IMSLP Forums

Someone on EBay claims to have a manuscript, copied by hand in the 1870's/80's, of a song by Schubert.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au:80/ws/eBayISAPI. ... :RTQ:AU:11

I know that Schubert would often give out songs to friends and acquaintances without retaining the originals, and there are lost works surfacing to this day, with some published as recently as the 1990's.

But what do you think? Could this be genuine, or does it smell funny?

I asked for some more details and this is the answer:

Dear aldona12000,

Hallo,

Franz Schubert live 1797 - 1827 in Wienna/Austria.

The song "Das theure Vaterhaus" is 1 from 600 Songs.

The note become 1878 von H. Riegger at Augsburg/Germany copy by hand.

The postage to Australia cost 15 Euro.

Sorry for my bade englich.

Regards.

Peter J. Hahn (nikolause)

Aldona
(confused)

Depends on how much the price goes up, it's almost worth it.... Within reason.

Well... that certainly sounds delicious... though without musicology experts (or maybe even handwriting experts) we may never know whether it is real. I'd agree with ArcticWind and go for it as long as it is within reason (and so you don't spend your entire fortune buying a fake piece of paper). If it is real, it'd be very incredible.

I have not made a bid yet...am still thinking...

I would be very happy to stand back and let people more musically qualified than myself buy it. I am only an armchair enthusiast with very limited formal music history/theory education, and I am in Australia, far away from the people and places in Europe where this sort of thing could be studied and verified.

There is almost a week left to go, so if anybody has the resources or contacts to check this out, please feel free to bid and don't worry about me.

I note that there are gaps in the Deutsch-Catalog, as well as references to mysterious lost things like "A song without title or words."

Maybe this belongs in one of those gaps...or as an addendum at the end...

Aldona

I was going to make a modest bid at the end of the auction if nobody else did - and then it was ended early because "the item is no longer for sale."

Interesting...



Aldona
(even more confused)

The thing I noticed is that this is merely a manuscript copy of a Schubert song that was made long after Schubert's untimely demise. It's not Schubert's own manuscript - which would probably fetch several hundred thousand dollars at Sotheby's.

If it were a previously unknown song, it could be very difficult to know whether the attribution to Schubert was accurate or not.

That's what I meant by me being too far away from where all the experts are, to be able to evaluate it...

It's probably every Schubertian's dream to stumble on a long-lost work. Just look at the Deutsch-catalog on the www.trovar.com site and note how many works are listed as "lost", "unpublished" or "not printed".

http://www.trovar.com/Deutsch.html

If you don't see any more Schubert-Lieder added over the next few days it's because I have to actually spend some time away from the computer keyboard and at that of the piano - my medical friends and I are having one of our infrequent "soirees" and I have to wear my "Schubert-Lieder-accompanist" hat.

Not only that, but my colleague (who sings baritone) has decided that a couple of the songs are too high for him, even in the "low voice" version, so I have to hit Noteworthy Composer and transpose them again (and learn to play the new version before Saturday night). I'm glad "Erlkönig" or "Schiffers Scheidelied" are not on the program!

...so I'll visit and lurk every now and then, but no more uploads until after next weekend.

Aldona
(trying hard to live up to her signature line)

I'm glad "Erlkönig" or "Schiffers Scheidelied" are not on the program!

Hehe.

Good to see someone else using NWC!

at one point I got so fast with NWC that I was hitting all the shortcut keys almost as fast as I type regular words. I was like a Noteworthy Ninja. I'm a little bit rusty now...but anyway, I had never heard of anyone else using NWC but me. right on!

Heh, I used to use Noteworthy, too, though I don't think I was quite as fast as you. Stopped about the time I moved to Linux, and I'm still waiting for a decent music notation program for it. :-/ (And I've tried nwc with wine, and it's just not the same, somehow)

(And I've tried nwc with wine, and it's just not the same, somehow)

ROFLOL

The soiree was lots of fun and now the NWC is now getting another use - one of my cello-playing friends was so impressed with the Schubert-Lieder that she wants me to transcribe some into bass clef for her to play on the cello. Now that's easy - I can churn several out each evening after work (or I could if I wasn't frantically trying to upload at every opportunity! )

Aldona

Well, now and then you do stumble upon some interesting manuscript copies of unknown origin, I've got two myself. Apart from that and in case you don't know:
http://www.schubert-online.at/
Here you have more than 500 score autographs plus letters and life documents. But it's expensive (D 802 for 176 €)!

I wonder if the people who are responsible for that website would consider sharing images of those manuscripts with us when IMSLP comes back.

aldona

If these Schubert autograph manuscripts, sketches and letters are out of copyright, shouldn't they be PD and be free of charge? Granted, each page is scanned and perhaps digitally enhanced and service and labour charges are applied. But for 8 euros per page? And at only 300dpi?
The same thing occured for the Mozart operas autographs. The Packard Humanities Institute launched a project to publish these autographs and the cost of each opera is about 200 dollars. The difference is that each page is scanned and bound in hardcover (likely by hand), so I suppose the price is justified. But 8 euros for a digital TIFF file? Call me stingy, but I don't want to get ripped off for something that is supposedly PD and free.

Vivaldi wrote:If these Schubert autograph manuscripts, sketches and letters are out of copyright, shouldn't they be PD and be free of charge? Granted, each page is scanned and perhaps digitally enhanced and service and labour charges are applied. But for 8 euros per page? And at only 300dpi?
The same thing occured for the Mozart operas autographs. The Packard Humanities Institute launched a project to publish these autographs and the cost of each opera is about 200 dollars. The difference is that each page is scanned and bound in hardcover (likely by hand), so I suppose the price is justified. But 8 euros for a digital TIFF file? Call me stingy, but I don't want to get ripped off for something that is supposedly PD and free.

Well... I'll disagree slightly with you here. While I think they shouldn't attempt to restrict what you can DO with the files after you've purchased them, I think they have the right to charge whatever they want for them. I'd still prefer it to be available free, but, again, that's something the IMSLP foundation could look into in the future: obtaining things like these and making them available for free.