*
Settling into a train compartment alone with her violin, Jelly experienced a naughty if good-humoured guilt at enjoying her solitude. Sharing a home with Adila and her family was adorable, and she felt grateful to them every day; but the holiday with Erik had not felt holidayesque.
It seemed to her that Erik and Adila had fastened on to one another’s spirits and she could not decide which of them was clinging harder. Alec seemed neither worried nor jealous, but Jelly could not forget the jolt of discomfort that went through her upon learning that they had gone to the beach without her and Adrienne. Yet as a guest in her sister’s household – however much Adila and Alec insisted that it was her home too – she could scarcely afford to express any objection.
The view from the train window was freckled with soot, now and then obliterated by clouds of steam; the song of the wheels made a tempting accompaniment. She had a compartment to herself, so to use the time productively she took out her violin and spent the rest of the journey practising.
At Edinburgh’s Waverley station, iron girders overhead clashed with the bright northern sky. Jelly packed up the Bergonzi and swung down her old leather suitcase – she’d travelled light, for once. She could not see Tovey at first in the cluster of people waiting to meet the train – then out of the steam-misted station depths there emerged a familiar tall figure, wearing a pale hat and a light suit, perfect for a spring evening. Under bushy eyebrows, his eyes, wide-set and capable of what she regarded as inspired ferocity, glowed at her across the concourse as he strode forward to help her with her case.
*
The morning after a joyous musical dinner party in her honour at Tovey and his wife Clara’s house, the professor took Jelly to work with him. Edinburgh University’s music library was well populated with students cramming for their exams, though Tovey remarked as they passed that its catalogue system desperately needed updating. On his study door, a plaque declared him the Reid Professor of Music: inside, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were stuffed with volumes accumulated during his two decades in the post. Running her fingertips along their cracked spines and embossed titles, Jelly thought the books smelled of all the lost worlds within their pages. She imagined sentences fluttering out like moths, dusted with the scents of coffee, chocolate, cigar smoke, a hint of whisky.
‘The coffee and chocolates are real.’ Tovey settled behind his desk. ‘Have some.’ He pushed a box towards her; Jelly pounced on a walnut praline that reminded her of the palacsinta she had loved in Hungary. Tovey sipped coffee. ‘Now, tell me what’s going on. Something is eating you up.’
Jelly took a breath, then began to explain in full her search for Schumann’s Violin Concerto.
He heard her out. ‘Gott in Himmel,’ he breathed when she’d finished. ‘Jelly, are you sure about this? You must realise it sounds perfectly preposterous.’
‘But think, Donald, please – you see, it doesn’t matter how we know, if the concerto is real… ’
‘Adila has never heard of it?’
‘She insists Onkel Jo never said a word, and she’d remember, wouldn’t she?’
‘Perhaps. But Adila is a busy lady. She gives a great deal, to her career, her family, her students and the best parties in Chelsea. And this spiritualist stuff – she regards it as central to her life, doesn’t she? Personally I can’t help being a scornful sceptic… ’ He took another chocolate and a sip of coffee, mingling the two in his mouth. ‘We need written evidence. I have some books that may tell us, so let’s go hunting.’
First he extracted a fat volume entitled Life of Joachim, by Andreas Moser. He turned to the index; as Jelly watched, he fell still and his eyes brightened.
‘Ha! Jelly, look! First time lucky.’
Under the index heading SCHUMANN was an entry that said, clear as Scottish sunlight, VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MINOR.
‘Schumann wrote to Joachim about it,’ Tovey said, reading rapidly. ‘So… yes, Jelly. It’s real. You’re very pale – are you all right?’
Jelly was silent. There, in print, was the confirmation she needed. She had been inwardly prepared for Tovey to continue declaring the whole story bunkum. Perhaps she’d hoped he would – because whatever was she to do about it now?
Tovey was following the trail. ‘It seems… yes, it was written for Joachim, naturally, and he gave a performance… Ah. Look, Jelly. A Schumann letter, written from the asylum at Endenich. It’s to Onkel Jo, saying he wishes he could have heard his performance of the D minor Concerto, quotes “which Clara speaks to me about so enthusiastically”.’
