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Seminary Library Assistant Rediscovers Historic Beethoven ScoreA long-lost piano score written and annotated by Beethoven will go on sale at Sotheby’s auction house in London December 1, thanks to the chance discovery by a library assistant at the Austen K. deBlois Library of the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania.Circulation and Periodicals Assistant Heather Carbo discovered the 80-page manuscript, written on several different types of paper and enclosed in a paper-covered board binding, in an archival cabinet in July, the New York Times reported October 13. Carbo told American Libraries that she found it on a shelf in a locked metal cabinet that contained memorabilia from some of the missionaries connected with the seminary. “There had never been any inventory of this material,” she added. “In a small place with a small staff, no one had ever had the chance to look closely at it.” An 1826 piano transcription of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, composed in 1825 as the final movement of his String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130, the score had last been sold in an 1890 auction in Berlin. Musical scholars suspect the unnamed buyer was William Howard Doane (1832–1915), a Cincinnati industrialist who also wrote Sunday school hymns. In 1952, Doane’s daughter made a gift to the seminary, then known as the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, that included some Mozart manuscripts and possibly the Beethoven score. The Times noted that the manuscript was the only complete source for the piano version of the Grosse Fuge, and has apparently never been examined by scholars. Seminary President Wallace Charles Smith said that funds from the manuscript’s auction—expected to bring in at least $1.7 million—would be added to the school’s endowment. Posted October 14, 2005. |
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