Scholar calls Sotheby's Beethoven manuscript a fake

London

WHEN a 232-page handwritten score of Mahler's epic Second Symphony (Resurrection) sold for US$5.6 million at Sotheby's in London last month, it shattered a nearly 30-year record for the highest price paid at auction for a musical manuscript.

The Mahler is one of the most valuable post-Renaissance manuscripts of any kind to be sold at auction, fetching more than recent sales of Jack Kerouac's draft of On the Road or Bob Dylan's lyrics for Like a Rolling Stone. But a less important score that failed to sell that same day has since transfixed the music world. A brief Beethoven work for string quartet went unsold when, before the auction, a scholar publicly questioned the assertion by Sotheby's, and its experts, that the work was written in Beethoven's hand - igniting an acrimonious debate in the generally staid, tweedy precincts of musicologists and manuscript dealers.