In this work we prove that the original (Bassi and Rebay in J Comput Phys 131:267–279, 1997) scheme (BR1) for the discretization of second order viscous terms within the discontinuous Galerkin collocation spectral element method (DGSEM) with Gauss Lobatto nodes is stable. More precisely, we prove in the first part that the BR1 scheme preserves energy stability of the skew-symmetric advection term DGSEM discretization for the linearized compressible Navier–Stokes equations (NSE). In the second part, we prove that the BR1 scheme preserves the entropy stability of the recently developed entropy stable compressible Euler DGSEM discretization of Carpenter et al. (SIAM J Sci Comput 36:B835–B867, 2014) for the non-linear compressible NSE, provided that the auxiliary gradient equations use the entropy variables. Both parts are presented for fully three-dimensional, unstructured curvilinear hexahedral grids. Although the focus of this work is on the BR1 scheme, we show that the proof naturally includes the Local DG scheme of Cockburn and Shu.