The professional appraiser who found a piece of work by Ludwig van Beethoven said the discovery was the "highlight of my career." 
 
 "It was just sort of hanging in a hallway and I saw it essentially right when I walked in, from across the room," Brendan Ryan told ABC News. "I said to myself,'‘Oh my God, that’s Beethoven.'" 
 
 "I recognized the handwriting because [Beethoven] has unmistakable handwriting," Ryan said. 
 
 What Ryan found hanging in the hallway of a Greenwich, Conn., home was a sketch leaf by Beethoven containing music to the famed composer’s opus 117, "König Stephan." 
 
 Ryan said the relic had been in the hands of the Greenwich family for 100 years. 
 
 "There are textbooks written on his sketch leaves but this sketch leaf is virtually unknown," Ryan said. 
 
 “We were there to look at other things, like furniture and paintings, but I knew that the Beethoven [leaf] was a valuable object and added it to our appraisal,” he added. “The owner decided that she would like to sell it and that’s when all the real research started because at that point we didn’t know what the music was.” 
 
 Ryan, a composer himself and former music student, turned to Carmelo Comberiati, his college professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., for help trying to find the piece of music attached to the sketch leaf. 
 
 Bob Luckey Jr./Greenwich Time 
 
 “It took about three weeks and was a lot of work,” Ryan said. “I equate it to trying to find a word in the dictionary without knowing the first letter.” 
 
 “We started combing through his works and I was able to find a photograph of another sketch leaf that was in the digital archives at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, Germany, where Beethoven was born,” Ryan said. “I was able to deduce that this was from a piece of Beethoven’s ‘King Stephan.’” 
 
 He continued: "The sketch leaf gives insight into his work process. Parts are only in pencil and others are also done over in pen -- that’s evidence that this is the area where Beethoven decided, 'Okay, that’s the theme I’m going to use.'" 
 
 Butterscotch Auction Gallery, the Bedford, N.Y., auction house where Ryan is employed, sold the sketch leaf for $120,000 at an auction last month. 
 
 The owner, who wanted to remain anonymous, received a windfall of $100,000. The buyer, according to Ryan, was an “important German autograph manuscript dealer.” 
 
 “It’s certainly one of the highlights of my career,” Ryan, a 10-year veteran of the appraising business, said of the find. “For me, personally, Beethoven is an idol of mine. It’s like seeing pages by your favorite author in the flesh.” ||||| Beethoven composition discovered in Greenwich 
 
 Brendan Ryan noticed it right away. 
 
 A professional appraiser, he recently visited the home of a Greenwich woman who was looking to sell some belongings, when his eyes lit on a yellowing sheet of music behind glass, stippled with notes. 
 
 More than just a musical composition, the sheet was ferociously dotted with German words, directions and symbols that practically flew off the page with manic intensity. 
 
 “When I saw it, I knew what it was. I’d seen his handwriting before,” said Ryan, who works for Butterscotch Auction Gallery in Bedford, N.Y. 
 
 A musician himself, Ryan had been obsessed with Ludwig van Beethoven as a younger man. Standing in the Greenwich home on a late summer afternoon, he was all but certain the music he was looking at had been penned by the great composer. 
 
 “I’ve been in a lot of homes and seen hundreds of things, but this will be one of the most memorable moments of my career,” he said. 
 
 He managed to keep his professional composure while perusing the possessions of the Greenwich woman, whose identity is not being disclosed by the auction house, until he was outside. 
 
 “I called my wife when I got into my car, I think I was bouncing off the walls,” said Ryan. 
 
 The sheet music went from being a curio in a Greenwich home to a $100,000 windfall when it sold at auction last month. For music scholars, it’s become an exciting addition to the Beethoven canon. 
 
 But before all that could happen, some detective work needed to be carried out. Was it really a sheet of Beethoven composition that graced a Greenwich home for decades, and if so, to which work did it belong? 
 
 “The woman who owned it knew it was valuable — but how valuable? That’s our job, to see what people have. It’s like ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ ” Ryan said, referring to the PBS television program. 
 
 Ryan called his old musical mentor and professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., Carmelo Comberiati. As a Fulbright scholar in Vienna, Comberiati had studied old Beethoven manuscripts. 
 
 He was able to come up with the exact work, written in 1810, to which the sheet music in question was connected. The page came from the sketchbook the composer used for brainstorming. 
 
 “Beethoven would write out his ideas. With most composers, we just have the final product — they threw the rest out. Beethoven didn’t throw anything out,” Comberiati said, “I found the sketchbook, and referenced the exact piece, we put it all together.” 
 
 The sheet of paper was quite revealing of Beethoven, his thought process and his stormy personality, the professor said. 
 
 “We can see the fire as it happened. He just went wild with a crescendo of activity,” Comberiati said. “There’s so much impatience there — I can’t imagine working for the guy. But that aspect of his character is wonderful.” 
 
 Another detail that confirmed the sheet work’s authenticity were three small holes on the side of the paper. The holes match up exactly with known samples from the sketchbook in Bonn, Germany. Beethoven threaded pages of the sketchbook together himself with a needle and some twine. 
 
