New York:

An 80-page musical manuscript by Ludwig van Beethoven is on display for the first time in 115 years after a librarian discovered it in an archive cabinet at a US religious school this summer. The Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, showed the manuscript to scholars before its planned December 1 auction in London, where it is expected to fetch $1.7 million to $2.6 million. The manuscript, mainly in brown ink, was a working score for a piano version of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, which he composed during the last part of his life when he was stone deaf. It disappeared after it was last sold in 1890 in Berlin to a Cincinnati industrialist William Howard Doanne. His daughter donated the manuscript to the seminary in 1953.

“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 City University, told The New York Times.

The newly discovered manuscript is also a rare piano transcription by Beethoven and the only complete manuscript source for the piano version of Grosse Fuge, The Times said.