Obviously, this is not a tech story, but as many techies are into music, I thought this sad news might be of interest to some. For those not familiar with Shoenberg, he was a groundbreaking composer of the early 20th century. While his avant garde atonal music did not have popular appeal, it was massively influential on experimental musicians.
In a way it is a tech story. All historical manuscripts and artworks together with notes and other metadata (provenance info—past owners, catalog lists, sales prices and dates and auction labels, etc.)—should be scanned in the highest quality/resolution then digitized and the data properly archived.
We shouldn't have to wait for disasters like this to occur before we act. Important and irreplaceable books and works of art have been lost many times throughout history from the Library of Alexandria to WWII to the Florence flood† of 1966, and so on.
Protecting valuable information should be on everyone's mind. With those earlier cultural disasters there's at least some excuse in that reproducing backup copies was essentially impossible given the quantity of works, lack of resources, backup repositories, etc.
Today, however, things are very different. High quality scanners and cameras are everywhere and there are even specialist automatic book scanners available like the ones Google and the Internet Archive use to digitize books, they do everything—scanning, automatically turn pages and produce digital copies including complete integrated PDFs of the book.
Perhaps these disastrous fires and the loss of Schoenberg records will prompt others to start scanning their artworks and documents.
I haven't read enough to know whether any information was permanently lost, or if it's more the physical artifacts. It would be a damn shame if there were artifacts that hadn't been digitized.
