Budapest, 1884 — Florence, 1975

 

Composer, pianist, musicologist, collector, author

 

Studied composition with Bela Bartók (1881-1945) in Budapest, and was collaborator for the most important German language newspaper in what used to be Moravia, Prager Tageblatt, alongside figures such as  Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Ferenc Molnár, Joseph Roth, Alexander Roda Roda, Alfred Döblin, Hans Natonek and Sándor Márai..

 

Friend and assistant of the Italian composer Ferrucccio Busoni (1866-1924), she organized his correspondence and published a biographical profile. Zweig had dealings with Busoni as a militant in the circle of pacifists in Zurich, Switzerland, during the Great War. It is possible that the relationship brought Stefan and Gisella together, especially after the composer moved to Berlin.

 

The intense correspondence with Gisella began in 1935 when the author had already settled in London. She was one of his Musikfreunde, the musical fraternity begun in Salzburg with Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and later extended to include Alfred Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Bronislaw Hubermann and others (q.v.). Gisella and Stefan collected scores and autographs and frequently did swaps. She was one of the few friends chosen to receive the postcard with verses by Camões translated by Zweig in late 1940.

 

From 1923 she and her daughter, the ballerina Trudy Goth (Berlin, 1913-New, 1974), lived in Florence. With the growing proximity of Italian Fascism to German Nazism, mother and daughter managed to flee and settle in New York, where Trudy became an exponent of modern dance.

 

Friderike had no contact with Gisella (in the correspondence with Stefan she is only mentioned once, en passant), unlike her ex-husband’s other female friends. Lotte met her on her trip to Italy when still Zweig’s secretary-companion, and later in New York.

 

Her collection of scores was donated to the US Library of Congress. A book of unpublished correspondence between Gisella and Stefan was published in Vienna in 1964. After Zweig’s death in Petrópolis, she made the following comment about her Musikfreund: “...A chamber group in a house or the opportunity to hear a good orchestra might have relieved the tension of that mind tortured by personal forebodings and by the vision of mankind in agony...”

 

Address listed: 66 Fifth Ave., New York; 2039 New Hampshire Ave., Washington. [crossed out]