Producer George Martin’s original handwritten score to much-loved Beatles song Eleanor Rigby is selling at Omega Auctions.
Paul McCartney is credited as the main author of Eleanor Rigby, which appears on the Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver, but Martin composed the moving string section.
Eleanor Rigby was the B-side to Yellow Submarine (1966)
These two pages of musical notation are signed at the top by Martin and McCartney.
There’s also a note specifying that the score will be recorded in the second studio at Abbey Road.
The page is valued at £20,000 ($25,803) but that looks low given the enormous popularity of this particular song and the growing demand for Beatles memorabilia.
Lyrics and other handwritten ephemera from the band have sold for as much as $1.2m in the past.
Martin is sometimes referred to as the fifth Beatle, given his enormous influence on the band’s development. This piece could easily sell for somewhere around the $100,000 mark given the right buyer.
The sale will also include the grave deeds for the Eleanor Rigby, who is buried in the graveyard of Woolton Parish Church in Liverpool.
Incredibly, Lennon and McCartney actually met for the first time at the church in 1957 - following a gig by the Quarrymen at a fete.
McCartney swears he’d never noticed the name on the gravestone before and would later say: "It was either complete coincidence or in my subconscious”.
Not much is known about the real Eleanor Rigby, save that she was born in August 1895, worked as a scullery maid at Liverpool City Hospital and died of a brain haemorrhage in October 1939.
The deeds are valued at £4,000 ($5,154).
Again, that looks low. In 2011, a document signed by a young Eleanor Rigby realised £115,000 ($148,197).
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