One of my responsibilities this summer has been to go through the however many thousands of scores donated to us by Ms. Muriel Wolf and Mr. Albert Steger, both influential musicians in the Buffalo area, and check for duplicates in our online system. Muriel was married once before to Anton Wolf, and as such she, Anton, and Albert accumulated a TON of stuff. The other librarians have been making trips to "Albert's House" to clean out the cartons and cartons of books, scores, posters, etc. Some of it is really interesting, like the "Photos for Art Students" book, which was chock full o'naked ladies, or the "How to Spot a Commie" (not the actual title) pamphlet, which I can only assume circulated during the Cold War.
Today I'm sitting at my desk and I come across a piece for two flutes (or "other melody instruments") by Beethoven. I could not find any sort of collective title on this piece, and I was getting a little frustrated when I noticed that there was a piece of white tape obscuring writing on the top of the piece. Holding the paper up to the light, I was astonished to see that it said "Musikblätter der Hitler=Jugend Nr. 594." On the back of the piece was information in German (my German is a little rusty), but it gave me this crazy sense of being incredibly connected to history. A search in OCLC revealed only 2 other holdings and very little else about this particular piece of music, and although the Library of Congress has a good collection of these pieces, they do not hold ours. This particular piece of history, as it turns out, is rare....very rare. And to think I was about to throw it away....
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