Re: A Historic Discovery, in Beethoven's Own Hand

Well it's a wonderfully gritty piece. I wonder who will be the first
pianists to play and record it. Come to that, how long before it's
published?

"eromlignod" <eromlignod@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1129229010.616836.299010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >From today's New York Times:
>
>
> A Historic Discovery, in Beethoven's Own Hand
>
> Heather Carbo, a matter-of-fact librarian at an evangelical seminary
> outside Philadelphia, was cleaning out an archival cabinet one hot
> afternoon in July. It was a dirty and routine job. But there, on the
> bottom shelf, she stumbled across what may be 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 in mainly brown ink - a furious scattering of notes across
> the page, with many changes and cross-outs, some so deep that the paper
> is punctured - dates from the final months of Beethoven's life.
>
> The score had effectively disappeared from view for 115 years,
> apparently never examined by scholars. It goes on display today, just
> for the afternoon, at the school, the Palmer Theological Seminary in
> Wynnewood, Pa. "It was just sitting on that shelf," Ms. Carbo said. "I
> was just in a state of shock."
>
> Like Ms. Carbo, musicologists sounded stunned when read a description
> of the manuscript by Sotheby's, which will auction it on Dec. 1 in
> London. "Wow! Oh my God!" said Lewis Lockwood, a musicology professor
> at Harvard University and a Beethoven biographer. "This is big. This is
> very big."
>
> Indeed it is.
>
> Any manuscript showing a composer's self-editing gives invaluable
> insight into his working methods, and this is a particularly rich
> example. Such second thoughts are particularly revealing in the case of
> Beethoven, who, never satisfied, honed his ideas brutally - unlike,
> say, Mozart, who was typically able to spill out a large score in
> nearly finished form.
>
> What's more, this manuscript is among Beethoven's last, from the period
> when he was stone deaf. It not only depicts his thought processes at
> their most introspective and his working methods at their most intense,
> but also gives a sense of his concern for his legacy. The "Grosse
> Fuge," originally part of a string quartet, had been badly treated by a
> baffled public, and he was evidently eager to see it live on in a form
> in which music lovers could play
> it on their pianos at home.
>
> The manuscript is one of the longest and weightiest Beethoven scores
> offered for auction since it was last sold, in 1890, said Richard
> Kramer, a musicologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of
> New York. "What this document gives us is rare insight into the
> imponderable process of decision making," he wrote in an e-mail
> message, "by which this most complex of quartet movements is made over
> into a work for piano four-hands."
>
> The last major Beethoven manuscript discovery occurred in 1999,
> according to Sotheby's, when a previously unknown quartet movement was
> found in a private manuscript collection in Cornwall, England.
> The newly discovered manuscript 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." It will allow,
> finally, for a critical edition of the piece.
>
> Above all, it may shed light on Beethoven's conception of the "Grosse
> Fuge," a work with almost mythical status in the music world, variously
> described by historians as a "leviathan," a "symphonic poem" and an
> achievement on the scale of the finale of his Ninth Symphony and Bach's
> "Art of Fugue."
>
> The manuscript's last known mention was at that auction in 1890, in
> Berlin, with no reference to a buyer. The buyer is now believed to have
> been William Howard Doane, a Cincinnati industrialist with a penchant
> for composing hymns.
>
> In 1952, Doane's daughter made a gift to the seminary, then known as
> the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The gift, to establish a
> chapel, included music manuscripts. Among them were Mozart's Fantasia
> in C minor and Sonata in C minor, a major Mozart find. Fifteen years
> ago, a researcher looking for historical records stumbled across the
> manuscripts in a safe at the seminary. Sotheby's auctioned off the
> Mozart and other works for $1.7 million. Since then, rumors persisted
> that a Beethoven work was floating around somewhere in the seminary.
>
> The "Grosse Fuge," which will also be on display at Sotheby's in New
> York Nov. 16 to 19, is expected to fetch $1.7 million to $2.6 million.
> (The seminary's president, Wallace Charles Smith, said funds from the
> "Beethoven blessing" would be added into its $3 million endowment and
> eventually put toward scholarships, a training program in West Virginia
> and the repayment of debts.)
>
> A look at the manuscript, made available by the auction house, shows a
> composer working with abandon and fixated on getting it exactly right.
> Groups of measures are vigorously canceled out with crosshatches. There
> are smudges where Beethoven appears to have wiped away ink while it was
> still wet. Sections have "aus," or "out," scribbled over them. In some
> parts, Beethoven pays little heed to spacing out the notes in a
> measure, extending the five-line staves with wobbly lines in his own
> hand. High notes soar above the staff. The handwriting grows agitated
> to match the
> music. His clefs are ill formed. In one place, he pastes an entire
> half-page over a botched section with red sealing wax. In another spot,
> Beethoven puts in numbers to signify the fingering. "It's so touching,"
> said Stephen Roe, a musicologist who is head of Sotheby's manuscript
> department. "It means he played it."
>
> The manuscript is written on several different types of paper with a
> paper-covered board binding, apparently from the 1830's. The title has
> the word "fugue" misspelled as "tugue." Bound at the back is a first
> print edition.
>
> The "Grosse Fuge" lies at the heart of an enduring Beethoven
> controversy. It was composed, and published, as the finale of his Op.
> 130 String Quartet, a member of the colossal series of late quartets.
> But it was astonishingly complex. After the premiere on March 21, 1826,
> a reviewer called the music "incomprehensible, like Chinese" and
> suggested that Beethoven's deafness was at fault. Beethoven wrote
> another finale, lighter and more pastoral, and agreed to have the
> "Grosse Fuge" published separately. Debate has raged over the Op. 130
> quartet's proper finale. One camp says
> that since Beethoven himself made the decision, the substitute finale
> should be played. The other says that he was effectively pressured into
> the change by his friends and publisher, and that therefore the "Grosse
> Fuge" should remain.
>
> Maynard Solomon, another Beethoven biographer, cautioned against
> overestimating the manuscript's value, pointing out that it is a piano
> transcription and thus a "secondary work." But, Mr. Solomon said, it
> fills a gap in the history of the "Grosse Fuge," which he called "one
> of the most important composition histories in Beethoven's life."
>
> The publisher commissioned a four-hand piano version from another
> composer, but the job of teasing out the string lines and assigning
> them to the keyboard was so poorly done that Beethoven insisted on
> making his own version, which he delivered in August 1826. He was dead
> less than eight months later.
>
> Describing the period of Beethoven's life, Mr. Lockwood, the Harvard
> musicologist, said: "He's sick. He is old in his way. He's tired. He's
> really near the end of his career. But he decides it's worth it to get
> this piece out in four hands in his own version. It's a labor of
> extreme love at the end of his life."
>
> Beethoven could not comprehend why the work was not better received.
> When he was told the audience at the premiere called for encores of the
> middle movements, he was reported to have said: "And why didn't they
> encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!"
>
>
> --
> Don
> Kansas City
>


.

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