The Polish Communists declared the collection to be state property and ordered the librarians to keep silent. The treasures were stored there in a church.Īt the end of the war, with the hiding place redrawn into Poland, the Polish authorities moved the hundreds of boxes out of the organ lofts of the Grussau church to the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow. The manuscripts, which include Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte,” Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Brahms’s “Song of Triumph” and Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth symphonies, were meticulously packed into crates by the Nazis when the British began to bomb Berlin in 1941 and trucked to a monastery in Grussau, near Breslau (now Wroclaw) in southern Silesia, which was then part of Germany. Indeed, the music manuscripts and other books are in Poland because of a German desire to find a safe haven for some of their most magnificent treasures. Unlike paintings now in Russia that were taken from Germany by the Soviet Army or art stolen from France by the Nazis, the manuscripts were not looted from Berlin by the Poles.

The case of the Berlin collection is one of the most unusual in the tangled web of cultural-heritage claims since the war. Now, Germany wants the collection back, and high-level negotiations, which broke off two years ago between the German and Polish governments, resume this week in Berlin. Since the end of World War II, the Berlin collection has been in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, mostly shrouded in Cold War secrecy and off limits, until 15 years ago, to scholars. In addition to original works by many of the great composers from the 12th to the 19th centuries - Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner as well as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart - the collection includes precious volumes of 300-year-old natural history paintings, writings by Goethe and thousands of manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages. The extraordinary collection of 400 scores, which some musicologists say is the single most valuable batch of music manuscripts, worth perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars, was once the centerpiece of the Prussian State Library in Berlin. In 1933 Zweig wrote resignedly to Max Unger: 'I will probably leave off collecting altogether, I have enough to do collecting myself.' Then, in the mid 1930s, with the political situation as it was, he parted with his whole collection, except for a few items.Hundreds of original manuscripts that include symphonies by Beethoven in his helter-skelter scrawl and operas by Mozart in his neat penmanship are the subject of one of the most politically charged cultural-heritage cases in Europe. To the musicologist Max Unger, Bodmer's most valued advisor and one of the leading Beethoven researchers of the time, Zweig mentioned in 1932 that 'the existence of such a superb specialist collection demands that as much as possible go into it.' In 1954 Bodmer bequeathed in turn his complete collection to the Beethoven House. Bodmer, of Zurich, was perhaps the most important collector of Beethoven manuscripts and other items connected with Beethoven. Recently surfaced documents, which also form the main thread of the exhibition, show that Stefan Zweig made a substantial contribution to the putting together of the Bodmer Collection, given to the Beethoven House in the will of Hans Conrad Bodmer. Zweig built up an impressive set of connections to collectors, research workers, antiquarian book sellers and auction houses such that he was informed of offers in good time. He therefore concentrated on manuscripts that came into being during that process, those that might be termed working manuscripts. He was convinced that a deeper understanding of an artistic work requires knowledge of the process of its creation. He himself brought together an exceptional collection of original manuscripts of writers and composers. Stefan Zweig was not only one of the most read authors of his time but also a connoisseur of autograph manuscripts.

Beethoven original manuscripts