Jelly tried to summon her voice. ‘It wasn’t… quite real… before.’
‘Good. Now it is. Let’s see… ’
He spent a few minutes jotting notes, checking pages and staring thereafter into space. Jelly kept motionless for fear of disturbing him.
‘So, it’s from 1853,’ he said at last. ‘That does make it, as your critic friend suggested, a late work… Completed that October. Which, my dear, is exactly when he met Brahms for the first time. That gave him a boost – he was enchanted by this brilliant young man and his music.’
‘When was it that Schumann had his nervous breakdown?’
‘Five months later. He ran out of the house in his nightclothes one evening during carnival, threw his wedding ring into the Rhine and leapt in after it, apparently intending to drown himself. He was saved, but after that, he asked to be sent to the asylum.’
‘And the Violin Concerto?’
‘From the look of these,’ Tovey said, tapping the volumes in front of him, ‘our elusive concerto may have been the last big orchestral work he ever wrote.’
‘So – perhaps a flood of inspiration, and then a crash?’
‘Here’s something else.’ Tovey pored over a page, translating from the German. ‘There’s a letter here from Joachim to Moser, about the concerto… and – hmm. He doesn’t like it very much. He says it shows, and I quote, “a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy”, though “certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative soul… ”’
‘But how can we know unless we can hear it?’
‘Precisely. It is only fair to Schumann that the work should be heard and assessed anew.’
‘Surely if Clara was “enthusiastic”, it can’t be one of those pieces she wanted to suppress, like that critic said.’
‘Think of the situation. Schumann is ill in an asylum; Clara is forbidden to see him, so she’s writing to him. Now, supposing Tom were a composer, he had produced a piece of questionable quality and you had to write to him in his current unfortunate condition to tell him you had heard it? You would be “enthusiastic” too, I think.’
‘Where do you think we should start?’ Jelly asked, deflecting the topic away from the painful thought of Tom – who had once been Tovey’s pupil and remained his friend.
‘I suggest you contact two people,’ Tovey said. ‘First, Onkel Jo’s daughter, your cousin Elisabeth Joachim, in Oxford; and next, Eugenie Schumann, the daughter of Robert and Clara, who lives somewhere in Switzerland. She is the last of their children to survive with body and mind entirely intact.’
‘Really? What happened to the others?’
‘Several died young from tuberculosis. One, Ludwig, went mad like his father, but much younger, and spent the rest of his life – decades of it – in an asylum. Marie, the eldest, died just a few years ago, having mainly devoted herself to caring for her mother. Clara was very good at inspiring people to care for her, Brahms included.’
‘You never met Brahms, did you?’ Jelly was not quite four years old when the composer died.
‘Alas, no. Onkel Jo always said he would introduce me, but we were never in the same country at the same time. And then it was too late… ’
An image of Tom lingered in Jelly’s mind.
‘The glass said the concerto was in Weimar. Perhaps I should go to Germany to look for it.’
&n
bsp; Tovey’s smile vanished. ‘Jelly, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
‘Whyever not?’
Tovey wandered to the window and stared out at the quiet morning, the townsfolk going about their business, bicycles and a few cars and trucks rattling up and down the hills. ‘You wouldn’t believe it possible from here. Jelly, listen: apparently there are disappearances, beatings, bricks through windows, notices in shops and restaurants forbidding Jews… There was an official boycott, so I’m told, of Jewish businesses in Berlin a month or so ago and now, I think in Frankfurt, they have forced the dismissal of all Jewish actors and musicians from their companies. It looks as if they are trying to negate Jewish influences wherever they can. I think you shouldn’t go.’
Jelly tried to absorb this information. ‘But I’m not Jewish, at least not entirely, and surely they can’t hurt me if I’m foreign?’
‘Onkel Jo was Jewish, so effectively that makes you part of his family and probably, therefore, Jewish as well – at least to the mind of a Nazi.’
‘But he converted. He became a Catholic, quite young… ’
‘I know, but is Jewishness a matter of race or religion? For Jo, it was religion. To the Nazis, it’s something quite different.’
