DÉJÀ VU History just keeps on repeating itself…

A manuscript of Elgar’s Enigma Variations that went missing from Worcestershire’s Elgar Birthplace Museum in 1994 has unexpectedly turned up on Antiques Roadshow. The draft score was signed by the composer and dated 1899, the year the piece was premiered. During the TV programme, the score was valued at around £100,000, and a row has now broken out about who is the rightful owner of the item, which was bequeathed to the Elgar Foundation by his daughter Carice. It’s not, however, the first time that a lost manuscript has turned up in unusual circumstances…

Dusty cupboards are a favourite hiding place for lost scores. Take the case of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. An 80-page piano version was found when someone cleaned out a cabinet in a US seminary – the score sold in 2002 for £1.1m. Champagne was opened when a forgotten Bach aria was found in shoebox in 2005. Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-weimar had stuffed this birthday gift there over 300 years before. Strangest of all must be the rediscovery of Schumann’s unpublished violin concerto. Violinist Jelly d’aranyi tracked down the manuscript after claiming to receive a message from Schumann’s ghost, via an Ouija board. And the prize for furthest-travelled surely goes to the two Holst manuscripts found in New Zealand. For over a century, the whereabouts of the 1906 Folk Songs from Somerset and Two Songs Without Words were unknown, until the scores popped up in the Bay of Plenty Symphonia’s library.