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Article Excerpt
In memory of Ira F. Brilliant (1922-2006)
In November 1827, Beethoven's estate containing music autographs, books, furniture, and other personal items sold at auction on behalf of the beneficiary, his nephew Karl. The estate inventory of 252 lots listed seventy sketches and "notebooks" and about 120 other music autographs, none appraised at more than ten florins. The following April, The Harmonicon printed a report on the results of the estate auction with comments on the "uncommon interest" on the part of buyers, some of whom paid "astonishing" prices. However, the lots that excited greatest demand might surprise today's auctioneers. For example, Beethoven's autograph score for the Fifth Symphony sold for only one florin more than its appraised value of five florins. His original score for the Septet, op. 20, however--a work so astoundingly popular during his lifetime that an exasperated Beethoven eventually proclaimed that "I wish it were burned" (1)--sold for eighteen florins, or six times its appraisal value. Tobias Haslinger bought the notebooks containing Beethoven's counterpoint studies, appraised at ten florins, for seventy-four florins, by far the highest price paid for any other autograph. (2) Thus began an active and sometimes erratic trade in Beethoven manuscripts and other treasures that, in spite of dwindling supplies, continues today.
The purpose of this article is to review auction sales of biographical and musical manuscripts, first and early editions, and other Beethoven-related documents and artifacts over a twenty year period (1985-2005). An introductory summary highlights changes in values, repeated sales of the same documents, and discoveries of manuscripts thought to be long missing. Although the major auction houses (Christie's, Sotheby's, and J. A. Stargardt) are the primary vendors of Beethoven rarities, several of the smaller venues are also represented. The appended index of auction sales supplements the list published as "A Ten-Year Review of the Beethoven Auction Market (1985-1995)" in The Beethoven Journal (vol. 11, no. 1 [Spring 1996]: 26-31). The intention is for libraries and dealers to use these lists to help them assess the rarity and value of their Beethoven collections. Because many manuscripts are in private hands and thus still eligible for future auction sales, these lists do not identify the current location of the materials. When possible, this information is recorded in the Beethoven Auction Database recently mounted on the Web site of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies (http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/beethoven [accessed 22 November 2006]). This searchable database is to be updated biannually to keep track of recent sales and identify locations when known.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Throughout the nineteenth century, most Beethoven manuscripts were the property of private collectors who exchanged them through dealers rather than auction. By midcentury some of the major European libraries and archives began building Beethoven collections through donations and purchases. The Royal Library at Berlin took the first step in 1846 by acquiring the collection of Beethoven's notorious secretary, Anton Schindler, who claimed many Beethoven documents prior to the estate sale, including the conversation books. Many of the sketchbooks purchased by Domenico Artaria and other dealers who were present at the estate auction eventually ended up in the Berlin library, mostly through acquisition from private collectors such as Ludwig Landsberg (acquired 1861), Friedrich August Grasnick (1879), and Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1908). A large collection of letters accumulated by II. C. Bodmer are now in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna became a repository of several major music autographs, some gifts of prominent members such as Johannes Brahms. Other manuscripts are scattered throughout the western world, with significant collections in the national libraries of Great Britain and France, and the Library of Congress in the United States.
Still, a large number of Beethoven treasures remain in private hands. The number is difficult to estimate. According to Sieghard Brandenburg, editor of Beethoven Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, (3) at least one hundred autograph letters are owned by private collectors. Although Brandenburg documents nearly 1,800 letters from Beethoven, in some cases he could not trace the original sources and was forced to rely on early publications or facsimiles to transcribe the texts. In 1969, Hans Schmidt attempted to record all of the extant sketch manuscripts, identifying locations, even private collections, when possible. (4) This catalog--with its cursory descriptions of the extent and content of the manuscripts--is now woefully out of date and lacks the recent discoveries. Although most of Beethoven's sketchbooks are now housed in libraries, possibly as many as fifty individual leaves of sketches are privately owned at the present time. Recent research on Beethoven's creative process has also made great progress in identifying and locating sketch sources. The award-winning book The Beethoven Sketchbooks (5) filled in details of the multipage volumes that Beethoven used to compose at his desk, or fit into his pocket on his many walks, even reconstructing the volumes that had been taken apart and individual leaves dispersed. Publications of the reconstructed sketchbooks, such as the recent edition by William Kinderman of the desk sketchbook for the Missa solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E Major, op. 109, also help identify leaves that remain in private hands. (6) However, some of these leaves have changed ownership in recent years, their current locations known to perhaps only a select few in the musicological community.
