Two priceless pieces of historic Toronto art — Massey Hall’s stained-glass portraits of Bach and Beethoven — are missing-in-action as the landmark embarks on a massive revitalization project.

As part of a $139-million, multi-year revitalization, close to 100 stained-glass windows are being carefully restored, said Sharon Vattay, architectural historian at GBCA Architects, one of the firms overseeing the process.

The most spectacular of the windows, unveiled at the Hall’s opening in 1894, were portraits rendered in glass, enamel, silver and lead of 12 famous composers: Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Chopin, Weber, Schubert, Gounod, Wagner, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven and Bach.

Eight were covered up in the first half of the 20th century, Vattay said. A set of four others — depicting Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Handel — were removed even earlier to make room for the first fire exits.

Haydn and Handel hung in Massey Hall offices for years. Today, they’re safely in storage at Roy Thomson Hall. But Bach and Beethoven? Apparently lost to the sands of time. A 1923 photo seems to show Handel and Hayden installed, so Bach and Beethoven were probably still in place then, as well. But after that, the trail goes cold.

Or so it seemed.

Some digging by Metro revealed the existence of brilliant colour photos of the missing portraits — banged up and stained, yet recognizable — hiding on old photographic slides at York University.

They were taken by historian Shirley Ann Brown during a tour of Massey Hall for an article she was writing about the windows for Rotunda, the ROM’s old magazine.

She shared this excerpt from her notes in August 1991: “The janitor told me to follow him, that he thought there was something else I might be interested in. Deep in the bowels of the building, in an almost empty storage room, there were two more partial windows leaning up against a wall. They were dirty and rather damaged.

“They turned out to be two more windows from the same composer series: Bach and Beethoven. When I finished photographing them, we returned the two windows to their resting place in the basement.”

“That was news to me,” said Grant Troop, director of operations at Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall.

The photos, Troop said, seem to show the Bach and Beethoven portraits propped up on the facade of the Albert building, a small annex and storage area behind the hall that was demolished starting in 2014.

Every artifact was taken out and meticulously catalogued, Troop said. Bach and Beethoven weren’t there.

“The (Albert) building is gone. Everything else from the basement of Massey Hall is gone,” he said. “I would love to find those windows. Believe me, I have looked. I don’t know what happened.

“They could have been crushed in an accident. Or someone decided to throw them out. I’m not saying it’s impossible we’ll find them. But anywhere that is a reasonable location, we’ve looked.”

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It’s a long-shot, but if someone out there does have the windows, they can return them — no questions asked.

“If somebody wanted to drop them off on the doorsteps of Massey Hall like a baby in the middle of the night, we’d be more than happy to have them back,” Troop said.