 The sketchbook had some 30 pages of lined paper in it, and it was with this pad that Beethoven, age 40, began work on “King Stephen.” It was a rush job — done in two weeks — to write incidental music for a ceremonial theater piece honoring the founder of Hungary, tied to the opening of a new concert hall in that nation’s capital city. Beethoven was at a spa in 1810 when he wrote the work. 
 
 It’s unclear what happened to the sketchbook after Beethoven’s death in 1827. At some point, it was broken up and cut into pieces and sold in portions to admirers. A few snippets have turned up in fragmentary form. 
 
 “Having a complete sheet is rare, and so heavily and densely worked on is even more rare,” Ryan said, “They don’t come up often.” 
 
 Evidently, a leading German antiques dealer agreed, placing a winning bid of $100,000 on Nov. 15, plus another $20,000 for the buyer’s premium. It substantially exceeded estimates. 
 
 “She’s very happy,” Ryan said of the Greenwich owner of the piece. 
 
 An expert on historical musical manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Jeffrey Kallberg, said it was an important and exciting discovery. 
 
 “Beethoven manuscripts turn up on the auction market with some regularity, but usually they’re known manuscripts. What makes this particularly interesting is this hadn’t garnered any notice — it’s been in this private collection,” said Kallberg, who viewed the piece on-line from his office in Philadelphia. “It’s a new manuscript, or a page from a manuscript, so that’s pretty exciting.” 
 
 It also captures quintessential Beethoven. 
 
 “He was famous for his sketching, and he sketched copiously. And it’s the archetypical looking Beethoven sketch — he had God-awful handwriting, he was working fast, it has the look of a messy genius.” 
 
 Kallberg hopes the sheet ends up in a state archive or library in Germany, where it could be made accessible to scholars and Beethoven lovers. 
 
 “It’s quite exciting when these things turn up,” the music professor said. “It’s cool that it was sitting in Greenwich all this time. Who knew?” 
 
 Robert.Marchant@scni.com ||||| Buy Photo Brendan Ryan of Butterscotch Auction Gallery and Professor Carmelo Comberiati of Mahattanville College authenticated a music sheet of Beetthoven's King Stephen, Op. 117. (Photo: Ricky Flores/The Journal News)Buy Photo 
 
 On the surface, Mel Comberiati and Brendan Ryan make an unlikely pair of sleuths: a passionate professor of music and his former student, a composer of classical music. 
 
 What they share is a deep love and respect for the work of Ludwig van Beethoven. 
 
 Comberiati, who teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, was a Fulbright scholar who studied the great composer in Vienna, while Ryan, who graduated from Manhattanville in 2008, became an art and antiques appraiser, composing music in his free time. 
 
 "Beethoven is an idol for any composer," Ryan says. 
 
 He credits a class he took with Comberiati for igniting his interest. 
 
 In a confluence of events as wondrous as the cycle of Beethoven's nine symphonies, these classical "nerds" found themselves working together to solve a once-in-a-lifetime puzzle, one which brought them close to their shared idol. 
 
 In the late summer, Ryan, an appraiser for Butterscotch Auctioneers and Appraisers in Pound Ridge, discovered what appeared to be a rare Beethoven sketch leaf, framed and hanging on a wall in a Greenwich, Connecticut, home. 
 
 "I recognized the handwriting right away; it was definitely Beethoven," he says. "When I saw it, it was a test of my willpower to keep my cool." 
 
 The sketch leaf had been in the owner's family for more than 100 years, and she knew the double-sided page covered in notes and nearly illegible scribbles might be valuable. 
 
 "But no one had any idea what it was," Ryan says. 
 
 To find out, he called on his old professor. 
 
 They were both sure it was Beethoven — the fact that someone had jotted "Beethoven" in a different hand on the margin notwithstanding. ("It wouldn't be the first time someone had written 'Beethoven' on something that turned out to be totally worthless," Ryan says). The mystery was determining exactly what piece of music was inscribed on the centuries-old paper and how valuable it might be. 
 
 "We were hoping it was the Ninth Symphony," says Ryan, sitting in a plastic chair in Comberiati's classroom, an overhead projector glowing with a super-enlarged copy of the music. Similar, complete sketchbooks of Beethoven's works have sold for millions at auction. 
 
 Buy Photo Professor Carmelo Comberiati of Mahattanville College helped authenticate a rare sketch leaf from Beethoven's King Stephan, Op. 117. (Photo: Ricky Flores/The Journal News) 
 
 "But it wasn't." 
 
 The pair researched the work for three weeks, comparing it to other known pages taken from Beethoven sketchbooks, searching for clues online, and enlisting experts Comberiati knew from his work as a Fulbright scholar. 
 
 "I have held Beethoven documents in my hands," he says. 
 
 What they had, they discovered, was a rare Beethoven work in-progress — literally the first draft for what would become Beethoven's opus 117, "King Stephan" , commissioned by Emperor Francis I of Hungary for the inauguration of a new theater. It was first performed on Feb. 9, 1812. 
 
