"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. "When I saw it, it was a test of my willpower to keep my cool." 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. 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. 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. 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. “Most are no longer in private hands.” 
 
 "It was a big job," adds Ryan. It’s like ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ ” Ryan said, referring to the PBS television program. “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. 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. We could see how he wrote the lines out, then dismisses the idea. "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. 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. 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 for 10 days rest when he got the commission, so he was in a bit of a rush," Camberiati explains. 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.'" 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. “It’s a new manuscript, or a page from a manuscript, so that’s pretty exciting.” 
 
 It also captures quintessential Beethoven. Bob Luckey Jr./Greenwich Time 
 
 “It took about three weeks and was a lot of work,” Ryan said.
– 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.)