Beethoven score discovered
Permalink | October 14th, 2005
Noted as one of the most important music finds in years, a 115 year-old 80 manuscript of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” written in his own handwriting along with edits, was uncovered by a librarian at an evangelical seminary outside Philadelphia.
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.
…
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.
[via NY Times]
