Zweig MS 81 A

Autograph. Written in brown ink on systems of three staves, on the recto of a single leaf. Headed ‘An die Musik / Gedicht von Schober’ and signed ‘Franz Schubert m[anu propr]ia’. In D major, the vocal line in the treble clef; tempo direction ‘Mässig’. The lines labelled ‘Voce’ and ‘Pianoforte’ against the first system. The second of the two versions of the song listed by Otto Erich Deutsch (ed.), Neue Schubert Ausgabe and Werner Aderhold, Franz Schubert. Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (Kassel, 1978). For material with which the manuscript was mounted when received in the British Library, see Zweig MS 81B.

This manuscript appears, like the autographs of the earlier version of the song, to take the form of an album leaf, but it is not known when or for whom it was written out. It remains the only known autograph of the version in which the song was published in Schubert’s lifetime. As early as 1923, in ‘Die Welt der Autographen’ (in Martin Bircher (ed.), Stefan Zweig’s Welt der Autographen (Zurich, 1996), p. 22), Zweig had written of the incomparably greater impact made by the embodiment of a Schubert song in the composer’s autograph than by its publication in the cold pages of a printed edition - a view which alone would justify the manuscript’s frequent reproduction. Of the three autograph Schubert song manuscripts from his collection which Zweig offered for sale in 1936 through Hinterberger’s catalogue IX one went to the Wiener Stadtbibliothek and two to the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana. The collection was then without any Schubert song manuscript until his acquisition of Zweig MSS 79 and 81A in the early months of 1940. Zweig’s delight at acquiring the autograph of this most famous of Schubert’s songs is evident from his remarks on his record card (Add. MS 73167, f. 44, and his own variant copy in Add. MS 73169, f. 62): ‘Ein Kronstück der Liedkunst ... Auch grafisch ausserordentlich schön’, a counterpart (both ‘Gegenpart’ and ‘Pendant’) to Mozart’s ‘Das Veilchen’, the manuscipt of which he had owned since 1934 or 1935. Both autographs were among the select group of manuscripts he chose to take with him to the United States in June 1940 and on to Brazil. Renoldner reproduces Zweig’s record card in addition to the manuscript.