Lost Beethoven Work Debuts

A hushed silence fell over the audience Thursday as a lone violin played the first plaintive bars of a forgotten composition by Ludwig van Beethoven, hidden away for almost two centuries.

The string quartet movement is just 23 bars, penned for a young British traveler in 1817 and discovered recently among the papers of the Molesworth St. Aubyn family in Pencarrow, Cornwall.

"The true moment of discovery was today, when I heard it for the first time," said Stephen Roe, head of Sotheby's books and manuscripts department, of Thursday's performance at the auction house. "It is so beautiful. I am very moved."

Sotheby's will offer the manuscript for sale on Dec. 8, and estimated the auction price at up to $330,000.

The tragic tone of the piece, composed 10 years before Beethoven's death, speaks of dark despair, characteristic of Beethoven's later work.

The music was a gift from the German composer to Richard Ford, a traveler and writer who inscribed the score: "This quartette was composed for me in my presence by Ludwig v. Beethoven at Vienna Friday 28th November 1817 Richard Ford."

Ford's heirs knew they possessed one of Beethoven's scores, but did not realize they were holding an unknown work until experts examined it recently.

Sotheby's expert Simon Maguire said the music came after a barren period for Beethoven, and at the start of a flurry of activity.

"This piece packs an awful lot into a short space. It's concentrated," Maguire said. "It sounds as if we are already in the development section of a piece."

For the musicians and audience at the auction house Thursday, there was the tantalizing possibility that the music had never been performed publicly before.

"We can't be sure it wasn't performed in Cornwall by the Smugglers Cove string quartet, but I would have thought it was unlikely," Roe said.

"It's fascinating for us as musicians to be playing something for the first time in hundreds of years," said cellist David Watkin, who performed the piece with the Eroica String Quartet. "It's like a miniature, but it's a complete piece which is very interesting."