Schumann composed the majority of his most famous songs in 1840, the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck. For much of the next decade, he focused his attentions elsewhere, but in 1849 and 1850 Schumann produced many more songs, including the Drei Gesänge, Op. 83, which he composed in the spring of 1850. The Gilmore Music Library is proud to hold Schumann’s own manuscript of the first of these three songs, “Resignation.” Schumann attributes the text only to a mysterious “J.B.” The work-list in Schumann article in Grove Music Online (by Eric Sams and John Daverio) identifies J.B. as Julius Buddeus, an author and publisher in Düsseldorf, but Margit McCorkle’s thematic catalogue of Schumann’s works says that this attribution cannot be verified, and notes that the source of the text has never been located.

Benjamin Rowland, a businessman from Massachusetts and a member of the Yale Class of 1932, owned this manuscript. He placed it and seven others (by Haydn, Mozart, Beetho­ven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Chopin) on deposit at the Music Library, but never actually donated it. After Mr. Rowland passed away, his heirs withdrew the manuscripts from Yale. Some years later, the Schumann song came up for sale, and the Library was able to purchase it.

The manuscript of Op. 83, no. 2, “Die Blume der Ergebung” is also at Yale; it is part of the Frederick Koch Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale does not have a monopoly on sources for the Drei Gesänge, however; the manuscript for “Der Einsiedler,” Op. 83, no. 3, is at the Brahms-Institut in Lübeck.