The story itself is full of compelling everyday drama. A small theological institute on the outskirts of Philadelphia, far from the centers of musical scholarship, turns up an original manuscript in Beethoven's hand. It is discovered by a bewildered librarian who was doing some housekeeping, and musicologists from Berlin to Boston are astonished. For everyone else, it is fair to ask, what's the fuss all about? The music itself had been published—a four-hand piano transcription of the Grosse Fuge, originally conceived for string quartet—so is this really any kind of a monumental discovery?

Time will tell. But at the very least, the handwritten scores unearthed at Palmer Theological Seminary this summer add a significant dimension to our conception of a great composer. They are a window into the heart and mind of the artist. The writing of Bach, meticulous and almost decorative, reflects the architectural designs of the music. Mozart's scores have a fluidity that mimics a mind barely able to contain the music, which flows out in a stream. Bartík manuscripts are as dense, jagged and emphatic as the music. Stravinsky's notations were scientifically precise. In our own time, almost all composers have eschewed pen and paper for the computer, but there are still holdouts. Surely, the most famous is George Crumb, whose music is only played from reproductions of his gorgeous scores, including staves twisted into circles, intended by the composer to inspire a sense of mystery and exploration among the players.

And then there is Beethoven. His musical penmanship is as passionate and explosive as the music. There is no little violence expressed in the writing, including erasures that tear through the paper, and thick overwriting. Even more than with Mozart, there is an exciting sense of a genius overflowing with ideas, as the hands race to keep up with the mind. Beethoven was the greatest pianist of his time, as revolutionary a performer as he was a composer, and the scores convey a palpable sense of his power and depth as a practicing musician.

In the case of the newly discovered manuscript, there is added poignancy because the Grosse Fuge is a late work, written when the composer was almost certainly completely deaf. And yet there are finger markings in the score, indicating that Beethoven played the piece himself. At this point in his life, he removed the legs from his piano, so that the strings would vibrate into the floorboards, giving the composer some sense, beyond his fathomless imagination, of how the music lived beyond the pages. And we, in viewing those very pages today, look across time, adding a level of appreciation that must enrich the way we hear the music.