If you've ever written a love letter, you know it's not easy. Amid a swirl of emotions, balancing elegant language and hormone-fueled passion can be tricky. Composers for centuries have skirted this problem by doing what comes naturally — writing their love letters in the language of music.
Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler: "Liebst du um Schönheit"
Gustav Mahler composed dozens of songs but only one, "Liebst du um
Schoenheit," is an outright love song. He wrote it in 1902 as a wedding
gift for his new bride, Alma. The text by Friedrich Rückert rejects the
idea of love for beauty, age or treasure, concluding, "but if you love
for love, then love me always, as I will always love you." Mahler's
music, a beautiful mix of soaring melody and bittersweet harmonies, was
eerily prescient. Little could he know then that he and Alma would
eventually drift apart.
Leoš Janáček to Kamilla Stösslová: 3rd mvt from String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters"
Talk about love letters. Leoš Janáček wrote more than 700 of them to Kamilla Stösslová, the wife of an antiques dealer 36 years his junior. The sad fact is that she was never interested in Janáček romantically. But that didn't stop him from composing music specifically fueled by his passion. In February 1928, while writing his Second String Quartet, subtitled "Intimate Letters," he wrote to her about the third movement: "It will be very cheerful, and then dissolve into a vision of your image, transparent, as if in the mist, in which there should be a suspicion of motherhood." The music rocks softly, pivots to a daydream and then cries out in a piercing scream.
Peter Lieberson to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: "Amor Mio" (from Neruda Songs)
It doesn't get more profound than this musical love letter and its back story. The text, by Pablo Neruda, starts: "My love, If I die and you don't, let's not give grief an even greater field." Lieberson set five of Neruda's love sonnets to music for his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Less than eight months after she made this extraordinary recording she would succumb to cancer at age 52. With its warm, autumnal strings and plaintive oboe, this final song is part lullaby, part tribute to love everlasting. In the final line, Neruda says love "is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips."
Tchaikovsky: Tatiana to Onegin "Letter Scene" (from Eugene Onegin)
Musical love letters also get delivered on the operatic stage. In Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, there's an emotionally charged scene that resonates with almost everyone. Tatiana falls in love and takes that vulnerable step in composing her first love letter, not knowing if Onegin, the man she just met, will feel the same. Since it's opera, he doesn't — at least not until it's too late. In her letter, Tatiana says that at first she wanted to stay quiet but she can't control her feelings. "I have lived my whole life waiting to meet you," she writes, as Tchaikovsky's music rises with passion.
Edward Elgar to Alice Elgar: Variation 1 (from the Enigma Variations)
Edward Elgar began writing his "Enigma" Variations as something of a joke, improvising a short tune at the piano. Then he and his wife Alice had the idea that the tune could be altered to depict or, in some cases, caricature their various friends. Elgar loved it and spent part of two years writing 13 variations for orchestra, each one a portrait of someone close to him. He started with an affectionate sketch of Alice (identified as C.A.E. on the score), which features Elgar's lilting mystery theme lovingly dressed in warm, Brahmsian winds and strings.
Read more at NPR
16 Inspiring Love Quotes from Great Musicians - Happy Valentine's Day!
In honor of Valentine’s Day, 16 best love quotes from composers, musicians, singers and other music personalities.
Franz Schubert
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Benjamin Britten
Hildegard von Bingen
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers–roses and lilies–which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes. (Letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176)
Gian Carlo Menotti
I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.
Maurice Ravel
The only love affair I have ever had was with music.
Robert Schumann
You appear in the Novelletten in every possible circumstance, in every irresistible form… They could only be written by one who knows such eyes as yours and has touched such lips as yours.
Clara Schumann
I do not want horses or diamonds – I am happy in possessing you.
Igor Stravinsky
What force is more potent than love?
Luciano Pavarotti
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
George Gershwin
For suddenly, I saw you there
And through foggy London town
The sun was shining everywhere…
Johannes Brahms
“I can do nothing but think of you… What have you done to me? Can’t you remove the spell you have cast over me?”
Ludwig van Beethoven
…you know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never – never – never…
Richard Wagner
We fell silent and all joking ceased. We gazed mutely into each other’s eyes and an intense longing for the fullest avowal of the truth forced us to a confession, requiring no words whatever, or the incommensurable misfortune that weighed upon us. With tears and sobs we sealed a vow to belong to each other alone.
Frédéric Chopin
Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time… Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can’t tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.
Claude Debussy
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
Ten black composers whose works deserve to be heard!
