The things people will buy

Manuscript of Beethoven Sells for $3.47M
By JANE WARDELL Associated Press Writer

Student protesters at Tiananmen Square played it. The European Union claims it as its official anthem. Adolf Hitler requested it for his birthday celebrations.

The importance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its ecstatic 'Ode to Joy,' was underlined Thursday when the final manuscript, which was annotated by the composer, sold at auction for $3.47 million to an anonymous buyer.

A collection of Mozart symphonies was sold for a record $4 million at a 1987 auction.

The previous owner of the Beethoven manuscript was a private foundation, which has not been identified. It reportedly plans to use the money to set up a charitable fund.

The work, completed by the frustrated _ and by then deaf _ composer in 1823, has become one of the most politicized as well as one of the most celebrated pieces of classical music.

'The Ninth Symphony is all things to all people,' said Peter Quantrill, an editor at Gramophone Magazine in London. 'Beethoven takes up the concept of universal brotherhood and runs with abandon.'

A single sheet of Beethoven's early draft of the opening of the Ninth sold last year for $2 million, eight times more than the estimated price. That sheet was written in the composer's hand; the manuscript sold Thursday at Sotheby's auction house was made by a copyist and had revisions and raging comments by Beethoven.

First performed in Vienna in 1824, when Beethoven had been deaf for at least eight years, it was met with wild acclaim and was later credited with influencing other great composers including Schubert, Brahms and Wagner.

Some musicologists say Beethoven was partly inspired to compose the triumphant piece, which includes the choral 'Ode to Joy' written by Friedrich Schiller, by the ideals of the French revolution because of its extolling of freedom and the brotherhood of man.

But many divergent points of view would be inspired by the work.

Hitler said the composer 'had accomplished more than all Englishmen put together' and chose the Ninth Symphony to be performed at his birthday concerts in 1937 and 1942.

Ian Smith, prime minister of white-ruled Rhodesia, selected it as his country's national anthem.

In 1956, East and West Germany chose 'Ode to Joy' as their anthem for a combined team of Olympic athletes.

A synthesized version was featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film 'A Clockwork Orange.' The European Council adopted it as the European Union's anthem in 1972.

Students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest played it from loudspeakers as a musical defiance of the tanks that rolled in. A few months later, Leonard Bernstein performed it at the ceremony celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.

'It is the work of a deaf, angry man. That last movement has an overarching joy about it that has captured people everywhere,' Quantrill said.

'The tub-thumping notes of the last movement and the text by Schiller appeals possibly to a different audience than the listeners who revel in the beauty of the third movement or the cataclysmic novelty of the first movement.'

The manuscript sold Thursday reveals the artistic frustration of Beethoven as he composed his last full symphony _ he made notes for a 10th but never co mpleted it, dying in 1827 at age 57.

Almost every one of the 575 pages has notes and revisions scrawled by Beethoven, ranging from minor adjustments to tempo and rhythm to entirely new sections pasted over previous work. These hidden pieces of music have never been published.

Beethoven was most vitriolic in the final choral passage section of the symphony. At one point he scribbled to the copyist, 'du verfluchter Kerl!' ('you ****ed fool!'), apparently for an error.

Re: The things people will buy

I think if anything deserves to have $3.74 million paid for it, it's Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Re: The things people will buy

A single sheet of Beethoven's early draft of the opening of the Ninth sold last year for $2 million, eight times more than the estimated price. That sheet was written in the composer's hand; the manuscript sold Thursday at Sotheby's auction house was made by a copyist and had revisions and raging comments by Beethoven.

to have that kind of money. insanity.

Re: The things people will buy

I agree.