A handwritten piece of sheet music by Beethoven has sold for $100,000

Professional appraiser Brendan Ryan had visited the home of a woman in the US town of Greenwich when he spotted the sheet, covered with notes in German, behind glass. Ryan, who had been a Beethoven obsessive, recognised the handwriting. “I called my wife when I got into my car; I think I was bouncing off the walls,” he told Greenwich Time.

The piece’s authenticity was confirmed by Carmelo Comberiati, who had been Ryan’s professor at college, and has studied Beethoven manuscripts. He was able to deduce that the music was from King Stephen, incidental music for a theatre piece. Three holes in the side of the paper showed the sheet had come from the notebook in which Beethoven worked on King Stephen in 1811.

Comberiati said Beethoven, unlike most composers, kept his workings. “Beethoven would write out his ideas. With most composers, we just have the final product – they threw the rest out. Beethoven didn’t throw anything out,” he told Greenwich Time. “I found the sketchbook and referenced the exact piece; we put it all together.”

King Stephen is among Beethoven’s minor works, and only its overture is performed with any frequency today. It was composed for a play written by August von Kotzebue for the opening of the Hungarian theatre in Pest, and tells of the life of the founder of modern Hungary in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Beethoven also wrote music for another Von Kotzebue play, The Ruin of Athens, written for the same theatre.

Although Beethoven manuscripts go to auction regularly, the page from King Stephen was unusual for being unknown.

Source: The Gaurdian