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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Last summer, a librarian at the Palmer Theological Seminary, outside Philadelphia, reached onto the bottom shelf of a basement cabinet and pulled out a lost manuscript by Beethoven. It was a draft of an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer's "Grosse Fuge," or "Great Fugue" (or, as the cover inexplicably said, "Grande Tugue"). Once the property of a nineteenth-century industrialist-composer, it had disappeared, "Citizen Kane"-style, into the clutter of his belongings, some of which the seminary inherited. The manuscript was handed over to Sotheby's, which sold it in December to an unnamed buyer for $1.95 million. Shortly before the sale, the manuscript was put on display. With some misgivings, I went to Sotheby's to have a look.
I had reservations because there is something ghoulish about the cult of classical artifacts. Not even the most ambitious new work--Pascal Dusapin's new Faust opera, for example, which opened last week in Berlin--inspires anything like the flurry of media interest that ensues whenever a scrap of Beethoven's or Bach's handwriting turns up in some Pennsylvania basement or Swabian attic. Even creepier is the attention devoted to organic relics of the Masters; someone recently wrote an entire book about Beethoven's hair, and, a few weeks ago, Austrian television breathlessly reported on a DNA analysis of an alleged piece of Mozart's skull. Like radical opera stagings, ventures in period performance practice, and gala birthday celebrations, manuscript finds are all too easily exploited as part of classical music's wax-museum strategy, serving to reanimate the past, to give it the veneer of the new.
Yet the pull of the past can be hard to resist. There I was, staring transfixed at the pages on which Beethoven's hand...
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