Very few autograph manuscripts for Beethoven's completed works are still owned by private collectors. Until 2005, the most recent auction sale was of the Piano Sonata in E Minor, op. 90, that in 1991 brought in $2 million. Then a librarian at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary discovered Beethoven's piano version of the Grosse Fuge in a cabinet. The existence of this autograph was last recorded in 1890 when Edward Speyer sold it through the antiquarian dealer Liepmannssohn in Berlin. Sequestered by the then anonymous collector William Howard Doane and his heirs, it was quietly donated to the seminary in 1950. Until it was sold at a December 2005 Sotheby's auction, it was essentially lost to the musicological community. Such a scenario could play out for many other Beethoven manuscripts whose existence was recorded in the nineteenth century but have since disappeared. At least thirty autographs at one time in the possession of collectors are now untraced. Another 130 autographs for Beethoven's published works disappeared in his lifetime. Though many of these missing sources are for Beethoven's earliest works, there are some major exceptions. The reappearance of the autograph for the "Hammerklavier" Sonata would excite Beethoven scholars and collectors beyond imagining. Discoveries of unknown works, even for a composer as carefully documented as Beethoven, are also possible. This unlikely scenario occurred in 1999 when Sotheby's announced the discovery of the autograph of an unknown string quartet movement composed by Beethoven in 1817.
A complete history of Beethoven in the auction market remains to be written, partly because the provenance of individual documents is often difficult to trace. While auction and dealer catalogs document offers of Beethoven manuscripts, they do not provide a complete picture of the results of these sales. Descriptions in the older catalogs are enigmatic and brief. For example, item 1272 offered for [pounds sterling]21 in the autumn 1930 catalog of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents by Maggs Bros, is described simply as an "autograph musical manuscript of approximately 40 bars on 1 page, oblong folio, probably the preliminary sketch of one of his compositions." The Kinsky thematic catalog includes information on these past auctions, matching sales to specific manuscripts when at all possible. (7) But in many cases the amount of the transaction and the buyer are unknown. More recently, auction houses provide detailed and often illustrated descriptions of the manuscript and its provenance, making it much easier to track sales of a particular item. Auction houses send sale results to subscribers of their catalogs, and the major houses now post results on their Web sites. However, these sellers protect the anonymity of successful buyers for reasons of security and privacy. It is fortunate for Beethoven scholarship that many collectors of the past twenty years are willing and even eager to share their treasures with researchers.
BEETHOVEN'S LIFE AT AUCTION: MANUSCRIPT LETTERS AND OTHER BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS
Values for Beethoven letters range widely depending on the contents, condition, legibility of the signature, and sometimes the importance of the recipient. However, even brief notes in Beethoven's hand are priced in the thousands. In 1985, a two-line note from 1806 to Friedrich Mayer (BG 244) regarding revisions for the second version of Fidelio sold for $9,400. At the other extreme, in 1990 a private collector paid $160,800 for Beethoven's letter to Bettina Brentano (BG 485) that was part of the Felix Salzer collection sold by Sotheby's. The significance of this letter stems from both the recipient and the contents. Once (and still in some quarters) regarded as a candidate for Beethoven's "immortal beloved," Bettina claimed to possess three letters from Beethoven when she published their contents in 1839. The location of two of the manuscripts is now a mystery and their authenticity is in question. (8) However, the letter sold in 1990 is proof of its legitimacy. In addition to his great affection for Bettina, in this extant letter Beethoven expresses his high regard for Goethe, knowledge of Friedrich Schiller's poetry, and belief in a divine power. A private collector in Japan now owns this prized biographical document. No other letter has yet crossed the $100,000 threshold but recent attempts have come close. Beethoven's letter to S. A. Steiner from October 1816 (BG 985) regarding the publication of An die ferne Gelieble sold for nearly $41,000 in 2003 by R & R Enterprises. It recently reappeared on eBay with an asking price of [pounds sterling]75,000, more than tripling its value in two years! Of the fifty-seven other letters sold at auction over the past twenty years, ten changed hands more than once. The letter to Meyer regarding Fidelio that sold for $9,400 was offered in 1999 at Sotheby's for an estimate of [pounds sterling]25,000-30,000, without success. The record for frequent changes in ownership goes to a frantic note to Karl Holz regarding the suicide attempt of Beethoven's nephew Karl that sold at Christie's in 1988 for $12,700 (BG 2210). After one failed offer in 1990, and successful sales in 1992 and 1994, the exchange ended in 1999 with an ultimate price of $21,250. This note now resides in the Beethoven Center at San Jose State University after Ira Brilliant donated it in 2003.
