A manuscript failed sell after a scholar publicly questioned its authenticity
When a 232-page handwritten score of Mahler's epic Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) sold for $5.6 million at Sotheby's in London last month, it shattered a nearly 30-year record for the highest price paid at auction for a musical manuscript.
The Mahler is one of the most valuable post-Renaissance manuscripts of any kind to be sold at auction, fetching more than recent sales of Jack Kerouac's draft of “On the Road”or Bob Dylan's lyrics for “Like a Rolling Stone.”
But a less important score that failed to sell that same day has since transfixed the music world. A brief Beethoven work for string quartet went unsold when, before the auction, a scholar publicly questioned the assertion by Sotheby's, and its experts, that the work was written in Beethoven's hand - igniting an acrimonious debate in the generally staid, tweedy precincts of musicologists and manuscript dealers.
While it is not uncommon for experts to defer on such matters - Is that painting by the old master or the school of the old master? - the Beethoven episode raised questions about transparency in auctions, even as classical musical manuscripts have become a big international business.
In July, for example, Christie's sold the third-highest-priced musical manuscript at auction：Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro for lute or keyboard in E flat (BWV 998), for $3.34 million.
Such works rarely come on the market, but when they do, they attract bidders from all over the world. In the initial run-up to the auction last month, most of the attention was on the Mahler score, an important manuscript given by Mahler's widow, Alma, to the conductor Willem Mengelberg, and later bought by the financial publisher Gilbert Kaplan, who developed an unusual sideline conducting the work with numerous orchestras.
Then came the dispute over the score attributed to Beethoven.
The score has 23 bars of music：his Allegretto in B minor for string quartet, a recently rediscovered work. The listing in the Sotheby's catalog, below a high-resolution photograph of the score, was unequivocal：It described the work as an “autograph manuscript,”meaning it was a copy that Beethoven had made of the piece, which he had composed the day before, as a gift for visiting Englishman. (An inscription on the score, thought to have been added around the time of its creation, reads：“composed & written by Beethoven himself November 29th 1817 at Vienna.”) The score was expected to sell for up to $248,000.
The controversy erupted when Barry Cooper, a music professor at the University of Manchester, in England, who has published a performing edition of Beethoven's piano sonatas, went to the BBC with the startling claim that the work was “not in Beethoven's hand.”
In an interview with The New York Times, he said that he and another scholar had previously told Christie's that they did not believe it was genuine, and questioned why Sotheby's, which knew Christie's had passed on the chance to sell the score, did not acknowledge in its catalog that there was a difference of opinion about the document.
“I think Sotheby's really should have indicated that there was some doubt about the manuscript, since they knew there was,” Dr. Cooper said.