 "Beethoven was at a spa for 10 days rest when he got the commission, so he was in a bit of a rush," Camberiati explains. "So it's kind of a mess. We could see how he wrote the lines out, then dismisses the idea. He's working out the music; He writes a line, crosses it out. It's in pencil then written over in ink. The main idea for us that was so exciting is that he got from this to the final copy for the manuscript. This is a stage that set it all off." 
 
 "It's a graphic representation of the music," Ryan adds. "It's the moment you get to see inside the composer's mind." 
 
 Manhattanville Professor Carmelo Comberiati and appraiser Brendan Ryan find a worksheet of Beethoven's King Stephan Opus 117. (Video by Ricky Flores/The Journal News) 
 
 For two major fans, holding a piece of Beethoven's work in their own hands must have been nirvana. 
 
 Combierati not only teaches multiple classes on Beethoven, Chopin and Hayden, but writes book-length projects; The latest is on the music in 16th century Prague. This was different, he says. This was personal. 
 
 Pointing at the screen, he is obviously passionate: 
 
 "You can see the intensity of the artist," he says. "It's the heat of the moment." 
 
 He hums a bit of the composition, punctuating the sounds with his hands: "'bah, ba-ba-ba-ba'... you can see Beethoven working this all out in his mind." 
 
 Ryan is more understated, a music major who segued into the appraisal field after college. He has a history with history, too: His mother is the executive director of the Bedford Historical Society. Comberiati is also from Bedford and has known Ryan since he was in high school. 
 
 And while Ryan admits the process of authentication was "intense," the pair worked well together. 
 
 "This doesn't happen often, but things just start fitting together," Ryan says. "I'll say this, it was like scouring for a word in the dictionary without knowing the first letter." 
 
 A German collector bought the piece for $120,000 at auction in November; not millions but a tidy sum for the Greenwich homeowner, who prefers to remain anonymous. But what of the two detectives? 
 
 More than anything, they say, was knowing they had authenticated something special. 
 
 "A Beethoven sketch leaf of this magnitude is a very rare find,” says Comberiati. “Most are no longer in private hands.” 
 
 "It was a big job," adds Ryan. "A mammoth task was to figure out the piece of music; in terms of value that has tremendous impact. It also has tremendous value to Beethoven scholars." 
 
 But for him personally? 
 
 "With music, you only ever hear the final product," he says, playing a few quick seconds of the music from the sketch leaf on a piano in the classroom. 
 
 "No one can really understand or have the concept of what goes into creating an orchestral piece," he says. "To see firsthand, almost to be inside the composer's mind, the proof in your hand is profound." 
 
 Do you have a masterpiece hanging around your house? 
 
 Brendan Ryan says when it comes to valuable objects, there are two categories of people: those who assume their family heirlooms must be valuable, and those who never suspect that great-grandma's ugly painting, relegated to a dark hallway, is actually a masterpiece. 
 
 The former is more prevalent. 
 
 His advice: If you think you have something of value, contact an expert. "It doesn't cost anything to have an appraiser take a look," he says. "We do it for free. We take a look and make recommendations." 
 
 Ryan points to one of his previous finds as proof: He authenticated a painting long held by a Westchester family as one by Dutch golden age artist Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). It sold for $2,040,000 in 2012. 
 
 In 2011, a Cortlandt homeowner got the shock of his life when two paintings hanging for years in the basement of his childhood rec room turned out to be lost Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey masterpieces. The two fetched $840,000 at auction. 
 
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– Appraiser Brendan Ryan was at a house in Greenwich, Conn., to take a look at furniture and other items the owner wanted to sell, but it was a framed document hanging on a wall that caught his attention. "I said to myself, 'Oh my God, that's Beethoven," Ryan tells ABC News. Beethoven's handwriting is "unmistakable," explains Ryan, who is also a composer. His hunch panned out, and what turned out to be a rare 1810 Beethoven sketch leaf of Beethoven's opus 117, König Stephan, sold at auction in November for $120,000, the Journal News reports. But before that could happen, the sketch leaf had to be authenticated and the music identified, and Ryan is providing new details about the weeks-long process. “I equate it to trying to find a word in the dictionary without knowing the first letter," says Ryan, who sought the help of his former music professor, Mel Comberiati of Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. The pair pored over the digital archives of Beethoven's works from the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, Germany. Most composers threw out their notes, but luckily, "Beethoven didn’t throw anything out," Comberiati told Greenwich Time. One important clue came in the form of three small holes on the side of the leaf that matched up perfectly with known samples from the complete sketchbook. The sketch leaf sheds light on Beethoven's process, showing ideas in pencil getting tweaked and then made permanent with ink, reports ABC News. "It's kind of a mess," Comberiati tells the Journal News. "He's working out the music. He writes a line, crosses it out." It's like the "moment you get to see inside the composer's mind." (Beethoven's heart arrhythmia may have influenced his music.)