Draft Of Haydn Work Sold For $1.04 Million String Quartet Manuscript Was Kept Under Family’s Bed

A draft of four string quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn, kept under a bed by an Australian woman, fetched a record $1.04 million at Sotheby’s on Thursday.

The working draft for the String Quartets, Opus 50, numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6, published in 1787, was bought by a German antiquarian book dealer, Hans Schneider of Tutzing, near Munich.

The seller, a Melbourne woman who asked not to be identified, said an English ancestor who was a retired colonel bought the draft in 1851 at a London auction - apparently as an investment - before emigrating to Australia.

The family stored it under a bed for safekeeping.

Scholars thought it was lost until the woman showed it to experts at a Haydn festival in 1982, and then put it in a bank vault.

Sotheby’s said the previous highest price paid for a manuscript by the 18th century composer was $219,800 in 1993 for six pages of Haydn’s unfinished last quartet.

“Although a few individual Haydn quartet manuscripts remain in private hands, the present collection is the largest group not already in a major library or institution,” Sotheby’s spokeswoman Beth McHattie said.

Haydn’s published version, dedicated to the King of Prussia, differed in important details from the draft sold Thursday, Sotheby’s said.

The draft was evidently owned for a while by Muzio Clementi, a composer friend of Haydn, who annotated it with tempo markings and other musical indications. Clementi lived in London and died in 1832.

The seller said she will use the money to set up a trust to help talented young musicians.