William A. Speck collection of Goetheana : music

The manuscript scores in the Speck Collection are all either settings of texts by Goethe or compositions based on, or inspired by, his works. Principally from the nineteenth century, the manuscripts include autographs by Liszt, Carl Loewe, Mendelssohn, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Ludwig Spohr, and Goethe's composer friend Karl Friedrich Zelter, among others. The best-known items are a one-page fragment from Beethoven's Egmont Overture, Op. 84, (folder 2) and an early sketch from Wagner's Faust Overture (folder 3). The Egmont fragment has been described by Georg Kinsky in Die Handschriften von Beethoven's Egmont-Musik (Vienna, 1933) and more recently by Adolf Fecker in Die Entstehung von Beethoven's Musik zu Goethes Trauerspiel Egmont: eine Abhandlung über die Skizzen (Hamburg, 1978). The Wagner fragment, also a single leaf containing 2 pages, belongs to the first version of the work, titled Ouvertüre zu Goethes 'Faust', Ier Theil, completed in 1840 in Paris and later described as "Der einsame Faust (Oder: Faust in der Einsamkeit); ein Tongedicht für das Orchester"; it was considerably revised for the 1855 version, Eine Faust Ouvertüre.

The acquisition of the manuscript score of Mendelssohn's song Suleika (Op. 57, no. 3) (folder 10), a setting of a poem from Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, illustrates William Speck's often ingenious methods of pursuing Goethe materials around the world. The Mendelssohn score, as well as a number of important Goethe autographs, was acquired around 1920 from the Chicago banker and collector Oliver R. Barrett. Speck learned that Barrett had an interest in presidential autographs, and since Speck had a fairly easy source of such documents in the person of William Howard Taft, whose tenure at the Yale Law School coincided with Speck's early years as library curator, several exchanges were made: Goethe-related manuscripts for letters Taft had received from his successor, Teddy Roosevelt.

Additions are still being made to the Speck collection of music manuscripts, as opportunity allows. Recent acquisitions, 1997-2010, include manuscript scores for Carl Baermann, "An Lina. Gedicht von Goethe," Albert Moeschinger, "Katzenpastete," and Johann Gottlieb Naumann, "Auf den Auen wandlen wir."