Zweig MS 127

Autograph short or condensed score. Written in ink on systems of two, three or four staves. As follows: f. 1r. ‘O Araby, dear Araby’ [no. 16]. Headed ‘Song Fatima’. f. 1v. ‘Mourn thou poor heart’ [no. 19]. Headed ‘Cavatina’. With annotations in red crayon and in pencil. f. 1v. Overture, eight bars only, at foot of page. Annotated as above. ff. 2r-3r. Act III finale [no. 22], lacking the final chorus. Headed ‘Finale. Oberon.’, and with lists of instruments for orchestration in the upper margin (f. 2r). f. 3v. ‘I revel in hope and joy again’ [no. 20]. 41 bars only, the lower part of the leaf cut away. Tempo direction ‘Vivace assai’. ‘Weber aus Oberon’ added later in pencil in upper margin of. f. 1v.

The lower portion of f. 3 of this manuscript must be presumed to have been cut off, perhaps to be given away, after it came into Moscheles’s possession; the verso of the leaf is written on systems of three staves, and the excision has removed the lower stave of the third system. Moscheles was able to acquire the leaf as a result of his friendship with Smart. Documentation of this friendship includes the charming drawing of the two together, Moscheles at the piano, Smart standing by, in Charlotte Moscheles’s autograph album (British Library, Loan 102.2, reproduced in Cyril Ehrlich, First Philharmonic (Oxford, 1995), p. 45). In a letter to his Paris publisher Moscheles describes how he and Smart went together into Weber’s room on 5 June, discovering the composer dead at his writing table. Moscheles had no entry from Weber in his own autograph album (Zweig MS 215, the earliest entries in which date from 1825; this may have strengthened his resolve, despite the tragic occasion, to add these leaves to his collection.