Images of Berlin ten years previously swirled in Jelly’s memory – nightclubs, jazz, the most outlandishly dressed people she’d ever set eyes on, actors and authors and incredible conductors and singers. It used to be so free, so open.
‘No longer,’ said Tovey. ‘Don’t go, I beg you.’
‘But if I can convince… ’
‘Jelly,’ he interrupted, ‘will you please listen to me? I didn’t want to tell you this… but they have just destroyed all the busts and statues of Onkel Jo, and renamed Joachimstrasse.’
Jelly recoiled. ‘But he was their greatest violinist… ’
‘Yet not an “Aryan”. That is their chief concern.’
‘But it’s stupid! People are the same, they have the same needs and the same duties and – ’
‘I don’t pretend my analytical skills extend anywhere beyond music, let alone to politics. Still, it strikes me that there’s a tipping point in any ideology when facts and sense start to matter less than the imposition of that ideology for its own sake. And then people may decide it’s in their interests to pretend to believe in it, even if they don’t. It’s fascism, Jelly. And even if you yourself might be safe, I personally forbid you to visit a country that’s foisting this upon its people.’
The vandalism against her great-uncle’s legacy stung Jelly as if she’d swallowed a hornet. Everyone would know about her Jewish roots via Joachim. But how could one quarter of one’s inheritance make such a difference?
‘My father was chief of the Budapest police,’ she protested. ‘He was part of the establishment, he was known and respected… ’
‘That won’t hold any sway with the Nazis. Don’t underestimate them. They are pigs rooting for the truffle that is power, and when they smell it there’s no stopping them.’
‘Donald – you don’t think it’ll happen here too, do you?’
‘Heaven willing, the majority of the British are too set in their ways to adopt anything so crudely alien,’ Tovey remarked. ‘But there are elements, especially in the upper crust of society and also among the disaffected unemployed, who are taken with Oswald Mosley, and we cannot deny they would like it to do so.’
‘Whatever would happen to me and Adila?’
Tovey gave her a quick and penetrating glance. ‘Try not to worry about it, Jelly. Keep vigilant and stay away from trouble. Meanwhile, our concern is that concerto… ’
Jelly, unsettled, took stock. ‘So the concerto is in Germany; Germany is ruled by the Nazis; and I can’t go.’
‘Brava.’
She drummed her heels in frustration. ‘If we’d had this message a year ago, or two, there’d have been no problem. Instead, the “messengers” had to appear just after Hitler took over! Why?’
Tovey sipped coffee, cold in its cup. ‘I wonder that as well.’
‘What we need, then,’ said Jelly, ‘is someone who is already in Germany and who has the contacts to go and look on our behalf. Do you know anyone? An academic? A composer?’
A broad smile unfolded across Tovey’s face. ‘You know something? I believe I know the very person.’
Chapter 6
Ulrich Schultheiss, assistant editor at the music publishers B. Schott und Söhne in Mainz, had not slept for five nights. Possibly ten. Sometimes, switching on the wireless to hear the news, which was often no longer news but whitewashing, he suspected he might never sleep again. The Chancellor had declared his political party the only one in Germany, effectively banning all others; that seemed to confirm Ulli’s worst suspicions that Hitler was not only dangerous, but medically insane.
Mainz, Ulli thought, should have been a small enough town not to feel the shifting tectonic plates of world politics. All that changed when the director of the local conservatoire, Hans Gál – a fine composer and even finer man, in Ulli’s view – was evicted from his post one month after the college had renewed his contract.
‘It contravenes the law, surely?’ said Ulli to his boss, Ludwig Strecker – the joint proprietor of the firm with his brother, Willy. Two tall men in their fifties blessed with imposing Roman profiles and a steely charisma fed by the endurance tests of the 1914–18 war, the Strecker brothers were on first-name terms with the entire music world of central Europe and beyond.
‘Law? What law?’ Ludwig said. ‘These madmen can do whatever they want. Gál is Jewish and he’s out. It’s nothing to do with his music or his teaching, let alone the law.’
