Career summary

Having worked in bookstores in Graz and Leipzig before serving and being wounded in World War I, Heinrich Hinterberger worked for the antiquarian dealer Gilhofer und Ranschburg in Vienna at the end of the war, and then for many years served as managing director of the antiquarian firm of V. A. Heck, on the Kärntner Ring.

In 1935 Hinterberger opened his own antiquarian dealership at Hegelgasse 17 in the Inner City of Vienna. In quick succession, he issued lists and catalogs in many fields, specializing particularly in rare books and autograph manuscripts. Through the contacts that he had cultivated during his years with Heck he succeeded in attracting some major clients and drawing them to his new business.

Hinterberger acquired valuable collections from the estates of a variety of book and autograph manuscript collectors. He acted in the sale of, among others, Stefan Zweig's collection of autograph manuscripts, the music library of Édouard Ganche (who had edited the works of Chopin), and parts of the library of Sigmund Freud. There was scarcely a catalog in which he was not able to offer several important autograph manuscripts of Goethe, Beethoven, or Mozart.

Of Hinterberger's antiquarian business during World War II and the post-war years little is known. Evidently after 1940 no further catalogs were issued. During the post-war period he developed a trade in graphics, but was unable to recapture the success of the pre-war period before finally giving up the business in the 1960s.

Hinterberger and Schenker

While viewing autograph manuscripts by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms at V. A. Heck on November 30, 1926, Schenker met and talked with Hinterberger; he recorded the conversation (notably remarks about Hoboken and the Photogrammarchiv) in his diary (OJ 3/9, pp. 3006-3007).

After Schenker's death, Hinterberger offered his books and collection of sheet music for sale. The books, numbering 394 titles, were presented in a printed catalog, and this remains an important bibliographical tool for Schenker research. For the sheet music, on the other hand, comprising about 750 items offered for 1,250 Swiss francs, only a card index (Zettelkatalog) was made (information on the last page of the book catalog), and this is not known to survive.

A short time after those sales, in his catalog No. 20 under the title "interesting autographs" (item 468), Hinterberger offered for 5 Swiss francs a calling card of Schenker's with fourteen lines of writing.

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