Sotheby’s to Sell Rare Beethoven Manuscript in Cone and Seeger Collection
A four-page Beethoven manuscript written in Baden in September 1822 is set to anchor Sotheby’s latest online sale, with an estimate of up to £200,000 ($269,000). The unpublished draft is for the overture to The Consecration of the House, and Sotheby’s says it is the most substantial Beethoven manuscript to come to auction in two decades.
The score appears in a two-part sale drawn from the collection of Christopher Cone and Stanley J. Seeger, the reclusive pair whose holdings were assembled over years of quiet buying. Together, the auctions comprise about 280 lots and are estimated at £1.2 million ($1.6 million). The material ranges widely, from books and manuscripts to works on paper, hats, canes, jewels, and small decorative objects.
The literary section reflects the couple’s long interest in 19th-century writing. Among the highlights are first editions of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Virginia Woolf’s copy of Far From the Madding Crowd, signed with her maiden name, “V. Stephen,” is also included, with an estimate of £8,000 to £12,000 ($10,000 to $16,100).
Other lots move from the canonical to the intimate. A pair of Winnie-the-Pooh works by E.H. Shepard, a round Albrecht Dürer engraving of the Crucifixion, and a 1636 Rembrandt etching of an old woman making pancakes all appear in the sale. The jewel section is led by a Fabergé chick formed from rock crystal and gold, a small object that captures the collection’s taste for wit as much as rarity.
Cone and Seeger’s holdings were built with a private, exploratory spirit, often through auction houses and antique shops. Their final sales offer a compressed view of that sensibility: scholarly, eclectic, and attentive to objects that reward close looking.
