THE MISSING MUSIC.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 September 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

THE MISSING MUSIC.

STRANGE HAYDN FIND. We all know what it feels like to misplay an important letter or a favourite thimble and search for it distractedly for days till, having resigned ourselves to the'loss of the elusive object, we suddenly come upon it in a' forgotten .pocket or a crease irr the sofa cover. ■ . It is something of the same sort'which has lately happened to the eminent German scholar of musical history Professor Adolf Sandberger, who went to Sweden to lecture on unknown Haydn manuscripts and incidentally i found there, tucked away on a shelf of the Musical Museum' of Stockholm, a very .well-known manuscript score for which he and other music experts had been hunting for years and had. sadly given up as lost for ever. < > The score ; is-that of -a -musical piece for viol, cello, and baryton, written by Haydn, for the .Hungarian; prince Esterhazy to whom Haydn was conductor of music and composer in the .second half of th.e ,18th century.',The baryton is. an instrument, now fallen. info, disuse,' like a big violin, with six catgut strings and ten made of steel. ‘Prince Esterhazy loved to play- on it and set Haydn to compose special? music for it. This particular-piece, which is a peculiarly valuable’ one fpr students; of Haydn’s music, disappeared long-ago from the Esterhazy library, where all the original scores of the great master are treasured, and had been entered as missing in the library catalogue. For decades it has haunted the imagination of the learned and been mourned as an irreparable loss to the world of music: and now, by the purest chance, Professor Sandberger has come upon it in Stockholm, still dressed in the sumptuous gold-tooled red morocco which Prince Esterhazy thought only just good enough for the compositions of ’ his favourite musician. How it got there, by what, mysterious paths it travelled from a prince’s private library in Hungary to a public museum in Stockholm, will probably be a secret for ever, blit the important thing is that, though .lost to the Esterhazy family, it has been retrieved for the world at large. ■ '