The manuscript held by the Jewish Petschek family in the 1920s was confiscated by German authorities on the eve of World War II.
The Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, one of the composer’s former homes converted into a place of memory and a museum, has just acquired the original manuscript of the fourth movement of the String quartet n°13 op.130 completed in 1825, announced the cultural establishment. A ceremony took place on Tuesday January 14 to properly welcome this precious document.
« The manuscript is not only one of Beethoven’s most famous string quartets. It is also the only manuscript source relating to the movement, which has unfortunately been kept under lock and key for decades. It’s great to be able to receive it today and to be able to make it accessible to the world of music again », said Daniel Hope, president of the Bonn cultural institution. Indeed, the story of this manuscript is worthy of a novel.
-Shortly before his death in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven entrusted this score to his secretary and violinist Karl Holz, a document which then changed hands for almost a century. From the 1920s, the score belonged to a wealthy Jewish family, the Petscheks, who lived in Aussig-sur-Elbe in Bohemia. They left the country for the United States in 1938, faced with the rise of Nazism. Before their departure, this family had their most precious possessions confiscated: art collection, furniture and Beethoven’s score. The document in the hands of the Nazi regime, an expertise is requested from an expert from Brno, in Moravia. So that it does not end up in the wrong hands, the director of the music collections of the Moravian Museum lies, claiming that the score has no value, which allowed him to keep it for 80 years in his museum.
Recovered by the family in 2022
At the end of the war, Franz Petschek tried to find the manuscript, requesting it from the communist authorities, but his requests led to nothing. We must wait for the vote of a law in the Czech Republic in 2022 on the restitution of looted property for the manuscript to resurface. At the end of 2024, the Petschek descendants agreed to hand it over to the Beethoven-Haus so that it could be “ once again permanently accessible to the public and to research”, indicates the museum. Preserved in optimal conditions, the score will be digitized and soon accessible online before being at the center of a special exhibition in Bonn from June to August.
