Zweig MS 99

Autograph draft in piano score. Written in ink on systems of two staves, with additions in red ink (f. 2v). Tempo directions ‘Sostenuto - Allegro’ (f. 1r); ‘Fine’ at end (f. 2v). The draft of the Overture ends on the fourth system on f. 2v; below this are brief sketches for the Concert Overture in C (WWV 27) and for an unidentified work in E, the latter in red ink. Many trial pen strokes appear in the margins and between staves on all folios. The number 22 added in pencil at the top left of f. 1r; the leaves numbered 195, 196, in pencil, inked over, at top right.

Zweig MS 99 is part of an extensive group of early Wagner manuscripts acquired by Zweig from Hinterberger in 1937 (see provenance information). For the whole group the provenance papers include a typed general description (Add. MS 73173, ff. 32-3), and draft detailed descriptions in manuscript (ibid., ff. 2-30), with typed and annotated copies of these (ibid., ff. 33-71), prepared by a cataloguer for or at Hinterberger; the detailed descriptions are individually numbered, and many (in the manuscript drafts) priced. The typed description has a pencil reminder that Hinterberger should be asked about the provenance of the manuscripts. Zweig’s note on his record card may incorporate the answer: ‘Stammt aus Sammlung Graf Thun, der es [?] Anfang der achtziger Jahre diese Sammlung zusammenstellte. Teil Katalog Liepmannssohn 21. Nov. 1887, teils Albert Cohn vorher und nachher’. (For Cohn see Zweig MS 114.) The collector was perhaps Graf Leo Thun-Hohenstein (1811-1888), Austrian minister for culture and education, and a keen musical amateur (see Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. xxxviii (Leipzig, 1894), pp. 178-212). The numbering of the leaves is in a hand which can with certainty be identified as that which also appears on Zweig MSS 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 110, 118, 119, 121, and 125; numbers added to Zweig MSS 102, 112, 120 and 122 may also possibly be in this same hand. It appears to be a numbering of an unordered group of manuscripts, added perhaps by an early owner; its ocurrence on other autographs of the period is noted in Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis (pp. 72 etc.), and discussed in Egon Voss, ‘Wagners fragmentarisches Orchesterwerk in e-moll - die früheste der erhaltenen Kompositionen?’, Die Musikforschung, vol. xxiii (1970), pp. 50-54. In the Zweig Wagner manuscripts the numbers from this series where the identification of the annotating hand is clear are 18, 19, 57-60, 100-103, 106-8, 110, 115-17, 123, 152, 166-7, 170-1, 177-181, 195-8, 202-9, 212, 300 and 303-4; possible further numbers from the series are 31-2, 46-7, 61-89, 160 and 163. Zweig acquired this extensive collection at a time when Hinterberger were selling many of the literary and musical manuscripts which he had collected in previous years. Among them was an autograph manuscript of part of the libretto for Siegfried given by Wagner to Princess Marie von Seyn-Wittgenstein (Hinterberger, cat. IX, no. 300). The autograph libretto of the first version of Der fliegender Holländer in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, though acquired by Bodmer from Hinterberger in 1936, would appear never to have belonged to Zweig.