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| English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Photograph: Unknown/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS |
In the past 200 years, dozens of prominent black composers from America and other parts of the African diaspora have fought to be recognized by the western classical tradition.
The earliest example is Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-99). Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy plantation owner and a female slave, Saint-George was brought to France at a young age. As well as being a champion fencer, a violin teacher to Marie Antoinette and a colonel in the republican army, his prodigious musical talents led to him being dubbed “le Mozart noir”. He was a prolific composer (with several operas, 15 violin concertos, symphonies and numerous chamber works to his name) and a rare French exponent of early classical violin composition. (Listen to Chi-chi Nwanoku’s radio documentary about him here, available until 3 July.)
Saint-Georges would have perhaps come into contact with George Bridgewater (1778-1860), a violinist of African origin born in present-day Poland. By the age of nine, his father (who was probably born in Barbados) had taken him to London, where he was shown off as a child prodigy, performing in front of the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George IV. Several of Bridgewater’s compositions survive, although few have been recorded. His story was also the basis for a 2007 opera, written by Julian Joseph.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was born in Croydon, the son of a white English mother and a Creole man from Sierra Leone. As a violin scholar at the Royal College of Music, he was taught composition under Charles Villiers Stanford and soon developed a reputation as a composer, with Edward Elgar recommending him to the Three Choirs festival in 1896. By the time he died of pneumonia – aged only 37 – he had already toured America three times and performed for Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
Compositions such as Coleridge-Taylor’s African Suite attempted to incorporate African influences in the same way that, say, Dvorák used Hungarian folk themes, but much more successful is Hiawatha’s Wedding, which is occasionally performed today. Even better are Coleridge-Taylor’s works for violin and orchestra, which are elegant pieces of fin de siècle romanticism.
Maurice Arnold Strothotte (1865-1937) studied in Berlin and wrote an opera and a symphony that were highly praised by Dvorák, but his work was rarely performed and has all but dropped off the musical map – he ended up making his living teaching violin and conducting provincial operettas.
Like Strothotte, Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) also studied in Berlin and was praised by Dvorák. He was acclaimed for his Broadway shows and ragtime-influenced songs, but found it almost impossible to break into “straight” composition.
Most sorrowful of all was Scott Joplin (1867-1917). The son of an ex-slave from Texas, he started as a travelling musician around the southern states, playing piano in “gentleman’s clubs”. By the turn of the century his piano rags, such as Maple Leaf Rag, had become a national sensation, but he was desperate to be taken seriously as an orchestral composer. His opera Treemonisha was all but ignored, and he died insane in 1917 after his brain was destroyed by syphilis.
Other black American composers had happier endings. William Grant Still (1895-1978) wrote 150 works, studied with Edgard Varèse, was the first African American to conduct a major US symphony orchestra (the New Orleans Philharmonic), composed for Hollywood and found his works performed by leading orchestras around the world, including his 1930 Afro-American Symphony.
Florence B Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman to have a work played by a major orchestra – the Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony in E minor in 1933, but despite success during her lifetime, her many compositions are rarely played today.
And George Walker, born in 1922 and still working today, was the first black American composer to win the Pulitzer prize for music (for Lilacs, a piece for voice and orchestra, in 1996). However, for all his acclaim, he still remains a cult figure in the world of contemporary composition.
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Happy Birthday Mozart! Top 10 facts about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
WOLFGANG Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, which makes today his 260th birthday.
1. Actually he was baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.
2. The name Amadeus means love of God and is the Latin version of the Greek Theophilus.
3. It would take 202 hours to listen to all the music Mozart wrote in his short life. He had written eight operas by the aged of 16.
4. When Mozart performed in London at the age of nine some thought his playing was too good for a child and suspected him of being a dwarf.
5. When growing up, Mozart had a pet dog, possibly a fox terrier, called Bimperl (or Pimperl or Miss Bimbes). He also had a pet canary.
6. For three years, he kept a pet starling. His notebook includes a tune the starling sang which he used in his 17th piano concerto, K.453.
7. When the starling died, he buried it in his garden and wrote a poem in its memory.
8. Mozart loved to play billiards. A billiard table with five balls and 12 cues was among Mozart’s estate when he died, aged 35, in 1791.
9. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an anagram of A Famous German Waltz God.
10. The species of frog Eleutherodactylus amadeus was named after Mozart in 1987.
Read more
1. Actually he was baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.
2. The name Amadeus means love of God and is the Latin version of the Greek Theophilus.
3. It would take 202 hours to listen to all the music Mozart wrote in his short life. He had written eight operas by the aged of 16.
