At the Special Collections of the Honnold/Mudd Library
(The Claremont Colleges, California)

 
The Hampsong Foundation is proud to announce the discovery of an autograph Gustav Mahler manuscript of the song “Frühlingsmorgen”, as well as an autograph copy of “Scheiden und Meiden” and a manuscript of “Nicht Wiedersehen!” signed at the end by Mahler’s Hamburg copyist, Ferdinand Weidigwhich. These came to light during the cataloguing and digitization process of the “Ernestine Schumann-Heink, a Contralto’s Legacy” digital archive at the Special Collections of the Honnold/Mudd Library (The Claremont Colleges, California). The creation of this digital archive is funded by the Hampsong Foundation.

While the “Frühlingsmorgen” manuscript is unsigned, it is confirmed to be in Mahler’s hand. Little else is known about the manuscript, including how Madame Schumann-Heink acquired it. Mahler scholar Dr. Stephen Hefling of the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft speculates:

“Schumann-Heink and Mahler worked together fairly frequently during Mahler’s Budapest and Hamburg years (1888-97), in both opera and concert repertoire. He was unsuccessful in attempting to lure her back from the US to Vienna in 1903, and apparently she never sang at the Vienna Opera during his directorship. It was fairly unusual for Mahler to give autographs to anyone but his sister Justine (who more or less served as archivist) and a few of his lovers; it would seem unlikely, however, that Schumann-Heink had an affair with him, and for the moment one can’t dismiss the possibility that she acquired the manuscript after Mahler’s death.”

Before this finding, what was believed to be the earliest version of the “Frühlingsmorgen” is part of the Mahler-Rosé Collection, held at the University of Western Ontario. The manuscript paper is smaller in size compared to others in the Schumann-Heink Music Manuscript collection and does not contain a commercially manufactured reference.

For more information about the autograph copy of “Scheiden und Meiden” and manuscript of “Nicht Wiedersehen!”, please download Stephen Hefling’s article, available at the top of this webpage.

Images of the manuscripts appear below. Credit: Ernestine Schumann-Heink Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of The Claremont Colleges