The complete score of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony was sold in London for £4.5 million on Tuesday, a record for a musical manuscript, Sotheby's auction house said. The handwritten 232-page score includes the composer's deletions, alterations and annotations, many of them done in a vivid blue crayon. The score was owned by US businessman Gilbert Kaplan who became obsessed with the work, known as the "Resurrection Symphony", and dedicated his life to conducting it before his death earlier this year.
The only comparable sales, both sold at Sotheby's, were a manuscript of nine Mozart symphonies for £2.5 million ($3.1 million, 3 million euros) in 1987 and the manuscript of Robert Schumann's Second Symphony for £1.5 million in 1994. "The result establishes a new auction record for a musical manuscript," Sotheby's said in a statement. "The work retains the form in which Mahler left it, reflecting and revealing the compositional process for the work," it said, adding that it was the only complete Mahler symphony ever sold at auction. There were four telephone bidders for the Austrian composer's work but the eventual buyer chose to remain anonymous.