Inside Schoenberg's wallet

The awe-inspiring website of the Schoenberg Center in Vienna continues to digitize its holdings and place images online; every time I visit, I find new treasures. Various of the master's identity cards and school reports can be viewed, and one can also page through his address books; one page lists Heinrich Schenker, Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt, and Franz Schreker, among others. There are also cards for Orson Welles and Harpo Marx. The photograph file has been considerably expanded: I don't recall having seen this lovely picture of Schoenberg with Poulenc, for example, or a bathing shot of Schoenberg with a husky Winfried Zillig. Two photo-booth snaps are strangely reminiscent of Robert De Niro; another has him wearing a delightfully rascally smile. (The Photomaton, the world's first fully automatic photo booth, arrived in Berlin in 1929, the Schoenberg Center newsletter advises.) A couple of the pictures suggest a man attempting to figure out his new camera.