Unpublished Beethoven Manuscript and Seeger-Cone Collection Head to Sotheby's
This summer, Sotheby's will auction an unpublished overture for Beethoven's The Consecration of the House (1822), with an estimated value of £200,000 ($269,000). The four-page manuscript, created in September 1822 during Beethoven's recovery in Baden, was commissioned for the newly renovated Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Sotheby's describes this as the most significant Beethoven manuscript to be auctioned in the last twenty years. This auction is part of a two-part online event from the estate of Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger, who passed away in 2011. The first segment (May 28–June 9) includes various collectibles, while the second (June 23–July 7) focuses on books and manuscripts, comprising 280 lots with a total estimate of £1.2 million ($1.6 million).
Key facts
- Unpublished Beethoven overture for The Consecration of the House (1822) estimated at £200,000 ($269,000)
- Manuscript is four pages, sketched in pencil and ink in September 1822 in Baden
- Commissioned for the renovated Josefstadt Theater in Vienna, Beethoven's final podium appearance
- Sotheby's calls it the most extensive Beethoven manuscript at auction in 20 years
- Part of two-part online sale from the collection of Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger
- First sale: May 28–June 9 (hats, canes, jewels, Fabergé); second: June 23–July 7 (books, manuscripts, works on paper)
- Total 280 lots estimated at £1.2 million ($1.6 million)
- Seeger and Cone bought a Tudor manor in Surrey from J. Paul Getty for £8 million (about $70 million today)
- Collection included 88 Picassos, Francis Bacon triptych, works by Schiele and Turner
- Library includes Virginia Woolf's signed copy of Far From the Madding Crowd, first editions of Middlemarch, Leaves of Grass, A Christmas Carol
- Other lots: E.H. Shepard Winnie-the-Pooh drawings, Dürer engraving, Rembrandt etching, Fabergé chick
Entities
Artists
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Francis Bacon
- Egon Schiele
- J. M. W. Turner
- Albrecht Dürer
- Rembrandt van Rijn
- E. H. Shepard
- Thomas Hardy
- Virginia Woolf
- George Eliot
- Walt Whitman
- Charles Dickens
- Marilyn Monroe
- Winston Churchill
- J. Paul Getty
- Christopher Cone
- Stanley J. Seeger
- David Macdonald
Institutions
- Sotheby's
- Josefstadt Theater
- Artnet News
Locations
- Baden
- Vienna
- Austria
- Surrey
- England
- United Kingdom
- Devon
- Yorkshire