Zweig MS 25

Autograph. Written in ink on systems of two and three staves. Music on ff. 2r and 3r only; f. 2r. headed ‘Indianische Erntelied / Erster Versuch einer Verwerthung für das Clavier’. Tempo direction ‘Allegretto vivace’ (f. 2r). Against the end of the last system on f. 3r is the date ‘12 April 1911’, and under it the inscription ‘diese Skizze wurde eigens niedergeschrieben / für Herrn Stephan Zweig / zur Erinnerung an Amerika / und an Ferruccio Busoni’. With a title-page (f.1r), ‘Klavier Skizze / (Versuch über ein Indianer Lied) / Herrn Stefan Zweig’, signed ‘Ferruccio Busoni’.

With number from Hinterberger catalogue IX in pencil at foot of f. 1r.

The piece takes the form of an improvisation on the American Indian Laguna corn-grinding song (see Beaumont, p. 200), and is apparently unpublished. Busoni had been introduced to American Indian music by a former pupil during his 1910-11 concert tour of the United States. A number of subsequent works are based on themes from this source; a version of the corn-grinding song is used again in the third piano piece in the first book of his Indianisches Tagebuch (1915, published Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1916). Busoni set out to return to Europe early in April 1911. Zweig writes in The World of Yesterday of his admiration for Busoni’s playing ‘from my early youth’; he made his first visit to central and North America for two months early in 1911, and met Busoni in the USA (see Prater, European of Yesterday, and Zweig. Briefe). Zweig was back in Vienna by 21 April. Mahler was one of his fellow passengers on the ship home (Prater); the date and inscription on the present manuscript suggest that Busoni was also on board. On his return home Zweig wrote to Ferdinand Grigori that he was now beginning to appreciate Busoni as a composer as well as a pianist, a remark made when the gift of this little piece was presumably still fresh in his mind. Zweig published an appreciation of Busoni in Oct. 1911 (in Blätter des deutschen Theaters, vol. i, no. 6), and the earliest of the surviving letters to him from Busoni (Jewish National and University Library) is dated 6 Dec. 1911; from it it is clear that the two men were already on cordial terms. Later Busoni was among the group of exiles in Zürich when Zweig was there in 1918 before the end of the first World War.