A neglected stash of unrecorded Schubert?

The Argentine violinist Tomas Cotik makes a claim on his new recording that much of Schubert’s dance music exists only in autograph at the city library of Vienna, unpublished and unrecorded. Can this really be?

Here’s Cotik’s assertion:

In view of the vast number of recordings of works by Franz Schubert, it may come as a surprise that there are still works that have not been documented on recordings. Schubert composed numerous dance pieces. Some of Schubert’s dance sets were published in engraved editions during his life or shortly after his death; however, most of his dance music existed only in autograph.

While these Ländler are written for “violino” (violin) on the autograph, it is arguable that in some cases these autographs could be considered as not definitive or not complete. On the other hand, drawings dating from the 19^th century where one violinist alone plays music for a dance make evident that this practice was customary and suggest that most, if not all, of these Ländler were conceived as solo violin pieces and that the autograph shows them in definitive form. During his doctoral research and recording of Schubert’s complete works for violin and piano, Tomas Cotik discovered these largely unknown and unrecorded pieces, whose autographs are at the Stadtbibliothek, Wien.