4. When Mozart performed in London at the age of nine some thought his playing was too good for a child and suspected him of being a dwarf.
5. When growing up, Mozart had a pet dog, possibly a fox terrier, called Bimperl (or Pimperl or Miss Bimbes). He also had a pet canary.
6. For three years, he kept a pet starling. His notebook includes a tune the starling sang which he used in his 17th piano concerto, K.453.
7. When the starling died, he buried it in his garden and wrote a poem in its memory.
8. Mozart loved to play billiards. A billiard table with five balls and 12 cues was among Mozart’s estate when he died, aged 35, in 1791.
9. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an anagram of A Famous German Waltz God.
10. The species of frog Eleutherodactylus amadeus was named after Mozart in 1987.
Read more
5 Ways Music Improves Our Health
Music’s neurological reach, and its historic role in healing and cultural rituals, has led researchers to consider ways music may improve our health and wellbeing. In particular, researchers have looked for applications in healthcare -- for example, helping patients during post-surgery recovery or improving outcomes for people with Alzheimer’s. In some cases, music’s positive impacts on health have been more powerful than medication.
Here are five ways that music seems to impact our health and wellbeing.
Music reduces stress and anxiety.
Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels -- all biological markers of stress. In one study, researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain. In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug.
Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect. In a recent study, 272 premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music -- either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist -- three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Though all the musical forms improved the babies’ functioning, the parental singing had the greatest impact and also reduced the stress of the parents who sang.
Though it’s sometimes hard in studies like this to separate out the effects of music versus other factors, like the positive impacts of simple social contact, at least one recent study found that music had a unique contribution to make in reducing anxiety and stress in a children’s hospital, above and beyond social contributions.
Music decreases pain.
Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth. In a 2013 study, sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia -- a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain -- were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period. In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms.
In another recent study, patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery. When measured on pain levels post surgery, the group had significantly less pain than a control group who didn’t listen to music.
It’s not clear why music may reduce pain, though music’s impact on dopamine release may play a role. Of course, stress and pain are also closely linked; so music’s impact on stress reduction may also partly explain the effects.
However, it’s unlikely that music’s impact is due to a simple placebo effect. In a 2014 randomized control trial involving healthy subjects exposed to painful stimuli, researchers failed to find a link between expectation and music’s effects on pain. The researchers concluded that music is a robust analgesic whose properties are not due simply to expectation factors.
Music may improve immune functioning.
Can listening to music actually help prevent disease? Some researchers think so.
Wilkes University researchers looked at how music affects levels of IgA -- an important antibody for our immune system’s first line of defense against disease. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions -- listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music or silence. Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music (and not other sounds) might improve innate immunity.
Another study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that listening to Mozart’s piano sonatas helped relax critically ill patients by lowering stress hormone levels, but the music also decreased blood levels of interleukin-6 -- a protein that has been implicated in higher mortality rates, diabetes and heart problems.
According to a 2013 meta-analysis, authors Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin concluded that music has the potential to augment immune response systems, but that the findings to date are preliminary. Still, as Levitin notes in one article on the study, “I think the promise of music as medicine is that it’s natural and it’s cheap and it doesn’t have the unwanted side effects that many pharmaceutical products do.”
Music may aid memory.
Music enjoyment elicits dopamine release, and dopamine release has been tied to motivation, which in turn is implicated in learning and memory. In a study published last year, adult students studying Hungarian were asked to speak, or speak in a rhythmic fashion, or sing phrases in the unfamiliar language. Afterwards, when asked to recall the foreign phrases, the singing group fared significantly better than the other two groups in recall accuracy.
Evidence that music helps with memory has led researchers to study the impact of music on special populations, such as those who suffer memory loss due to illness. In a 2008 experiment, stroke patients who were going through rehab were randomly assigned to listen daily either to self-selected music, to an audio book or to nothing (in addition to receiving their usual care). The patients were then tested on mood, quality of life and several cognitive measures at one week, three months and 6 months post-stroke. Results showed that those in the music group improved significantly more on verbal memory and focused attention than those in the other groups, and they were less depressed and confused than controls at each measuring point.
In a more recent study, caregivers and patients with dementia were randomly given 10 weeks of singing coaching, 10 weeks of music listening coaching, or neither. Afterwards, testing showed that singing and music listening improved mood, orientation and memory and, to a lesser extent, attention and executive functioning, as well as providing other benefits. Studies like these have encouraged a movement to incorporate music into patient care for dementia patients, in part promoted by organizations like Music and Memory.
