In Beethoven’s own hand

Heather Carbo, a librarian at an evangelical seminary near Philadelphia, was cleaning out a cabinet one July afternoon—a dirty and routine job. But there, on the bottom shelf, she stumbled across one of the most important musicological finds in years.

It was a working manuscript score for a piano version of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, a monument of classical music. And it was in the composer’s own hand, according to Sotheby’s auction house. The 80-page manuscript—a furious scattering of notes across the page, with many changes and cross-outs—dates from the final months of Beethoven’s life, a period when he was stone deaf.

Any manuscript showing a composer’s self-editing gives invaluable insight into his working methods, and this is a particularly rich example. It is also a rare piano transcription by Beethoven of one of his own works, and the only complete manuscript source for the piano version of the Grosse Fuge. Above all, it may shed light on his conception of the work, which has almost mythical status in the music world.

The score had effectively disappeared from view for 115 years having been last sold in 1890. Sotheby’ s will auction it on December 1 in London. —NYT