A letter from Mozart is being auctioned off from Malaga for 440,000 euros.

A handwritten letter from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was auctioned this Thursday for 440,000 euros, while the auction for a draft of a letter from John Lennon to Eric Clapton failed to attract buyers, according to International Autograph Auctions Europe, an international auction house based in Malaga.

The auction house, considered the most important in Europe in the segment of autographs and manuscripts, has held auctions over the last three days, but reserved the most special hundred documents for Thursday afternoon, according to Francisco Piñero, the company's general manager.

Among these last lots was the Mozart letter, which reached a "record price," Piñero assured, who initially estimated that it could reach 200,000 euros, a figure that more than doubled. "We received bids from the USA, Europe and Asia," he highlighted, revealing only that the final buyer was European.

The Mozart letter discusses Haydn's quartets. The one-page letter written in German is "one of the most important autographed letters of Mozart to come to auction in recent years," the auction house's website claims.

Only twenty-five autographed letters by Mozart (several of them incomplete, and most written to his father or other relatives) have been auctioned in the last fifty years, according to the Auction and Book Sales Archive (ABSA), which incorporates records from American Book Prices Current (ABPC).

Mozart wrote this letter on April 26, 1783, to the French music publisher and composer born in Germany, Jean-Georges Sieber, starting with "Monsieur!" ("Sir!") to offer him some compositions and confirm that he was working on six quartets.

Lennon's Letter to Clapton

Less fortunate was the "extraordinary" eight-page draft letter (a draft, as it is full of deletions and underlinings) that Lennon wrote to Clapton with the proposal to form a group with members of the Plastic Ono Band, including his then-partner, Yoko Ono.

"You could make the kind of sound that would bring the drive back to rock and roll," Lennon said in the document, which had an estimated price of between 100,000 and 150,000 euros.

A rare 12th-century letter signed by a pope and three cardinals who would later also become popes was also auctioned, reaching a price of 15,000 euros.