Music helps us exercise.
How many of us listen to rock and roll or other upbeat music while working out? It turns out that research supports what we instinctively feel: music helps us get a more bang for our exercise buck.
Researchers in the United Kingdom recruited thirty participants to listen to motivational synchronized music, non-motivational synchronized music or no music while they walked on a treadmill until they reached exhaustion levels. Measurements showed that both music conditions increased the length of time participants worked out (though motivational music increased it significantly more) when compared to controls. The participants who listened to motivational music also said they felt better during their work out than those in the other two conditions.
In another study, oxygen consumption levels were measured while people listened to different tempos of music during their exercise on a stationary bike. Results showed that when exercisers listened to music with a beat that was faster and synchronous with their movement, their bodies used up oxygen more efficiently than when the music played at a slower, unsynchronized tempo.
According to sports researchers Peter Terry and Costas Karageorghis, “Music has the capacity to capture attention, lift spirits, generate emotion, change or regulate mood, evoke memories, increase work output, reduce inhibitions and encourage rhythmic movement -- all of which have potential applications in sport and exercise.”
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. For more, please visit greatergood.berkeley.edu.
Here are five ways that music seems to impact our health and wellbeing.
Music reduces stress and anxiety.
Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels -- all biological markers of stress. In one study, researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain. In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug.
Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect. In a recent study, 272 premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music -- either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist -- three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Though all the musical forms improved the babies’ functioning, the parental singing had the greatest impact and also reduced the stress of the parents who sang.
Though it’s sometimes hard in studies like this to separate out the effects of music versus other factors, like the positive impacts of simple social contact, at least one recent study found that music had a unique contribution to make in reducing anxiety and stress in a children’s hospital, above and beyond social contributions.
Music decreases pain.
Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth. In a 2013 study, sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia -- a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain -- were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period. In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms.
In another recent study, patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery. When measured on pain levels post surgery, the group had significantly less pain than a control group who didn’t listen to music.
It’s not clear why music may reduce pain, though music’s impact on dopamine release may play a role. Of course, stress and pain are also closely linked; so music’s impact on stress reduction may also partly explain the effects.
However, it’s unlikely that music’s impact is due to a simple placebo effect. In a 2014 randomized control trial involving healthy subjects exposed to painful stimuli, researchers failed to find a link between expectation and music’s effects on pain. The researchers concluded that music is a robust analgesic whose properties are not due simply to expectation factors.
Music may improve immune functioning.
Can listening to music actually help prevent disease? Some researchers think so.
Wilkes University researchers looked at how music affects levels of IgA -- an important antibody for our immune system’s first line of defense against disease. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions -- listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music or silence. Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music (and not other sounds) might improve innate immunity.
Another study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that listening to Mozart’s piano sonatas helped relax critically ill patients by lowering stress hormone levels, but the music also decreased blood levels of interleukin-6 -- a protein that has been implicated in higher mortality rates, diabetes and heart problems.
According to a 2013 meta-analysis, authors Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin concluded that music has the potential to augment immune response systems, but that the findings to date are preliminary. Still, as Levitin notes in one article on the study, “I think the promise of music as medicine is that it’s natural and it’s cheap and it doesn’t have the unwanted side effects that many pharmaceutical products do.”
Music may aid memory.
Music enjoyment elicits dopamine release, and dopamine release has been tied to motivation, which in turn is implicated in learning and memory. In a study published last year, adult students studying Hungarian were asked to speak, or speak in a rhythmic fashion, or sing phrases in the unfamiliar language. Afterwards, when asked to recall the foreign phrases, the singing group fared significantly better than the other two groups in recall accuracy.
Evidence that music helps with memory has led researchers to study the impact of music on special populations, such as those who suffer memory loss due to illness. In a 2008 experiment, stroke patients who were going through rehab were randomly assigned to listen daily either to self-selected music, to an audio book or to nothing (in addition to receiving their usual care). The patients were then tested on mood, quality of life and several cognitive measures at one week, three months and 6 months post-stroke. Results showed that those in the music group improved significantly more on verbal memory and focused attention than those in the other groups, and they were less depressed and confused than controls at each measuring point.
In a more recent study, caregivers and patients with dementia were randomly given 10 weeks of singing coaching, 10 weeks of music listening coaching, or neither. Afterwards, testing showed that singing and music listening improved mood, orientation and memory and, to a lesser extent, attention and executive functioning, as well as providing other benefits. Studies like these have encouraged a movement to incorporate music into patient care for dementia patients, in part promoted by organizations like Music and Memory.
