Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained.
Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history.
Olivia Harrison, whom I believe would consider herself a curator of her husband’s legacy, was revising and updating George’s 1980 memoir/scrapbook, I Me Mine, when she decided to search through previously ignored nooks and crannies for fresh material to include in the book. This February, Ms. Harrison presented a copy of the lyrics to a stunned Ringo at a Los Angeles party commemorating George’s seventy-fourth birthday, expressing hope that he and Paul McCartney would record it. She is said to be searching now for a possible demo tape made by George more than four decades ago that would give his surviving bandmates a key to how lyrics like “Hey Ringo, now I want you to know, that without you my guitar plays far too slow” were meant to be set to music.
One might think such a discovery is a rare occurrence. But other, even older, manuscripts thought to be lost forever have been surfacing—often in dusty lockers, attics, archives—with curious regularity. If Beatles material can arise from the abyss, why not Beethoven?
In fact, a Beethoven manuscript turned up a little over a decade ago in, of all places, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A piano duet transcription of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the original finale of the composer’s renowned and revolutionary Opus 130 String Quartet, had been acquired by an unknown buyer at an auction house in Berlin in 1890. It then made its circuitous way to the Palmer Theological Seminary, where it was put on a shelf and forgotten for over a hundred years. That is, until an intrepid librarian named Heather Carbo, going about the mundane business of cleaning the seminary’s archive cabinets one summer day, recognized the eighty-page document—scribed vigorously in sepia ink in the composer’s own hand—and lifted it out of obscurity.
The heavily revised and annotated score was written toward the very end of Beethoven’s life, when he was altogether deaf. It fetched $1.9 million at Sotheby’s in London, in December 2005, a handsome sum by any calculus, but its real value lies in insights it offers musicologists into his working habits and thoughts before his death in 1827.
Another astounding discovery occurred when the German musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann read patiently through the digital catalogue of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague, entry by entry. He was floored when he realized that the museum’s holdings included a musical collaboration by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his supposed rival, Antonio Salieri. The work, a cantata titled Per la ricuperata salute di Offelia (“For the recovering health of Ophelia”) was scripted in three parts by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was acquired by the museum in the years after World War II, part of a larger cache of music scores, then proceeded to go missing during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Da Ponte had collaborated with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. For this piece, he had Salieri composing music for the first section, Mozart for the middle, and a lesser-known composer named Cornetti for the final movement. The surfacing of Offelia debunks the legend that Salieri—played with sinister finesse by F. Murray Abraham in the film version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus—poisoned Mozart out of jealousy. In fact, it is now clear that they must have worked together in the mid-1780s. The piece was performed last February, in Prague, for the first time in centuries—perhaps ever.
When interviewed about “Hey Ringo” and other works by her husband that had gone astray, Olivia Harrison admitted to having had “a reluctance to disturb these little time capsules,” saying, “You don’t want to decant someone’s life.” Yet the mundane work of many archivists, librarians, and researchers—documentation, cataloguing—is often motivated by just that desire: to disturb the time capsules and reveal what is hidden in them, to bring them to light for fresh study. In short, to decant lives and the artistic work produced during them. And if finding a misplaced wristwatch or favorite ring is cause for excitement, imagine the joy of an archivist who unearths an artifact that changes cultural history.
Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history.
Olivia Harrison, whom I believe would consider herself a curator of her husband’s legacy, was revising and updating George’s 1980 memoir/scrapbook, I Me Mine, when she decided to search through previously ignored nooks and crannies for fresh material to include in the book. This February, Ms. Harrison presented a copy of the lyrics to a stunned Ringo at a Los Angeles party commemorating George’s seventy-fourth birthday, expressing hope that he and Paul McCartney would record it. She is said to be searching now for a possible demo tape made by George more than four decades ago that would give his surviving bandmates a key to how lyrics like “Hey Ringo, now I want you to know, that without you my guitar plays far too slow” were meant to be set to music.One might think such a discovery is a rare occurrence. But other, even older, manuscripts thought to be lost forever have been surfacing—often in dusty lockers, attics, archives—with curious regularity. If Beatles material can arise from the abyss, why not Beethoven?
In fact, a Beethoven manuscript turned up a little over a decade ago in, of all places, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A piano duet transcription of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the original finale of the composer’s renowned and revolutionary Opus 130 String Quartet, had been acquired by an unknown buyer at an auction house in Berlin in 1890. It then made its circuitous way to the Palmer Theological Seminary, where it was put on a shelf and forgotten for over a hundred years. That is, until an intrepid librarian named Heather Carbo, going about the mundane business of cleaning the seminary’s archive cabinets one summer day, recognized the eighty-page document—scribed vigorously in sepia ink in the composer’s own hand—and lifted it out of obscurity.
The heavily revised and annotated score was written toward the very end of Beethoven’s life, when he was altogether deaf. It fetched $1.9 million at Sotheby’s in London, in December 2005, a handsome sum by any calculus, but its real value lies in insights it offers musicologists into his working habits and thoughts before his death in 1827.
Another astounding discovery occurred when the German musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann read patiently through the digital catalogue of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague, entry by entry. He was floored when he realized that the museum’s holdings included a musical collaboration by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his supposed rival, Antonio Salieri. The work, a cantata titled Per la ricuperata salute di Offelia (“For the recovering health of Ophelia”) was scripted in three parts by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was acquired by the museum in the years after World War II, part of a larger cache of music scores, then proceeded to go missing during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Da Ponte had collaborated with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. For this piece, he had Salieri composing music for the first section, Mozart for the middle, and a lesser-known composer named Cornetti for the final movement. The surfacing of Offelia debunks the legend that Salieri—played with sinister finesse by F. Murray Abraham in the film version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus—poisoned Mozart out of jealousy. In fact, it is now clear that they must have worked together in the mid-1780s. The piece was performed last February, in Prague, for the first time in centuries—perhaps ever.
When interviewed about “Hey Ringo” and other works by her husband that had gone astray, Olivia Harrison admitted to having had “a reluctance to disturb these little time capsules,” saying, “You don’t want to decant someone’s life.” Yet the mundane work of many archivists, librarians, and researchers—documentation, cataloguing—is often motivated by just that desire: to disturb the time capsules and reveal what is hidden in them, to bring them to light for fresh study. In short, to decant lives and the artistic work produced during them. And if finding a misplaced wristwatch or favorite ring is cause for excitement, imagine the joy of an archivist who unearths an artifact that changes cultural history.
by Bradford Morrow, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Felix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904.
