The song is occasionally referred to by its first line, "Ich liebe dich, so wie du mich".

It passed into the hands of Franz Schubert, who used the blank pages in June 1817 to sketch out the second movement of his Piano Sonata in E-flat major, D 568 and to write down some exercises in reading musical notation for an unknown pupil (whose written answers are also preserved on the manuscript).

Half came into the possession of Schubert's friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner (who inscribed an owner's note on it), and thence to the Viennese collector Johann Nepomuk Kafka, and thence to Johannes Brahms in 1870; in April 1872 Brahms acquired the other half from Schubert's nephew Eduard Schneider.

In 1893 he presented it to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where the musicologist Eusebius Mandyczewski added his own owner's note as well.

[2] The lyrics are from a poem by Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Herrosee [de] (1754–1821), a German pastor and writer.