Nazi-loot Beethoven score is returned to rightful owner
NewsThe Moravian Museum in Brno has finally agreed to return Beethoven’s manuscript for the fourth movement of the B-flat Major string quartet, Op. 130, after holding onto it for more than eight decades.
The score was stolen by the Nazi occupiers from the heirs of Otto Petschek, a local industrialist in mining and chemicals (pictured with his wife, Magda.
The family’s former home in Prague is now occupied by the US embassy.
Most immediate members of the family escaped to the US after the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia.
Now that they’ve proved their point perhaps the family could leave it with the (excellent and blameless) museum.
Their “point”???? They and countless others are just proving a “point”?? I assume you think they should just be grateful that justice was done after 80 years.
Did you ever heard talk of proprietorship?
Next stop Christie´s.
Unless the heirs decide to take a page each…
Even if it is destined for the auction house, somebody will be assigning a dollar value to that manuscript and all museums will have an equal chance to own it. Beethoven, who was often guilty of sharp practice himself, would have approved.
Ed. Did you mean to include the /s, for sarcasm?
Fiat justitia ruat caelum