Stefan Zweig collected composers' manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his works
In the 1920s and 1930s few writers anywhere were translated more widely than Stefan Zweig. He was also an obsessive collector of autograph manuscripts, and the hoard his heirs gave the British Library in 1986 includes Mozart's own handwritten catalogue of his compositions.
Zweig was born in Vienna on 28 November 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family; his father made textiles and his mother came from a banking dynasty. He took a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1904 with a thesis on Hippolyte Taine, and Theodor Herzl, then literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, printed some of his early essays. He described himself as a citizen of the world from the outset, though his wartime diaries cheered Austria's army in ways his later memoir quietly left out.
Fame came through novellas and biographies. Letter from an Unknown Woman was filmed by Max Ophüls in 1948, the chess novella The Royal Game and the novel Beware of Pity found huge readerships, and his life of Marie Antoinette became a 1938 MGM film starring Norma Shearer. American readers first met him in 1919 through a pirated edition credited to Steven Branch, a literal rendering of his name.
Music ran through his life. He wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau, and Strauss refused to let Zweig's name be removed from the programme for the Dresden premiere on 24 June 1935. Goebbels stayed away, and the opera was banned after three performances. Zweig's collection, rich in scores by Bach, Haydn, Wagner and Mahler, has been counted among the finest of its kind anywhere.
Nazism pushed him from Austria to England in 1934, and an SS list of people to seize after an invasion of Britain later proved to include his London address. In 1940 he and his second wife, Lotte, crossed to New York and then, in August 1941, settled in Petrópolis in Brazil, where he wrote Brazil, Land of the Future. Despairing over Europe, the couple took their own lives there in February 1942, a day after he completed his memoir The World of Yesterday.
Source: Stefan Zweig
