Beethoven draft fetches £1.3m at auction

The first draft of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was sold for £1.3m yesterday, more than six times the expected price and more than 200 times what the composer was paid for the work.

An anonymous European collector bought the single-page signed draft for £1,326,650, surpassing expectations even for a piece of work described as a "landmark of our civilisation".

Sotheby's had set a reserve price of £200,000 for the draft, believed to have been written in 1818, shortly after Beethoven was paid £100 for the symphony by the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, equivalent to £5,500 today. He finished it in 1823, four years before he died.

The Ninth was first performed in Vienna when Beethoven, struggling against illness and deafness, was unable to hear the applause from an emotional audience. The opening of the work inspired Schubert, Wagner and Mahler to push back the boundaries of the symphonic form.

The manuscript sold yesterday bears an inscription by the 19th century scholar Gustav Nottebohn describing it as "the very first sketch for the Ninth Symphony".

Stephen Roe, head of Sotheby's manuscripts department, said £1.3m was a "stupendous price ... about ten times more than any Beethoven sketch leaf has ever gone for. Four or five bidders got whittled down to two and then a duel lasted for about five minutes. People have obviously looked at it as Beethoven's first ideas for the Symphony and regarded it as an incredible thing. The Ninth Symphony is incontestably a landmark of our civilisation."

The manuscript was sold on behalf of a charitable foundation to help sponsor musical scholarship.