Zweig's manuscript collection is at the British Library

Person: Stefan Zweig
Lived: 1881–1942
Field: Literature
From: Austrian

The story

Alongside his writing, Stefan Zweig was a passionate collector of manuscripts. As a young man travelling abroad, he wrote in his memoir, the only valuables he carried were autographs and writings by authors he admired, notably Goethe. Over many years he built a private collection of original handwritten pages by great composers and writers, and he corresponded at length with the Hungarian musicologist Gisela Selden-Goth about their shared passion for original music scores.

His collection was especially rich in autograph music manuscripts. It includes works in the hands of Johann Sebastian Bach, Joseph Haydn, George Frideric Handel, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, as well as many Mozart manuscripts and even a piano duet by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Its literary and historical documents, dating from 1542 to 1940, range from Martin Luther and John Locke to Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, Jules Verne and Sigmund Freud.

Among its treasures is Mozart's own handwritten catalogue of his works, the Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke. Mozart began it in February 1784 and kept it until weeks before his death in 1791, noting each new work with its date, a description and its opening bars. He left the closing date blank, writing only a single 1, as if expecting to continue into the 1800s. The catalogue remains a standard basis for dating and authenticating his music. Zweig is said to have regarded it as the most precious of all his musical treasures.

After Zweig's death his heirs continued to develop the collection, lent it to the British Museum in 1956, and in May 1986 donated it to the British Library, where it is known as the Stefan Zweig Collection. It contains 206 numbered items, and most of the music manuscripts have been digitised. It has been described as one of the world's greatest collections of autograph manuscripts. Other important Zweig collections are held at the State University of New York at Fredonia and the National Library of Israel.

Housed in a national library, it is now available to scholars and to the public, preserving original documents of European music and literature. The gift reflects the generous spirit of a collector who saw these pages as part of a shared cultural heritage.

Why it matters

The Stefan Zweig Collection preserves irreplaceable manuscripts of great composers and writers for researchers and music lovers worldwide.

About Stefan Zweig

Viennese Jewish novelist and biographer, among the world’s most translated writers of the interwar years, whose exile memoir The World of Yesterday mourns a lost Europe.

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Stefan Zweig

1881–1942 · Literature

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