Free Republic

Beethoven score sells for £1.1m Grosse Fuge dates from the year before Beethoven died. An 80-page handwritten script by Beethoven, which was missing for 115 years, has sold for £1.1m at auction. An anonymous buyer purchased the score of Grosse Fuge in B flat, which features the composer's changes. London auctioneers Sotheby's had expected the manuscript to fetch up to £1.5m but a spokeswoman said it had still achieved "an excellent price". It had not been seen in public since an auction in 1890, before it was found by a librarian at a US religious school. The buyer at the...

Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesThe recently discovered manuscript for Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge." 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...