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12-C Maine Antique Digest, April 2015
- AUCTION -
A
single-owner sale called A Celebration of Music was
conducted (no pun intended) by Profiles in History
on December 17, 2014, in Calabasas, California.
The 165-lot auction featured autograph letters signed, musi-
cal quotations and scores signed, and portrait photographs
signed—by just about every figure in the classical music
pantheon. The list includes everyone from Beethoven to
Bernstein and from Georges Bizet to George Gershwin—
everyone, that is, except Bach and Chopin. I was able to
ask the anonymous collector about those two gaps, sending
my question via Marsha Malinowski, the auction house’s
historical consultant. She said on his behalf that he was
never able to find anything by either of them that met his
high standards. “The collection wasn’t assembled with a
checklist. There was such substance,”
Malinowski told me. “Examples [of
Bach and Chopin] that were brought to
his attention were both expensive and
devoid of significant content, and he
didn’t want just a signature.”
Of the collector in general,
Malinowski added, “It is very rare to
see such a disciplined collector. Usually
collectors stray a bit, because they can’t help themselves.
They’re compulsive a bit. They see something, and it’s out-
side the scope of their collection, but they just have to have
it. Not this man.”
Until this sale, the most recent comparable single-owner
music sale at a major auction house was conducted by
Sotheby’s in Paris on October 16 and 17, 2012, when the
collection formed by the French-born American investment
banker and financier André Meyer was sold. In that case, the
nearly 500 lots, which included mostly printed music along
with drawings, paintings, and sculptures of great compos-
ers, musicians, and singers, brought the equivalent of $4.3
million (including buyers’ premiums). The far smaller-scale
Profiles in History sale realized $879,741 on the 102 lots
that it sold on auction day, a respectable enough figure, but
then there was an encore. A phenomenal 11 post-auction
sales came through in the 24 hours after the auction ended.
One of them fetched $209,000, making it the sale’s top lot.
The item, featured on the catalog cover, was an autograph
manuscript of part of Mozart’s Serenade in D Major for
Orchestra, K. 185. That and the other post-auction sales,
which were calculated with a 10% premium instead of 20%
(25% for Internet purchases), brought the grand total to a
bravo-worthy $1,208,091.
The bidding pool for this or any musical manuscripts sale
is not large. Granted, there are huge numbers of people who
are passionate about music, but what they love is sound,
recordings, live performances. Only a subset of that group
will be able to appreciate musical “paper” enough to collect
it.
When dinner guests walked into the dining room of this
collector and his wife, Malinowski said, they would see the
Mozart in a frame hanging on the wall. It was surrounded by
framed pieces of many other gems from the collection. “He
was the one who was writing the checks, but they both loved
and lived with the material,” she said.
A significant number of Asians vied for this material,
which the collector began acquiring in 1981. “We were so
lucky getting the Asians,” Malinowski said. “The Asian fac-
tor was huge, and if we hadn’t had it we would have been
in trouble,” considering the “upheaval in the European mar-
ket.” She was referring to the news that broke in mid-No-
vember about what is turning out to be one of the biggest
scandals to hit the rare books and manuscripts market in
recent memory. France’s anti-fraud brigade suspects Gérard
Lhéritier, founder of a company called Aristophil, of run-
ning a colossal Ponzi scheme.
For years now, Lhéritier has been spending enormous
amounts in the market on behalf of thousands of investor-cli-
ents. Many of the pieces they have bought are displayed in
a so-called museum, Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, that
Lhéritier has created; others are in his storage facilities; still
more have been lent to public museum partners. But accord-
ing to the French press, the operation is believed to be a
scam, and both the museum and the offices of Aristophil
have now been raided by the French government, together
with Lhéritier’s home and his accountant’s office in Nice.
Is Lhéritier the Bernie Madoff of the antiquarian book and
paper trade? It’s a legitimate question to be answered in the
future.
Meanwhile, Malinowski wisely made the decision to try
“getting as much Asian interest as possible, to balance out
what was happening in Europe.” She said: “I really pushed
hard for us to get some publicity in Asia and was able to get
a bit.”
An Asian paid $96,000 (est. $80,000/120,000) for the sec-
ond to top lot of the sale, an autograph letter signed twice
by Ludwig van Beethoven. The subject of the single page
Profiles in History, Calabasas, California
A Celebration of Music: A Bravo-Worthy Sale of
Manuscripts and More
by Jeanne Schinto
Photos courtesy Profiles in History
“It is very rare to
see such a disci-
plined collector.
Usually collectors
stray a bit.”
in German is the composer’s nephew Karl. “Beethoven
had a nasty custody battle with his sister-in-law after his
brother died,” Malinowski explained. “Karl was torn
between being with his uncle and being with his mother.
He was nine years old.” The letter, undated but after 1816,
is a request presumably addressed to a government official
for something for Karl. “It may have been something to
do with his education or with military,” said Malinowski.
“[Beethoven] attached something that we don’t have.”
An American private collector, bidding on the Inter-
net, paid $87,500 (est. $40,000/60,000) for another of the
sale’s standouts, a leaf from the opera
Carmen
by Georges
Bizet. The autograph manuscript, signed and dated May
18, 1875, is Act I, Scene 10, “The Seguidilla.” “I think he
probably wrote this out for someone,
because usually when we see works
in progress, they’re more amended,”
Malinowski said. “It was
probably
the most glamorous lot in the sale,”
she added. “It was a show-stopper. If
anyone wanted a Bizet, this could not
have been a more perfect example.”
The item also had great prove-
nance, having come from the collection of Rudolf F.
Kallir (1895-1987). An Austrian-born antiquarian who
immigrated to the States in the 1930s, Kallir not only
amassed a collection of musical autographs and manu-
scripts, but also published articles on the subjects of his
collection and served as a consultant on musical acquisi-
tions to major institutions. Only one other leaf from this
opera has been sold at auction since 1975. That one was
a lengthy quotation from the “Flower Song” that sold at
Sotheby’s in London on December 1, 2005, for £24,000
($41,482).
Another lot whose provenance included ownership
by Kallir was a six-page autograph musical manuscript
A leaf from part of Mozart’s Serenade in D
Major for orchestra, K. 185, realized $209,000
(est. $200,000/300,000). The two pages, approxi-
mately 6 2/3" x 8½" each, are from the working
manuscript. A leaf from this same serenade sold
at Sotheby’s in London on November 27, 2013, for
£200,500 ($325,111).
A cabinet card photograph of a youthful Johannes Brahms sold
to an Asian bidder for $11,400 (est. $5000/7000). Inscribed and
signed in German, it is approximately 6 2/3" x 4½" and dated
Christmas 1876.
A European paid $24,000 (est. $20,000/30,000) for a group of manu-
scripts by Brahms. They included a single page of music, approximately
3 2/3" x 5 2/3", that he wrote in Vienna in March 1897. The lines are
believed to have been the last ones he wrote before his death on April 3
of that year. The image of an elderly Brahms that was part of this lot is
approximately 4" x 2".