The Lost Berlin Manuscripts

Abstract

Many treasures that were lost sight of during the last war later reappeared ? perhaps not always in the hands of their former custodians but at least available once more to art, science and scholarship. Other treasures were destroyed, and there is proof of this. There is, however, another and tantalizing category, that of art works and the like whose existence is strongly suspected but which have remained elusive for more than three decades. Such has been the fate of a particular batch of music manuscripts that were formerly in the Music Manuscript Department of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. This was no minor collection. It contained the manuscript scores of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte (Act 1), Marriage of Figaro (Acts 3 and 4) and Jupiter symphony; Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and 7th, 8th and 9th symphonies (in whole or in part); numerous Bach cantatas; Bruckner's sketches for his 8th and 9th symphonies; Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Midsummer Night's Dream; many manuscript scores of works by Brahms, Haydn, Schubert and so on. Since 1941, when they were packed into boxes and dispatched by train to Silesia, these precious documents have been unavailable to musicologists. With the passage of time, and with the post-war changes in political alignments, many of those who were involved in the evacuation and care of this material have since retired, moved to other countries, or died. To the best of my knowledge, a full inventory of the loss has never been published and the circumstances surrounding the loss are difficult to reconstruct from the few reports that have appeared. Nevertheless, it seems worth while to assemble what can be gleaned and to record current efforts to locate these manuscripts.

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