Britten, Benjamin.

comprising the autograph score, for violin, viola and piano, written in Britten's early hand, in blue-black ink on four four-stave systems per page, together with a separate autograph manuscript playing part for viola, with deletions, alterations and corrections, a few revisions written on hand-drawn staves in the margins, with rehearsal numbers added in orange crayon,  22 pages, folio (c.35.5 x 26cms), the score 18 pages, in a folder with copyist's manuscripts of "Phantasy" op.2 (1932) and another unidentified,  no date, probably early 1930s



Unrecorded and unpublished: Britten's early transcription of Beethoven's "Rage over a Lost Penny", Op.129, is an unknown work by the young composer.

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate
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Britten's handwriting shows that this arrangement is a relatively early work, probably from the first half of the 1930s.   Britten revered Beethoven's music as a boy ("between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I knew every note of Beethoven and Brahms"), but later came to find the great German master's musical expression rather heavy and "obvious". He still played Beethoven's sonatas, and enthusiastically heard performances of Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony in the mid 1930s, but by 1949 he was privately unenthusiastic about Beethoven and later criticised much of his music to the composer Murray Schafer.  Whilst Britten made arrangements of pieces by Bach, Schubert, Schumann and Mahler, there are no published arrangements by him of Beethoven.  Britten's identification with that composer here, however, extends to "signing" the score and parts with Beethoven's name, which appears strikingly similar to his own signature.