A musical manuscript handwritten by Ludwig van Beethoven is getting returned to the heirs of the richest family in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, whose members had to flee the country to escape the Holocaust.
The Moravian Museum in the Czech city of
Brno has had the original manuscript for the fourth movement of Beethoven’s
String Quartet n B-flat Major, Op. 130 in its collection for more than 80
years. The museum put the score on display for the first time this week in
anticipation of handing it over to its rightful owners.
“It’s one of the most precious items in our
collections,” museum curator Simona Šindelářová said.
The museum said a restitution law on
property stolen by German Nazis made the return possible. Details about how the
family, whose wealth came mainly from mining industry and banking in Central
Europe, after World War I acquired the piece from one of the German composer’s
late quartets is unknown.
“We’re sorry about losing it, but it
rightly belongs to the Petschek family,” Šindelářová said.
Beethoven composed the six-movement String
Quartet in B-flat Major in 1825 -1826 as part of his work on a series of
quartets commissioned by Russian Prince Nicholas Galitzin. It premiered in
March 1826 at the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, Austria.
“We’re sorry about losing it, but it
rightly belongs to the Petschek family,” Šindelářová said.
Beethoven composed the six-movement String
Quartet in B-flat Major in 1825 -1826 as part of his work on a series of
quartets commissioned by Russian Prince Nicholas Galitzin. It premiered in
March 1826 at the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, Austria.
Museums, archives and libraries in the
Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland and the United States currently have almost
300 pages of the entire autograph in their possession.
It’s known that Beethoven, who died in
1827, gave the fourth movement to his secretary, Karl Holz, and at least two
other private owners in Vienna acquired it before the Petscheks.
The family tried but failed to send the
manuscript abroad by mail in March 1939 during the Nazi occupation of
Czechoslovakia, drawing the attention of the Gestapo.
According to Šindelářová, the Germans asked
an expert from the Moravian Museum at the time to verify Beethoven had penned
the document, and “he denied that in an effort to save it” from the occupiers.
The lie could have cost him dearly, but it
worked; the museum was allowed to keep the piece. However, the Nazis seized
most of the Petschek family’s assets and possessions, which Czechoslovakia’s
Communist regime nationalized after the war.
From his new home in the United States,
Franz Petschek, who had run the family’s mining businesses in Czechoslovakia,
tried to get the piece back but was unsuccessful due to the post-war division
in Europe and creation of the Iron Curtain.
The Moravian Museum signed a deal on Aug. 3
to transfer the ownership of the manuscript to his heirs. However, other
families with claims to property and valuable items lost during World War II
are still waiting for their cases to be resolved.
Anne Webber, the co-chair of the
London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, said that despite 47
countries agreeing in 2009 to try to resolve Holocaust-era injustices, “the
restitution of artworks that were looted often seems to be as distant prospect
as ever.”
“Some 90% of all artworks being sought
today by families have been neither found nor returned,” Webber said at a
conference held in Prague last month to review the progress made since the
non-binding Terezín Declaration was adopted.
The declaration urged governments to make
every effort to return former Jewish communal and religious property
confiscated by the Nazis, fascists and their collaborators, and recommended
that countries implement programs to address the issue of private buildings and
land. -AP