Music helps us exercise.
How many of us listen to rock and roll or other upbeat music while working out? It turns out that research supports what we instinctively feel: music helps us get a more bang for our exercise buck.
Researchers in the United Kingdom recruited thirty participants to listen to motivational synchronized music, non-motivational synchronized music or no music while they walked on a treadmill until they reached exhaustion levels. Measurements showed that both music conditions increased the length of time participants worked out (though motivational music increased it significantly more) when compared to controls. The participants who listened to motivational music also said they felt better during their work out than those in the other two conditions.
In another study, oxygen consumption levels were measured while people listened to different tempos of music during their exercise on a stationary bike. Results showed that when exercisers listened to music with a beat that was faster and synchronous with their movement, their bodies used up oxygen more efficiently than when the music played at a slower, unsynchronized tempo.
According to sports researchers Peter Terry and Costas Karageorghis, “Music has the capacity to capture attention, lift spirits, generate emotion, change or regulate mood, evoke memories, increase work output, reduce inhibitions and encourage rhythmic movement -- all of which have potential applications in sport and exercise.”
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. For more, please visit greatergood.berkeley.edu.
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE SKETCH LEAF AND BEETHOVEN'S 'KING STEPHAN'
The sketch leaf, apparently unknown to scholars prior to its discovery and sale, belongs to a book of sketches that Beethoven used while writing his stage music 'König Stephan' (King Stephan) in 1810.
Dr. Carmelo Comberiati, author and professor of Music History at Manhattanville College explains: 'He [Beethoven] created his own book from various paper on hand and used it while at the spa in Teplitz from late 1810 into mid 1811.
He finished King Stephan between August 25 and September 13 in 1810. The sketches are of the first chorus (after the overture). It was commissioned for the opening of the new theater in Pest (as in Budapest) along with The Ruins of Athens. First performed 2/9/1812, it was published as op. 117.
King Stephan I founded Hungary in 1000. Emperor Francis I of Austria commissioned the new theater, and Beethoven made most sense as the composer to honor the occasion of the opening. The Austrian emperor was honoring Hungary's loyalty, thus the subject matter on a text by August Von Kotzebue.'
The sketch leaf gives insight into his work process. Parts are only in pencil and others are also done over in pen -- that’s evidence that this is the area where Beethoven decided, "Okay, that’s the theme I’m going to use."
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| Teamwork: Beethoven Sketch Leaf Verified by Professor Comberiati (left) and Brendan Ryan (right). Upon finding the work, Ryan turned to his college professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., Carmelo Comberiati, to help him find the piece of music attached to the sketch leaf |
The sketch shows off Beethoven's 'stormy personality.
Beethoven would write out his ideas. With most composers, we just have the final product — they threw the rest out. Beethoven didn’t throw anything out,' Comberiati said, 'I found the sketchbook, and referenced the exact piece, we put it all together.
The sheet of paper was revealing of Beethoven's impatience.
We can see the fire as it happened. He just went wild with a crescendo of activity. There’s so much impatience there — I can’t imagine working for the guy. But that aspect of his character is wonderful.
Read more at The Daily Mail
A previously unknown Beethoven manuscript has been discovered – hanging on a wall in a house in Connecticut!
Brendan Ryan, who made the chance discovery, said finding the manuscript was the highlight of his career as an appraiser.
On a routine visit to a house, an American appraiser (auctioneer), who is also a trained musician, happened upon a remarkable discovery.
Brendan Ryan was called to a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, to examine furniture and paintings for sale.
Ryan told US TV station WHAS11 : “It was just sort of hanging in a hallway and I saw it essentially right when I walked in, from across the room… I said to myself, ‘ Oh my God, that's Beethoven’. I recognized the handwriting because [Beethoven] has unmistakable handwriting.”
After the find, Ryan had to research the history of the fragment. “It took about three weeks and was a lot of work,” he said. “I equate it to trying to find a word in the dictionary without knowing the first letter.”
The sketch was eventually attributed to the composer’s work 'King Stephen Op. 117.
Ryan said: “It's certainly one of the highlights of my career. For me, personally, Beethoven is an idol of mine. It's like seeing pages by your favourite author in the flesh.”
The sketch was sold at auction by Butterscotch auctioneers last month for $120,000 (£81,000) to a German autograph manuscript dealer.
Read more at Classic FM
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