The International Day of Provenance Research has been taking place annually on the second Wednesday in April since 2019. It’s an occasion for various activities ranging from lectures to guided tours of museums, collections, and libraries and on to the publication of scholarly essays in the blog Retour. 8 April of this year saw the mdw participate in this day’s observance for the first time, doing so with a dedicated event and the opening of the permanent exhibition Stolen Melodies – Provenance Research at the ub.mdw in the open stacks of the mdw’ University Library (ub.mdw).
Provenance Research
Provenance research examines the provenance—i.e., the ownership chain—of artworks, cultural property, musical instruments, printed music, other forms of written music, books, and everyday items. Since the reform of Austria’s Art Restitution Act of 2009, such efforts encompass objects stolen not only under National Socialism but also during the Austrofascist period, which began in 1933. The Art Restitution Act obligates federal museums and federally owned collections to engage in provenance research, to which end the Commission for Provenance Research was established. Multiple federal provinces and municipalities have also passed acts and regulations at their own respective levels concerning the restitution of arts-related assets taken from their rightful owners under authoritarian regimes. And Austrian university libraries, for their part, have likewise been conducting provenance research since the turn of the millennium through various working groups and projects.
The Robbing of Jewish Citizens in 1938
Researching clues as to items’ provenance entails engaging with former owners’ biographies as well as reconstructing acquisition channels in order to discern what is known as the “provenance chain”. The period following Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938 saw the Jewish population successively deprived of its basis for existence. Due to being banned from their occupations and the attendant loss of all income, many were forced to sell everyday items and valuable property to fund their lives in Austria or flee abroad. Those who attempted to flee frequently stored their property as removal goods—so-called Lifts—with shipping companies. In many cases, these goods remained in storage with the shippers—either because it proved impossible to bring them along into exile or because the owners were deported to concentration and extermination camps, where most of them were murdered. Those who were deported had to leave the lion’s share of their property behind in the “collection camps” and “group apartments” [Sammelwohnungen] where they had initially been forced to move. And from 1940 onward, the Gestapo Office for the Disposal of Jewish Removal Goods (VUGESTA) proceeded to liquidate all of their property to the Reich’s benefit.
Stolen Property at the mdw
Via these various paths, printed editions, sheet music, and musical instruments found their way into the trade in musical items and to instrument workshops and were sold to new owners, hence also becoming part of collections such as that of the present-day ub.mdw. As early as the 2000s, Kathrin Hui-Gregorovič began pursuing initial provenance-related clues in the library’s holdings. In 2012, the ub.mdw went on to establish the mdw’s Working Group on Provenance Research, which is headed by Michael Staudinger. A further impulse for provenance research at the mdw came from the research conducted by the author of this article for the exhibition If These Objects Could Speak. The Resonance of Contemporary History, as part of which the first restitution cases were presented to the public in 2023 and 2024. And since May 2025, a project funded by the mdw Rectorate and curated by the mdw Archive, the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, and the University Library has been underway to systematically inspect the library’s holdings.
The history of the ub.mdw began on 1 January 1909, when a resolution of Emperor Franz Joseph I effected the state takeover of the Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna and its renaming as the Imperial-Royal Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Since the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde retained its own collection’s extensive and valuable library, the Academy then established a library of its own. The 1933–1945 period saw around 15,000 volumes (overwhelmingly of printed music) entered into the ub.mdw’s inventory books. As was the case at other libraries, many of these volumes were illegally obtained under National Socialist rule. Other such objects arrived at the ub.mdw after 1945 by way of acquisitions on the open market for musical items and books, purchases from antique dealers, and frequently anonymous “donations” as well as bequeathed estates. The inventory books, compiled from 1909 onward, provide information on modes of acquisition and the sellers or donors. Thanks to this valuable source, it is often possible to reconstruct chains of acquisition and custodial history.
A Societal Responsibility
On 8 April 2026, the International Day of Provenance Research was observed with the public presentation of two biographies of former owners of printed music held by the ub.mdw in an event that featured readings from extant letters and documents as well as music performed on the piano. This was followed by the opening of the exhibition Stolen Melodies – Provenance Research at the ub.mdw, which is the first permanent exhibition at an Austrian university library to be devoted to this topic. Its four display cabinets present instances of restitution, the biographies of the former owners, and cases that still require further research.
With this permanent exhibition, the ub.mdw’s provenance research project concerning the Nazi era is planting a flag for memorial work and the obligation to account for the past as part of its historical responsibility to uphold an active culture of remembrance.
