‘… A veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music’ (Alban Berg) - as little as it was perceived by the general public during its short existence, in accordance with its genesis, all the more remarkable were the effects and the aftereffects of the Association for Private Musical Performances, founded by Arnold Schoenberg in Mödling near Vienna in November 1918, especially as its intention was to keep away unpopular and malicious critics and ‘to give Arnold Schoenberg the opportunity personally to carry out his intention of providing artists and art lovers with a veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music’, as Alban Berg described in a leaflet in 1919.

In autumn 1921, Schoenberg embarked on the arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, but he broke off in the middle of the first movement. The continuation was to be taken over by Webern, but his did not happen, evidently as a consequence of the end of the society. It was only in 1982/83 that the German composer, conductor and musicologist Rainer Riehn (b. 1941) was prepared to continue what had been begun.