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Missing Beethoven Manuscript Found in US

October 13, 2005
https://p.dw.com/p/7Iko

An 80-page, handwritten working manuscript score of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" that went missing 115 years ago has been found by a librarian near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The New York Times said Thursday. "It was just sitting on that shelf. I was in a state of shock," Heather Carbo, the librarian at an evangelical seminary outside Philadelphia who found the manuscript while cleaning out an archival cabinet in July, told the daily. Turned over to Sotheby's, which will put it on display in New York November 16-19 before it goes up for auction in London on December 1. The manuscript is in the composer's own hand, the auction house said. It has many notes written across the pages, with many changes and cross-outs, some so deep that the paper is punctured, Sotheby's said. Experts value such hand-written manuscripts because they can be very revealing of the composer's thinking process.