A handful of letters transcribed in the Briefwechsel Gesamlausgabe without benefit of the original sources (and therefore listed as untraced as of 1996) have sold at auction in the past ten years. One, a short note requesting an urgent meeting with Beethoven's close friend Nikolaus Zmeskall (BG 124), was once in the possession of Alexander W. Thayer, who transcribed it for his biography of Beethoven. (9) The letter had been missing ever since until it appeared in one of Sotheby's 1999 catalogs. For a letter to Freiherr von Turkheim (BG 816) in which Beethoven indulges one of his famous puns ("I too am a 'Freiherr'" [free man]), the source used by Brandenburg was a facsimile of the letter published in 1911. (10) This manuscript reappeared on the auction market in 1997. Another letter, last seen in 1905 when it was published by Fritz Volbach in his biography of Beethoven, (11) was written by Beethoven just a few days after his nephew's attempted suicide (BG 2178). This letter responds to a request by Wilhelm Ehlers, a professor of singing at the Mannheim Hoftheater, to adapt Beethoven's theater music for The Ruins of Athens for an opera. Stargardt sold this letter in June 2002 for [euro]92,000 ($87,262).
Other biographical documents offered at auction over the past twenty years included leaves from Beethoven's conversation books, household records, and receipts. These scattered sources are particularly difficult to identify from older auction catalogs and bibliographies as their descriptions are too often cryptic and incomplete. Some of these occasional manuscripts record minutiae of Beethoven's activities, and on closer study could reveal intriguing details of Beethoven's life that are otherwise undocumented. Although Beethoven's extant conversation books are safeguarded in the Berlin library, a few detached leaves remain in private hands. One such leaf, in which Beethoven inquired about lodging for an unidentified student, sold at Sotheby's in 1998 for about $12,000. The highest price paid thus far for a conversation leaf was $21,700 for a previously unpublished document with particularly rich content relating to both musical and domestic affairs. Presumably in response to a letter from B. Schott in which the publisher complains that Beethoven had also offered the String Quartet op. 127 to another firm, Beethoven remarks testily that Schott should be content that he did not have the work published by Schlesinger instead. His penciled scribbling also instructs his servant on where to buy wine and cheese in the Karntnerstrasse and other locations in Vienna. Beethoven's household records, while detailing domestic spending, also often contain enigmatic notes in the margins. His servant used these blank spaces to "converse" with the deaf composer. A set of eight such pages sold for $33,700 at Sotheby's in 1991. Next to an itemized listing of food and fuel purchases, the servant's markings alerted the composer when the clock had struck the hours of eight and then nine in the evening.
In the course of his financial dealings with publishers and patrons, Beethoven signed receipts when accepting payments. Only a small number of these receipts were included in the appendix to Emily Anderson's edition of Beethoven's letters, (12) and the volume of the Briefwechsel Gesamlausgabe that is to include these documents has not yet been published. Current value of these receipts on the auction market depends largely on the legibility of Beethoven's signature, and those with Beethoven's wax seal, still intact, are especially prized. Recent auctions offered a substantial collection of documents from the treasury of Prince Ferdinand Kinsky (1781-1812). These receipts relate to the quarterly payments by the prince as his share of the contract agreement brokered in 1809 with Archduke Rudolph and Prince Lobkowitz to support Beethoven's residency in Vienna. Many of these receipts were documented by V. Kratochvil in his article in the Beethovenjahrbuch from 1909. (13) In 2004...
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