全球拍卖行巨头索思比13日称，新近发现的贝多芬《大赋格》钢琴用乐谱的预计竞拍价可达260万美元。这份遗失了1个多世纪的乐谱手稿偶然间在一家神学院地下室被发现。

    据《纽约时报》10月14日报道，今年7月，美国费城帕默神学院的图书管理员卡波无意间发现了这份遗失百年的贝多芬巨作手稿。卡波负责重新整理档案，就在这个庞大的计划接近尾声时，她在图书馆地下室的最后一个柜子里看到这份乐谱。她回忆说：“它就在架上，我吓了一跳。以前就听说过有关贝多芬乐谱手稿的传闻，所以当我看见它时立刻意识到自己发现了什么。”

    专家指出，这份长达80页的乐谱手稿为贝多芬于1826年亲手谱写的弦乐四重奏《大赋格》的钢琴乐谱。《大赋格》是贝多芬晚期作品，充分表现了贝多芬失聪后的痛苦。

    索思比手稿部门主管罗伊博士说：“这是项令人吃惊的发现。”　他表示：“这份手稿只有在1890年的一份目录中可见其简述，研究贝多芬的学者以往从未见过或提起过它。它能够重见天日，将允许对这部不凡的音乐作品作完整的重新评价。”该公司今天表示，这份厚80页的乐谱是“当代出现在市场上的最长也是最重要的一份手稿”。贝多芬传记作者所罗门看过乐谱后也表示，这是一次极为重要的发现，它填补了贝多芬主要作品的一项空白。

    罗伊博士还介绍说，手稿用黑色和棕色墨水书写而成，其中注释部分还用了铅笔和红色蜡笔。手稿上处处是贝多芬细心修改的痕迹，有的地方由于擦拭过重还出现了小洞，还有的地方用纸张粘贴修补。

    这份乐谱手稿最后一次露面是在1890年柏林的一次拍卖会上，买家据信是来自美国俄亥俄州辛辛那提市的企业家杜安。1952年时，杜安的女儿赠送一批礼物给帕默神学院，以协助其兴建教堂。此后，这份《大赋格》钢琴乐谱手稿便在人们视线中消失，它的下落也曾是欧洲音乐史学家们研究的一个谜团。

    报道说，这份手稿已于13日在帕默神学院展出。它将于12月1日在伦敦的索思比拍卖行被拍卖，在湮没115年之后，这份名人巨作手稿预计竞拍价将达到260万美元。

    A handwritten score of one of Ludwig van Beethoven's most revolutionary works has been discovered by a librarian cleaning out a cabinet in a seminary in Pennsylvania after being missing for more than a century.

    The 80-page manuscript for a piano version of Grosse Fuge, thought to have been written by Beethoven himself, dates from the final months of his life when he was completely deaf. The work was described by scholars of the German composer yesterday as an "amazing find" and "extremely important".

    The lost work came to light in July when Heather Carbo, a librarian at the Palmer Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia, was cleaning out an archival cabinet.

    "It was just sitting on the shelf, I was in a state of shock," she told the New York Times. "I'd heard oral history about a Beethoven manuscript, so I recognised what I had found immediately."

    The fate of the manuscript has been one of the great musical mysteries since it was auctioned in Berlin in 1890. It is written mainly in brown ink and was described by the New York Times as a furious scattering of notes across the page, with many changes and crossings out.

    The work, which went on display yesterday at the evangelical seminary, will be sold at Sotheby's in London on December 1 and is expected to fetch around ?1.5m.

    Grosse Fuge was composed as the finale for the string quartet in B flat major, Op 130, which Beethoven began in May 1825 and completed in September of that year. It is a notoriously difficult work, and when first performed the audience apparently demanded encores of only two of the movements. "Why not the fugue?" Beethoven demanded. "Cattle! Asses!" he is reputed to have shouted. But despite criticism by contemporaries it is now seen as one of his most important works.

    The composer later produced a version for piano, and it is a manuscript of that reworking that has been discovered in Pennsylvania. Stephen Roe of Sotheby's said it was an amazing find: "The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never been seen or described by Beethoven scholars. Its rediscovery will allow a complete reassessment of this extraordinary music."

    Maynard Solomon, a biographer of Beethoven and a world expert on the composer, who has seen a selection of pages from the manuscript, said it was an extremely important find.

    "It is in beautiful condition and has many interesting compositions and will be the subject of much analytical work because it fills an important gap in the compositional history of one of Beethoven's major works."

    Dr Roe said the manuscript was written in brown and black ink, sometimes over pencil, and includes annotations in pencil and red crayon. It shows the extent of Beethoven's reworkings and includes deletions, corrections and deep erasures - occasionally the paper is rubbed right through leaving small holes - smudged alterations and several pages pasted over the original or affixed with sealing wax. The passion that Beethoven endured is also in evidence on the manuscript: the higher and more intense the music becomes the larger the notes.

    "What this document gives us is rare insight into the imponderable process of decision-making by which this most complex of quartet movements is made over into a work for piano four hands," Richard Kramer, a musicologist at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, told the New York Times.

    The manuscript last surfaced at an auction in Berlin in 1890 where it appears to have been purchased by William Howard Doane, a Cincinnati industrialist and hymn writer.