Some of the cross-outs are so determined, Beethoven's pen has penetrated the paper. "I was just in a state of shock." Another public viewing is set for mid-November at Sotheby's in Manhattan before the manuscript is moved to London for the auction on 1 December.Experts say it will be the most important Beethoven score to surface for sale in living memory.The score is a work in progress. Widely recognised as one of Beethoven's most monumental compositions, the Grosse Fuge was originally written for a string quartet. The manuscript is the only known example of a major Beethoven work transcribed by the composer for the piano. "It was just sitting on that lower shelf," she told The New York Times yesterday. Written in brown and black ink, it is crammed with annotations and corrections and thus will give new insight into the creative patterns of the composer, who at the time was already stone deaf and only months from death. "This is an amazing find," said Stephen Roe, head of the manuscript department at Sotheby's."The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never before been seen or described by Beethoven scholars." When put under the hammer, the score, composed for four-handed piano, is expected to fetch up to $2.6m (£1.5m).Heather Carbo, the librarian, was cleaning out cabinets at the evangelical school one afternoon in July. Suddenly, she spotted the dusty manuscript in a paper and board cover sitting on a low shelf.At first, she hardly knew it would soon be setting the whole musicological community atwitter.

Displayed to the public at the Palmer Theological Seminary for just one afternoon yesterday, the 80-page manuscript, dated 1826, is a seminal find for scholars of Beethoven and classical music. A librarian in a religious school in the suburbs of Philadelphia has become the darling of classical music lovers after stumbling across a handwritten score of a piano version of Ludwig van Beethoven's celebrated workGrosse Fuge. The manuscript will be sold at auction by Sotheby's in London in December. They say persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey.Ankara angrily rejects the claim of a planned genocide, but some EU politicians still want Turkey to recognise the killings as genocide before Ankara is allowed to join the EU.. Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, angry at the Armenian separatist forces fighting for independence from Azerbaijan in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.For Armenians, the behaviour of the Young Turks, the dominant party in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, in systematically arranging the deportation and killing of 1.5 million Armenians, is central to their national self image. Despite criticism of the stance taken by Ankara on the issue, EU member states did not seek to make recognition of the Armenian case as genocide a condition of beginning negotiations on joining the bloc.The failure to acknowledge the genocide has also bedevilled Turkey's relations with its neighbour, Armenia. In February, New York Life agreed to pay $20m to descendants of its Armenian policyholders killed in 1915.Mark Geragos, an Armenian descendant who was a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said: "The AXA and New York Life settlements are important building blocks not only toward seeking financial recovery for the losses resulting from the Armenian genocide but also in our ultimate goal, which is for Turkey and the US to officially acknowledge the genocide."This month, Turkey launched EU membership talks which are expected to last at least a decade.

AXA's headquarters are in France and the company operates in the US through subsidiaries.Under the settlement, AXA agreed to donate several million dollars to various France-based Armenian charities. It will also contribute $11m toward a fund to pay valid claims of heirs of policyholders with AXA Group subsidiaries that did business in the Turkish Ottoman Empire before 1915.The AXA case was the second lawsuit of its kind to be settled in US courts, although the United States, along with Turkey, does not officially recognise the deaths as genocide. Turkey has always denied there was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against Armenians, saying they were casualties of partisan fighting and of a political vacuum during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Ankara says that as many as 300,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died during civil strife in eastern Turkey during the First World War. Last month the authorities finally allowed the issue to be debated on Turkish soil by historians at an academic conference. But the organisers had to side-step two legal orders banning it by rearranging the venue.The California settlement will be administered in France, which also has many expatriate Armenian communities and which was one of the first countries to recognise the murders as genocide. Armenians are stepping up their campaign to win formal classification of the murders as an act of genocide.