On November 29, Sotheby’s in London offered the complete manuscript of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) at auction. The manuscript’s estimated value was 3.5 million British pounds (US$4,343,675) and it brought £4,546,250 in today’s sale, a record for the highest price for a musical manuscript sold at auction. The score was sold by the estate of the late Gilbert Kaplan (1941-2016), an American businessman, self-taught conductor, and champion of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. In a press release, Sotheby’s noted that the 1895 manuscript, in the composer’s hand, includes deletions, alterations, and annotations, many in blue crayon. In 1920, Alma Mahler gave the manuscript to conductor Willem Mengelberg, and Gilbert Kaplan bought it from Mengelberg’s estate in 1984, the same year he sold the magazine Institutional Investor, which he had founded in 1967.
Posted November 29, 2016
