It will go on sale at Sotheby's in London. The estimated price is well over Ô£1 million. The manuscript will be on display at Sotheby's in New York November 16-19.

The manuscript, which transformed the 1826 string quartet into a piano duet, was written well after Beethoven went deaf. It is not the final version of the work; the annotations, deletions, and corrections are likely to provide a great deal of insight into the composer's thought processes and working methods.

This is not the first time the school, the Palmer Theological Seminary, has found a rare document in its archives. In 1990, a Mozart manuscript was discovered there.