MUSIC

‘Elijah’ Goes Home: The score for Felix Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” is going to be returned to the town where its world premiere took place in August, 1846. In an expensive bit of municipal pride, a dealer acting for the Birmingham City Council in Britain paid $187,000 for it Sunday at an auction at Christie’s in London. The performing score with Mendelssohn’s markings was lost for 140 years before being discovered in 1986 in the archives of the Novello music publishers. It was sold then to a private purchaser who apparently discovered later that he would not be allowed to take it out of Britain and decided to resell it at cost.