Zweig MS 89-92

Autograph. Vocal score, the orchestral part in short and compressed score on up to five staves. Written in blue-black ink. Includes full stage directions and spoken dialogue; the scenes within each act, which mostly follow one another without a break, are not always indicated. Staves are frequently extended freehand into the right-hand margins, as the music requires. With annotations in pencil, apparently made by the composer during orchestration of the work and principally giving page and bar numbers in the autograph full score; page nos. are followed by letters where a page in the full score has more than one system. Indications of orchestration occur in both ink and pencil, and are most frequent in Act I.

Zweig gives his own account of his collaboration with Strauss in The World of Yesterday. He wrote the libretto during 1932, at the same time as he was also working on Marie Antoinette, a productive and happy period (Prater). When Strauss received the completed text in January 1933 he wrote to Anton Kippenberg (Zweig’s publisher, who had brought the two men together) describing it as ‘the best text created in comic opera since Figaro’ (Prater, p.206). The derivation of the text, ‘frei nach Ben Jonson’, echoes the even more free version of Volpone which Zweig had written in 1926, and which met with international success. Zweig’s letters (Briefwechsel) show how great was his desire to own this manuscript, which was apparently agreed as a part of his ‘fee’ - in the contract signed by librettist and composer in August 1933, in a separate clause after the stipulation of Zweig’s financial interest in the opera, it is stated that Strauss will provide him with ‘eine handschriftliche Klavierauszugsskizze für dessen Autographensammlung’. Zweig was also concerned, and rightly so as was very soon apparent, that their collaboration might damage Strauss in the eyes of the Nazi authorities in Germany. He undertook to keep his ownership of the manuscript entirely private, and urged the composer before presenting it to him to record in it the date when they had begun work (which was before Hitler assumed office) as well as of its completion (Briefwechsel, p. 109; Prater, p. 235).