Unpublished Beethoven Manuscript Hits the Auction Block
By Richard Whiddington
An unpublished overture for Ludwig van Beethoven’s The Consecration of the House (1822) is heading for auction at Sotheby’s this summer where it could fetch £200,000 ($269,000).
Sketched out in pencil and ink, the four-page draft was written at a rapid clip in September 1822 while Beethoven was recuperating in the spa town of Baden. As the title suggests, it was commissioned to open the newly renovated Josefstadt Theater in Vienna, a premiere that marked the composer’s final appearance on the podium. The work’s ceremonial grandeur, with a fugue at its core, nods to Handel, whom Beethoven venerated. Sotheby’s calls it the most extensive Beethoven manuscript to hit the block in two decades.
The Beethoven overture arrives at the auction house in the second half of a two-part online sale dedicated to the eccentric and encyclopedic collectors Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger, who died in 2011. The first sale, which runs from May 28 to June 9, presents the pair’s hats, canes, and jewels, including Fabergé trinkets. The second sale, running from June 23 to July 7, focuses on books, manuscripts, and works on paper from the couple’s sprawling library. The sales span some 280 lots and have been given an estimate of £1.2 million ($1.6 million).
Beethoven’s Autograph sketches for the overture “Die Weihe des Hauses”. Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s.
The heir to an American fortune built on lumber, oil, and railways, Seeger was a reclusive figure who moved to England after meeting Cone in the late 1970s. Together, they bought a Tudor manor in Surrey that had belonged to J Paul Getty for £8 million (roughly $70 million today), then a U.K. record, and filled it with whatever piqued their fancy at auction houses and antique shops. This included 88 Picassos, the Francis Bacon triptych Studies of the Human Body (1970), works by Egon Schiele and J. M. W. Turner, as well as curiosities, such as a basket owned by Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill’s armchair.
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“It was all about exploration; fun was a key part of the collecting process,” David Macdonald, who works on single owner collections at Sotheby’s, said over email. “It was also a very private process and although both men loved buying quietly at auction, they also became friends with a network of dealers. They would really get into a subject or the work of a particular artist or writer, so there was a depth of understanding.”
A selection of lots from the Collection of Stanley J. Seeger and Christopher Cone at Sotheby’s. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Seeger and Cone operated on a sell-to-buy more basis (the Picassos, for example, sold in 1993 for the equivalent of $70 million today) with the upcoming sales representing the final tranche of the couple’s treasures.
They built an important library of 19th-century literature, along with a collection of illustrations and prints, which moved with the couple as they relocated from Surrey to Devon, and lastly to Yorkshire.
Thomas Hardy ranked among Virginia Woolf’s favorite authors and her slightly banged-up copy of Far From the Madding Crowd (1908), signed with her maiden name “V. Stephen,” has been given an estimate of £8,000 to £12,000 ($10,000 to $16,100). First editions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 and 1872), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) have upper estimates of £30,000, £70,000, and £12,000 respectively ($40,300, $94,000, and $16,100).
Albrecht Dürer, The Round Crucifixion (1519). Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s.
A pair of Winnie-the-Pooh works by E.H. Shepard, one a pen and ink drawing of Pooh and Piglet and the other watercolor of a cabbage patch are both estimated at £20,000 to £30,000 ($26,800 to $40,300). A round Albrecht Dürer engraving depicting Christ’s crucifixion, perhaps intended for the pommel of a sword, has an estimate of £15,000 to £25,000 ($20,100 to $33,600). A 1636 Rembrandt etching of an old woman making pancakes surrounded by boisterous customers has an estimate of £4,000 to £6,000 ($5,400 to $8,100).
A Fabergé jewelled gold-mounted rock crystal model of a chick. Photo: courtesy Sotheby’s.
The earlier jewel sale includes miniatures that Seeger and Cone used to gift to one another. The star lot is a beady-eyed Fabergé chick formed from rock crystal and gold that has been given an estimate of £15,000 to £20,000 ($20,100 to $16,100). “It was about the joy of giving,” Cone said in a statement. “Finding something interesting that would make the other laugh.”
This article was originally published by Artnet News.