Beethoven in the auction market: a twenty-year review.

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.