About The Ferdinand Rebay Project
From 2017 to 2019, and in consultation with Stift Heiligenkreuz (who owns the original manuscripts), Bergmann Edition published almost 300 compositions for guitar and chamber ensemble including guitar by the Austrian composer Ferdinand Rebay. 
FERDINAND REBAY (1880–1953)
Ferdinand Rebay was born in Vienna in 1880. He studied both violin and piano from an early age. His mother had studied piano with Anton Bruckner, and his father co-owned a publishing firm Rebay & Robitschek.
At the age of ten, Ferdinand went to the Abbey of Stift Heiligenkreuz as a chorister, and during the next five years, he received a solid musical education. In 1904, aged 24, he completed his studies at the Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna by composing the work Erlkönig, which his teacher Robert Fuchs declared the finest work to have been presented at the conservatory in his three decades teaching there.
Until 1938 (when he lost his job) Rebay was an important and extremely productive person in the Vienna classical music establishment. He ran two choirs, worked as a piano professor at the Conservatorium, accompanied singers and wrote a lot of original music, including many works for chamber ensemble. His fondness for the guitar meant he often included it in his compositions, and he wrote a substantial amount of solo works for the instrument. Rebay wrote in a Romantic Neoclassical style, closer to Brahms, Mahler and Grieg than to his contemporaries of the Second Viennese School.
After the war, he got his job back and was active composing until his death in 1953. A significant number of Rebay manuscripts can be found in The Abbey of Stift Heiligenkreuz, and Bergmann Edition has published the 300 works that include the guitar. We hope that classical guitar societies around the world will study these gems of the Late Romantic period in Vienna.
MILENA VALCHEVA - editor and engraver of the Ferdinand Rebay Project
Milena Valcheva graduated from the Academy of Music and Dance Arts – Plovdiv with a Music Pedagogy major. In 2010, she earned a Doctor of Arts degree from the New Bulgarian University, Sofia. She works at the Dobrin Petkov National School for Music and Dance Arts, and has established herself as a trusted expert on digital music score-writing doing the pre-press work for some of the most prestigious specialised publishing houses. She was a member of Milena & Valentin Valchev Guitar Duo which she formed with her husband Valentin Valchev until his death in 2014. Milena Valcheva has worked with the musicologist Dr. Maria Gelew, who has catalogued Rebay’s works. Some of the manuscripts in the Stift Heiligenkreuz collection were initially fingered for the guitar by Rebay’s niece, Gerta Hammerschmied, a guitarist to whom he dedicated a lot of his guitar compositions. Milena Valcheva critically went through the pieces before publication, and the fingering and layout presented in this edition are to be attributed to Milena Valcheva only.