First Edition of Beethoven's Ninth in Christie's Harnoncourt Sale

Christie’s will present Alice & Nikolaus Harnoncourt – Artists Collecting Art, an online sale of 50 select works which opens for bidding on June 30 until July 14, alongside a group of Old Master pictures and illuminated manuscripts that will be offered from their collection in the Old Masters Part I Sale on July 6. 

Renowned classical violinist Alice (1930-2022) and celebrated conductor and musicologist Nikolaus (1929-2016), the Harnoncourts were a remarkable artistic duo - collecting books, art and furniture was a shared passion. Their daughter Elisabeth von Magnus said: “My parents bought works that inspired them and that they wanted to live with. They were never just collectors. They only bought art that they found important and fascinating, as well as with the music they engaged with – it was worth studying and discovering again and again”. 

Among the items in the Old Masters Part I Sale is a lavishly illuminated, iconographically unusual Book of Hours by the Master of Martainville 183 [Paris, circa 1490s], once in the collections of Napoleon’s chamberlain Count Joseph-François de Kergariou, and later the great French bibliophile André Hachette (estimate: £300,000-500,000/$378,000-$630,000)