticed – these documents were held by the Totenbeschreibamt of the Vienna Magistrate and were not accessible to the public. Therefore, these thefts seem to have been an inside job, perpetrated by a city employee. Although we have to accept the loss of the entries of Beethoven and Schubert, there is still occasion to wonder, because the original entries concerning the deaths of Mozart and Haydn are still extant. And since the original protocols are not handed out to readers anymore (following a suggestion that I filed a few years ago), these two documents seem to be safe.

The entry in the Vienna Totenbeschauprotokoll concerning Mozart's death (A-Wsa, Totenbeschreibamt, 96, M, fol. 53v)

The entry in the Vienna Totenbeschauprotokoll concerning Haydn's death (A-Wsa, Totenbeschreibamt, 126, H, fol. 42v)

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© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2014.

Updated: 14 March 2023

The Wienbibliothek Buys its Own Property

The eminent Viennese music collector and scholar Ignaz Weinmann (1897–1976) left his collection and musical estate to the (then) Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek (today Wienbibliothek). While Weinmann's huge collection of musical scores survived the transfer to the library without any loss, other items from Weinmann's collection of Schubertiana did not fare so well. In a blogpost, which I published here on 5 December 2012, I wrote the following.

While the current efforts of the Wienbibliothek to recover stolen Strauss sketches are praiseworthy, it has become evident that these sketches are only the tip of an iceberg, and that the public has not yet been informed of the full extent of the losses suffered by the music collection of the Wienbibliothek (at that time the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek) prior to the retirement of Ernst Hilmar as head of that collection in 1994. In particular, the estates of Otto Erich Deutsch and Ignaz Weinmann, both owned by the Wienbibliothek, suffered massive losses. Items that were demonstrably in the library as part of Weinmann's estate surfaced in a Viennese antiquarian shop as early as 1993, where they were purchased by the Canadian Schubert scholar Rita Steblin. Steblin (for obvious reasons) didn't notify the police, but informed the head of the library, who, however, took no legal action, preferring instead to resolve everything behind the scenes, putatively in the interest of a principle of "confidentiality" that is apparently still in force today. The head of the music collection was suspended and eventually quietly dismissed into retirement. The police and the state prosecutor were not involved. The losses from Weinmann's estate included not only irreplaceable treasures that once belonged to the Krasser family, such as the prayer books of Schubert's sister Therese Schneider and her daughter, but also many other valuable books and a lock of Franz Schubert's hair that had been given to his half-brother Andreas Schubert on the occasion of the composer's first exhumation in 1863

The two prayer books originating from Schubert's sister and her daughter Therese Krasser were part of Weinmann's valuable collection and came to the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek in 1976, together with all the other material that Weinmann had bequeathed to the library. In the inventory of Weinmann's library, titled Bibliotheca Schubertiana (Vienna 1968) these prayer books appear under "Andenken aus dem Nachlass K r a s s e r" (keepsakes from the Krasser estate), right after the lock of Schubert's hair that was stolen from the Wienbibliothek and never recovered from the exhibition premises in Schloss Atzenbrugg.

Just like several other books from Weinmann's estate, the two precious prayer books did not make it into the holdings of the library. They vanished, and all my efforts to find them in the library's catalog in 1999 and order them were unsuccessful. In the course of an internal investigation their loss (and the loss of many other books from Weinmann's estate) was later blamed on "an erroneous sale of supposed doublets" by the former head of the archive Herwig Würtz. Thus, all the embarrassing losses and thefts that the library suffered during the 1990s could be quietly resolved without the involvement of the police or the state prosecutor. 

In autumn of 2012, the lost prayer books from the Krasser family suddenly turned up again. To round up a sad story with a bizarre twist, the two books were presented on the website of the Wienbibliothek as "Neuerwerbungen September 2012" (new acquisitions).

There is no reason to assume that the library is now presenting books as "new acquisition" that had already been it its possession since 1976, when Ignaz Weinmann bequeathed his collection to the City of Vienna. I have made no enquiries yet, as to who sold (or donated) the two prayer books to the Wienbibliothek. I take it as a fact that the Wienbibliothek is now buying back valuable items that already belonged to this library almost forty years ago.

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© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2013. All rights reserved.