“How does one put a price on the autograph score of Brahms's First Symphony?” asked Herbert Cahoon, super visor of the collection. The symphony autograph lacks the first movement, but like other items in the collection it has been hungered after for years by those musicians and collectors who knew that the late Mrs. Cary owned it. The daughter of Herbert Harkness Flagler, who was president of the Philhar monic‐Symphony Society of New York from 1928 to 1934, kept treasures in her Fifth Avenue apartment until her death in 1967.
News of the famous collec tion's acquisition and first public exhibition drew anti quarians and musicologists from major archives of the world. Such experts as Albi Rosenthal of Oxford prowled among display cases oohing and aahing at Schubert's song cycles, “Wintereise” and “Schwanengesang,” or his “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. An Italian scholar excitedly reported a discovery in his field, and demanded a Xerox on the spot. Pierluigi Petrobelli of the Verdi Institute in Parma, who is editing Tartini's let ters, found and identified an autograph that he knew must exist and for which he had left a blank in his book.
To a musician, the manu scripts could only be awe some. One could examine Bach's Cantata No. 112 (“Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt”), done in his entirely legible, flowing hand or Beethoven's “Ghost” Trio, a clotted, blotted mess that only a Bonn cryptographer could hope to make out. The Verdi display contained the full score of “Ernani,” including an aria not previously known. In one outsized case reposed Schoenberg's massive full score of “Gurrelieder.” In an other there were Bellini's full score of “Il Pirata,” with Act II missing, and his own op eratic version of “Hernani,” never printed.
The collection shines lights on many a master's second thoughts. The Richard Strauss display includes a “Wer hat's gethan?,” that he first intended as No. 6 of his Op. 10. But “Die Versch wiegenen” took its place, and the rejected song lies there, intact, but with Strauss's large unequivo cally penciled “X” through the whole page.
Here are some Chopin mazurkas. There lies Handel's “Messiah” in the “Gold schmidt” manuscript, written out by the composer's secre tary, John Christopher Smith. And would that be a coffee stain in the corner of Mo zart's Sonata for Violin and Piano (K.376)?
Mrs. Cary, though plainly a musical connoisseur, was not an archivist's dream. “She didn't even keep things in a safe,” said Mr. Cahoon. Nor was there the kind of temperature and humidity regulation that librarians now favor. “Nothing came to us in bad shape, though,” Mr. Cahoon added. Bach's scores, after all, survived for a cou ple of centuries before the humidifier came along.