‘But why does nobody do or say anything? Why aren’t there protests?’ Visiting the conservatoire to see a friend, Ulli had found its stone staircases and dark wooden doorways echoing with the usual wails, scales and studies, the corridors dotted with students smoking after class, while professors lunched in the café opposite. Business as usual – but without Hans Gál.
‘You can’t be surprised if people are afraid to speak out.’
‘But if they can force this, what next? If people just let things happen… ’
‘Oh, Ulli.’ Ludwig was shaking his head. Ulli knew he had experienced the trenches and still had nightmares about them, though he rarely spoke of it. ‘You’re very young,’ was all he said.
The Gáls made a furtive visit to Willy Strecker’s family to say farewell, one night when Ulli happened to be there for dinner. They were leaving, they said, so that their friends would no longer be compromised by seeing them; the Third Reich officials were observing and noting every move of the town’s Jewish citizens. ‘Don’t those busybodies have anything better to do with their time?’ Ulli grumbled.
The Gáls walked away across the square with their two sons, avoiding the streetlights, heads down, dark hats and scarves all but concealing their faces; with a fearful lurch he wondered when he might ever see them again. He shut himself inside the cloakroom for a few minutes so that his boss would not witness his emotions getting the better of him.
He had seen it approaching, yet he didn’t want to believe it. It had been baking at the back of the Depression’s oven for years. The new recipe of this nationalist cake – thick textured and full of nuts, Ulli thought – lured disaffected young people who couldn’t find jobs, since there were none to be had; it seemed aromatic, too, for older folk who’d blame anyone but the government and world finances for what was going on: immigrants, Jews, Gypsies, sodomites, and anybody who dared to ask too many questions.
Ulli could easily have been part of that. His father never came back from Ypres, and he still recalled the anguish of mortification when he arrived at school during the war in a blazer three sizes too small, lightheaded and nauseous because there was no breakfast to eat, nor any lunch to look forward to. He thanked God, and his mother, for his music; in contact with the piano keys and the spirits of Beethoven, Bach or Schumann, he felt the world�
��s madness give way to beauty, inspiration and order, while the music lasted. He wished to serve that beauty, inspiration and order; now working for Schott gave him the chance to do so. And so the Streckers, and Ulli with them, watched, waited and fought what corners were theirs to fight; namely, those of the composers whose works they published.
Each morning Ulli bicycled to the office from his flat on the outskirts of Mainz – a small apartment with a living room occupied mainly by his Bechstein piano. He would ride along by the river Rhine, past the dusky pink stone of the ancient cathedral and into the medieval streets of the town centre, cobbles under his wheels, oak-beamed façades around him – as pretty as a set for Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, which Schott published, and as German as one for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which Schott also published. On the Weihergarten he left his bike outside the building, then unlocked the heavy wooden door that led to the main staircase between the street and the courtyard. There in the hall he found himself face to face with Richard Wagner.
‘Good morning, Herr Richard,’ Ulli said silently to Wagner’s bust. It had a noble mien – much idealised – and Ulli never failed to bid it good morning. Wagner’s operas brought the company coffers quantities of income: they owed the old codger a dreadful debt of thanks. And whatever you thought of the man, his unspeakable arrogance and the suspicion that every time he looked in a mirror he saw Nietzsche’s Superman, there was no getting away from the glory of his music. He had unveiled the libretto of Die Meistersinger to Willy and Ludwig’s grandfather downstairs in the same offices some 70 years earlier. The Strecker brothers, having inherited the family business, insisted that nothing in that historic space must be changed, so the Wagner Room kept its character: the fine-limbed wooden furniture, the graceful cornicing, and a very elderly piano – nobody dared to touch it now – on which Liszt and Wagner had both played. While other firms moved to Berlin to be at the centre of German cultural life, Schott’s stayed put, their location and history prime assets. Here in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg had invented the modern process of printing: now the Streckers kept their products rolling off the presses not a mile away from that first machine. And Ulli, as general, all-round, right-hand editorial man, would make certain that everything was progressing smoothly and on time. Beauty, inspiration and order. Strange ideals, perhaps, at a time of fire – of the Reichstag, of books, of democracy itself – but ones only to be found in art.
Ghost Variations Page 8
