The Dickinson Collection consists of autographs and printed scores, manuscripts, letters of Robert and Clara Schumann and others, as well as some personal memorabilia of Clara’s. The musicologists Jürgen Thym and Ralph P. Locke, who discovered the precious collection more than 45 years ago in a cottage at Conesus Lake in Upstate New York, describe in the following essay the circumstances of their find.
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We are perhaps the only musicologists to have made it onto the front page of the National Enquirer, a newspaper that was the nation’s most renowned scandal-sheet for many decades. The story of our extended research trip in the late 1970s that led, in part, to that brief moment of notoriety, is one that we have decided to share with interested readers.
More than 45 years ago, the two of us, junior faculty members at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, picked up the scent of an allegedly important collection of Clara and Robert Schumann memorabilia located somewhere south of the city, in the lovely Finger Lakes region. Teasingly brief mentions of the collection had previously surfaced now and then, but none of our local friends and colleagues had ever seen the Dickinson Collection, nor could they speak with authority about its holdings. The phantom collection seemed to be related to a mysterious and by-then-defunct “Schumann Memorial Foundation”, which in the 1950s had sponsored concerts in Rochester in pursuit of “world peace through music education.”
Lethargy and indifference on the part of the community, as well as a desire for privacy on the part of the collectors—a married couple: June and Edward Dickinson—had thwarted earlier attempts to lift the veil of mystery. Our combined energies and enthusiasm ended up fitting well with June Dickinson’s desire to know the nature and value of her rather sprawling and disorganized holdings. (Edward had died several years earlier.) We were allowed access to the Dickinson Collection and permitted to catalogue the items in it.
Little did we know what we were getting into at the time. We were permitted to work only at the site, take notes, and then, after returning to Rochester, check our findings against the reference tools available at Eastman’s world-renowned Sibley Music Library. It was a cumbersome process. The Interstate highway (I-390) that today connects Rochester with its rural hinterland to the south had not been built, and we had to make our way on slow, albeit charming, country roads. The premises were guarded by a viciously barking German shepherd named Wotan (“Woty” for short, and of the best pedigree, we were assured), who was so excited at our first visit that he pooped right in the living room. Alas, he had not been housebroken, and his owner felt compelled to subscribe to two weeklies, the National Enquirer and the Sunday New York Times (with the latter providing lots of paper), to make up for Woty’s shortcomings. The stench was sometimes quite overwhelming, forcing one of us out onto the screened-in porch for oxygen and recovery, while the other retained a more heroic posture inside.
Did we see the Collection? Yes, and we were richly rewarded for our efforts: six rusty trunks full of “stuff,” some of it damaged by moisture and infested with quick-moving insects called silverfish. (The roof above the trunks had been leaking.) An archivist’s nightmare, but a musicologist’s dream: we were indeed encountering the real thing. The Dickinson Collection turned out to be focused on manuscripts, published scores, and memorabilia of Robert and Clara Schumann (including a brooch, a signet ring, and a lock of hair), and it contained autograph scores and letters galore. What’s more, the Collection was not limited to the Schumanns. There were letters by Felix Mendelssohn, Sigismond Thalberg, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and others.
A whole world of music from continental Europe around 1850 opened up before us. Artists long deceased spoke directly about matters lofty and mundane, and often in touchingly personal ways. Variants of compositions could be traced, filling blank spaces in our knowledge of that composer’s compositional process. And we were able to track, on the basis of correspondence, receipts, and autograph dealers’ notes, the often-erratic path of many of the manuscripts before they found their resting place in rusty metal containers in a cottage at the shores of Conesus Lake. Numerous items had been purchased by the Dickinsons directly from one or another of two grandsons of Clara and Robert: Ferdinand Schumann, living in the Soviet-occupied zone that would become the German Democratic Republic, and Robert Sommerhoff, who had emigrated to America and become a chicken farmer in Ancramdale, NY, close to the Connecticut border.
Teamwork was essential to the project, and not just for trading places in order to take a fresh-air break. Often one of us conversed with June Dickinson (who had many stories she liked to tell), allowing the other—sitting at the same small table—to concentrate on taking notes.
The following photo provides an overview of the geography of the rural spot where we carried out our research. Lakeville, NY, is at its northern end (bottom of photo) of Conesus Lake. East Lake Road is initially visible on the far left, leading in a southerly direction to the weekend cottage just before the first “point” or peninsula stretching into the lake.
Our research, carried out over many months of Saturdays and under trying circumstances, allowed us to present papers about our findings—at the New York-St. Lawrence regional chapter of the American Musicological Society, and then at the AMS’s national meeting—and to publish an article in the international musicological journal Fontes Artis Musicae, “New Schumann Materials in Upstate New York: A First Report on the Dickinson Collection, with Catalogues of its Manuscript Holdings” (1980).
The latter publication eventually helped each of us earn tenure. But, more importantly, it prompted research institutions to become interested in buying the Collection, as a whole or in parts.
Pressure to sell started to intensify when The National Enquirer (that “other” newspaper to which June Dickinson subscribed) published an article that was accurate, by and large. But its alliterative headline was disastrous for the collection’s owner: “Widow Worth $Million Is Living on Welfare”. All of a sudden, June told us in distress, people in the community were accusing her of welfare fraud.
This put pressure on her to seek a buyer for the collection, and the fact that our catalogue of its holdings was now published in a major scholarly journal helped assure potential purchasers that the materials were the real thing. Josef Kruse and the Heinrich-Heine-Institut in Düsseldorf, Germany, made the winning offer, thanks in large part to funds provided by a major West German bank (the Westdeutsche Landesbank).
A few months after the transfer of the holdings, the cottage on East Lake Road burned down. The owner escaped the blaze with minor injuries. (Alas, not the puppy that had succeeded Woty.) The proceeds of the sale allowed June Dickinson to build a new house on a hill overlooking Conesus Lake and to spend her last years in relative ease, knowing also that the materials that she and Edward had gathered, at some effort and expense, would now be stored in a safe location and made permanently available to musicians, scholars, and the interested public.
In retrospect, we consider the treasure hunt we embarked upon 45 years ago to be one of the most colorful episodes of our professional lives. We feel gratified that we helped keep a significant collection of primary-source materials alive, and that the Dickinson Collection will continue to enlighten the world about the musical achievements of Robert and Clara Schumann and other musicians of that great creative era.
Postscript:
In late 2023, one of the precious treasures in the Dickinson Collection, Clara Schumann’s swans-down cape, was given an entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The entry includes information about the item of clothing and a description and photos.
The present essay first appeared as “The Dickinson Collection: Adventures in Musicological Research,” in Musicology Now (the blog of the American Musicological Society), on 13 October 2022.