Discarded Beethoven movement reassembled

An original piece of music by Ludwig van Beethoven unheard for more than 200 years will be played in England on Thursday after being meticulously pieced together by music scholars.

The Quatuor Danel ensemble will perform the original slow movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in G, Opus 18 Number 2 at a seminar open to the public at the University of Manchester.

Beethoven composed the movement in 1799, at just 28 years old, for his patron Prince Lobkowicz.

It was an early attempt at writing a string quartet and, later on, he returned to his first two pieces to substantially revise them.

Though scholars have studied fragmented sketches from String Quartet in G, Opus 18 Number 2 since they were discovered in the 1970s, for many years no one realized that the disparate pieces formed a complete movement that Beethoven had discarded.

Barry Cooper, a music professor at the University of Manchester, has reassembled the 74 bars of "lost" music into a movement of approximately four to five minutes.

However, to complete the reconstruction, he was forced to add parts for missing instruments and harmonies in certain places.

"The prospect of hearing a Beethoven work that has been absent for over 200 years should be of much interest to anyone who loves his music, even if my reconstruction may differ slightly from what the composer wrote," Cooper said.