The exil.arte Center has gone public with the opening of its exhibition “I Return to Vienna when I Compose”. More specifically, over the coming years, the Center will offer a broad range of musical exile-material that will be made available not just to musicians and scholars, but with activities such as concerts, seminars,workshops and publications, also acccessible to a wider public of music lovers.

Burger began studying with Schreker at the mdw in 1919, following his teacher to Berlin in 1920. On Bruno Walter’s recommendation, Burger joined Artur Bodanzky as assistant at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1929, he became Klemperer’s assistant at Berlin’s Kroll Opera, returning to Vienna after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. He still continued to arrange and conduct, notably for the BBC. En route to Vienna from London in 1938, Burger and his wife foresaw what lay in store for Austria and detrained in Paris, abandoning their luggage. In 1939, Burger relocated to America, and in 1949 he rejoined the staff at the Metropolitan Opera, starting a close working friendship with Dimitri Mitropoulos. Though having largely abandoned composition, he won a composition prize from the University of Indiana in 1984 with a work he had composed thirty-nine years earlier: Variations on a Theme by C. Ph. E. Bach His mother was shot in transit to Auschwitz, and five of his brothers were murdered in the concentration camp.

Ronald Pohl, ein Anwalt in New York, kannte Julius Bürger in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens sehr gut und hat mit seinen Werken auch Konzerte veranstaltet. Ronald Pohl hat den Nachlass von Julius Bürger vor kurzem dem exil.arte Zentrum der mdw geschenkt. Im Rahmen des Empfangs spielte das Adamas Quartett auch einen Satz aus dem 2. Streichquartett von Julius Bürger.