Zweig MS 5

Autograph draft full score. Written in ink on systems of up to 26 staves, with annotations in pencil and in blue and red crayon. Signed, with the opus number, in pencil (f. 2r). The pieces are for differing forces and the instrumentation for nos. II-IV is noted at the foot of the first page of each. The pieces are:

ff. 2r-16v. ‘I. (preludio)’; tempo direction ‘Moderato’.

ff. 17r-37v. ‘II. (Scherzo)’; ‘Allegro’. The dotted minim metronome marking altered from ‘92-96’ to ‘104’.

ff. 38r-44r. ‘III. (Intermezzo)’; ‘Moderato’. The crotchet metronome mark altered in ink from 110 to 132.

ff. 44v-48v. ‘IV. (Marcia funebre)’; opening tempo direction ‘Maestoso’. An apparently unconnected folk-melody of 8 bars is written on a single free stave at the foot of f. 47v.

The pencil annotations, mostly by the composer, include instructions in Hungarian for copying the score, references to the page numbers in that copy, and timings in minutes noted on the first page of each piece: 7 for no. I, 6 for II, 4 for III and 5 for IV. Some of the corrections in ink, including those on pasted-down slips (ff. 5, 7, 8, 14, 16), are in the hand of Bartók’s first wife Márta. Cue numbers have been added in red crayon throughout. The former cover (f. 1) is a sheet of music paper, with three bars of an unidentified work in ink in the hand of Márta Ziegler-Bartók at the top left. It has in pencil in Bartók’s hand ‘Preludio, Scherzo, Interm / Marcia funebre / Partiture’, with a note in French of possible variations in the order of the pieces: ‘ou: 1+2’, ‘ou: 4+3+2’, ‘ou: tous les 4re’. Also in pencil, perhaps in another hand: ‘Hotel Majestic (Avenue Kléber)’. The front fly-leaf (f. i) has the signature R. Lehman.

The Four Pieces for Orchestra were composed in 1912, but not orchestrated until 1921. In a letter of 2 Feb. 1922 to Universal Edition, Vienna (Somfai, ‘Bartók’s Draft’, p. 312 and n. 10), Bartók states that the work was sketched as orchestral music, though he had afterwards transcribed it for two pianos as an interim measure. The following account of the use made of the Zweig MS 5 once completed is drawn from Somfai (ibid., p. 317): from it Bartók’s wife Márta made a copy (now Peter Bartók’s Collection, 31FSFC1) which was used for the first performance on 9 January 1922 in Budapest, and was subsequently the source for the published edition. Her corrections in Zweig MS 5 incorporate the changes which the composer himself made to the copy. Bartók further annotated Zweig MS 5 during rehearsals for the first performance. It was then used for a performance in Paris in 1923, but was not returned to Bartók, who describes it as lost in a letter of 1938.