Zweig MS 108-109

Autograph. In Mein Leben Wagner describes this work as ‘a further step in the direction of a type of composition calculated to make the most overwhelming effect; at the close ... a large military band was to be added to an already overmanned orchestra ...’. This is born out by his annotation ‘Hier fällt die Militärmisik ein’ on the score. Mitteilungen even states that with the manuscript was an arrangement of the coda of the overture for military band, but there is no mention of this in any other source. The illustrations in Mitteilungen show the manuscript with stitching and what appears to be the remnants of a binding, as if it had perhaps been removed from a larger tract volume; this supports the impression given by the structure details above that the manuscript originally comprised a series of bifolia, the leaves of some of which have since become detached.

The evidence is that Wagner performed the piece at one of his concerts in Riga in March 1838. But it seems he had already parted with this full score, with the prospect of securing performance further afield. John Deathridge, Martin Geck, Egon Voss (eds.), Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV). Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (Mainz, 1986), p. 154 outlines the history of the manuscript, with the sources - principally Wagner’s own account in Mein Leben and the correspondence and minutes in the archive of the Royal Philharmonic Society (British Library, Loan 48); these are augmented and printed in full in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Werke, 18/II, pp. XXX-XXXII. Wagner sent the score to Sir George Smart in London in 1837 in the hope that he would perform it at a music festival or a Philharmonic Society concert; it was neglected by Smart, but eventually considered by the Philharmonic directors in 1840. They decided against a performance - ‘being written on a Theme which is here considered common place’ - and the manuscript was returned to Wagner, by then in Paris and unable to pay the carriage.

As a result it was finally sent back to England, where it was lost sight of until 1904, when the Leicester music dealer Cyrus Gamble found it among music he had purchased some years earlier from the executors of Evan William Thomas. Thomas, whose later career was spent in Liverpool (Brown and Stratton), can be identified from concert programmes and the London Philharmonic Society accounts (Loan 48.9/1) as a violinist with the Society in the late 1830s. Following the rediscovery of the manuscript Henry Wood gave the first modern performance of the work at the Queen’s Hall in London, 2 Jan. 1905. Elkin adds circumstantial details about the rediscovery of the manuscript this century.

In one letter among the Royal Philharmonic Society correspondence Smart quotes Wagner as being aware that a musical phrase is missing from the verse of Arne’s tune in his setting, and as having the intention of putting this right before any performance in England [Loan 48. 13/32, f. 49, of 17 September 1839]. In Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 18/II, Egon Voss demonstrates that Mottl’s edition is based on the copy score now in Berlin, made from a set of parts from which that for the first valve trumpet was missing and incorporating a number of minor revisions made by the composer. Voss bases his edition in Sämtliche Werke on Zweig MS 109.