Manuscript Labor
The original manuscript of Beethoven's piano arrangement, four hands, for Grosse Fugue was purchased in December 2005 for $1.95 million by an unnamed buyer. The purchaser turned out to be hedge-fund jillionaire Bruce Kovner, board chairman of the Juilliard School. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, who has been totally on top of these transactions and their worth, called the work "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven's wake, it became a kind of political object."
Kovner subsequently donated the manuscript, along with 137 other more or less priceless works, to the Juilliard Library. They include the lost manuscript (from its 1725 premiere) of the transposed continuo part of Bach's cantata BWV 176; Beethoven's first sketches for the opening to his ninth symphony; the first manuscript page of Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, inscribed to Benny Goodman; a heavily annotated early piano version of Stravinsky's Firebird; Leonard Bernstein's autographed manuscript of Copland's El Salón México, with marginal caricatures of Copland by the conductor; and Toscanini's marked-up copy of Wagner's imposing Die Walküre.
In addition to being on view at The Julliard School in Manhattan, this treasure trove is now available online. You can search each manuscript, sketch, proof, and edition with a zoom function at this elegant and easy-to-use site, providing intimate and unprecedented glimpses into the working methods of forty-two classic composers. [via The Rest Is Noise]