Well, it was news to ME...

[johncomic]

[if you don't like classical music then you won't care about any of this; if you know a lot about it then none of this will be news to you]

An original Beethoven manuscript, lost for a hundred years, turns up in a seminary library in Philadelphia.

How the eff can you own something as valuable as sheet music handwritten by Beethoven himself and lose it??!! Apparently the last known owner bequeathed it to the seminary in his will, along with a buncha other papers. I think if it were me, my will woulda added something like "By the way, there's an original Beethoven in those papers so take care of it, it's really valuable!"

One reason I found this story really exciting-slash-cool is that the music in question is Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. I learned about this piece in a book about a year or two ago, and it's fascinated me ever since. If you're not familiar with the Grosse Fuge, you can hear/download a legal MP3 of a nice performance of it here -- but it's pretty big, so if that's an issue, you only need to hear the first 30 sec. or download the first 500kb to hear what I'm gonna mention next.

This was one of the last things Beethoven ever wrote, and it was so advanced at that time that it freaked everyone out and no one would play it. If you listened to the intro of that MP3, then you heard how stark, abrasive and abstract it was -- unlike anything Beethoven [or anyone] had written before. The thing is, it was nearly a hundred years before anyone else dared even try writing something like it again. And even then, a century later, that sort of music still freaked people out! But at least a few hardy souls were now willing to play it, so it managed to survive and establish itself as a valid new direction for the twentieth century...

The point: near the end of his life, Beethoven was writing music that was literally and demonstrably a hundred years ahead of its time. How cool is that?

The guy was a frickin genius.