Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  When Tovey came in, Jelly was kneeling by the bed, her cheek resting on the folded blanket. For once, she was not crying.

  ‘Come along, my dear. Come on out now. There’s coffee for you downstairs.’ He helped her to her feet.

  ‘I feel as if I’ve looked over a cliff,’ Jelly whispered – she couldn’t get her voice to work. ‘And seen something… something empty and… blank.’

  ‘Hush, Jelly. His suffering is over now. There’s nothing more we can do.’

  George was waiting with the coffee in the lounge; she held out motherly arms and embraced Jelly. Beside her, the clock’s pendulum continued to swing.

  Part II

  1935–38

  Chapter 10

  After his visit to Britain in 1933 to hear Jelly play the not-really-Mozart concerto, Ulli went back to Mainz with his mind out of kilter. He slipped back into routine. He corrected proofs, wrote letters and sometimes, in the hall of the Schott’s building, paused to gaze at Wagner’s bust. Wagner, composer of Tristan und Isolde, should have known a thing or two about loving someone you shouldn’t.

  Ulli tried always to think first of his duties, not of his rights, and to be a man of honour, for the sake of Schott’s. With his feet firmly on the office floor, it took him no more than two seconds to imagine the outcome were he to have an affair with Jelly d’Arányi and be found out. A scandal: an older woman, at least partly Jewish, a starry soloist with a past that people rumoured was dubious – when he began to mention her name he soon discovered that some in the music business thought she’d been Bartók’s mistress, others that she was a man-eating femme fatale, still more that she would never even touch a man in preference to her violin. Besides, she had a vested interest in a work that she wanted his company to publish. Worse still, with relations between their countries plunging into the Channel, he had no idea how he might ever manage to see her again.

  Even when her image flickered before his eyelids, delectable as palacsinta, even when he noticed, at Sunday lunch with his mother, that he hadn’t heard one word she had been saying because his inner ear was full of violin music, even when he went about his usual business in Mainz, cycling past the cathedral and the sleepy river, and wondered what had happened to the part of himself that was still in London, dancing the tango and reciting Heinrich Heine, there was no choice at all. Once he stopped at the cathedral and, most uncharacteristically, went inside to say a prayer for peace of mind. Yet something about the altarpiece paintings there of the Madonna, perhaps the tilt of her head, reminded him of Jelly. Ulli made a rapid retreat.

  Their correspondence continued – yet whenever he picked up his fountain pen to write to her, he found himself chewing the end of its barrel with anxiety. Her friend had died; mourning him, she wrote, she had been careless on tour, fell and broke her finger; soon afterwards, she was laid low by a septic throat that affected her ears; and recovering from that, she fell again and hurt her back. She was having to cancel concerts, much to her own horror, and planning ahead was difficult with nobody to help. At any other point in history except for 1914–18, he reflected, this time would have been free and she could have come to visit him, or he could have begged for some leave from the office and gone to her.

  Instead, there came two further blows. The government reintroduced conscription. It applied in the first instance to men of 18 to 25, who all had to spend six months in military training; but should matters deteriorate, should there be war, and everyone thought Hitler intended this, Ulli knew he might find himself drafted. Then, with the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, he understood – with horrified incredulity – that for a German to marry or even have intimate relations with a Jewish or partly Jewish woman had just been made a criminal offence. He had dithered first for reasons of caution or ‘honour’, but now, if he pursued her, it could cost him both his job and his liberty.

  ‘I’m living in some kind of nightmare, some dystopian film,’ he said silently to Wagner’s bust one blustery November morning.

  ‘You had better get used to it,’ came the answer within.

  *

  ‘Ah, Ulli… ’ Willy Strecker blew in through the outer door, shaking dry an umbrella. ‘Just the man. Pop in for a minute, will you?’

  Upstairs, Ulli hung up his coat, then followed Strecker into the biggest office, festooned with framed composer portraits and pages of historic autograph manuscripts.

  Strecker settled behind the desk. ‘Ulli, we’d like you to go to Paris next month and make sure the music shops are still stocking our material. If they’re not, try to charm them. And while you’re there… it would be nice if you could drop in on a certain recording session and mention to the soloist the shadowy existence of a Schumann violin concerto.’

  Ulli listened in incredulity. ‘The Schumann? But what about Jel – Miss d’Arányi?’

  ‘There’s no reason she wouldn’t play it. But this concerto is a bigger concern than one violinist. We need as much ammunition as we can amass. As our Führer might put it,’ he added, with a certain sarcasm, ‘we need to re-arm.’

  ‘Who is the violinist?’

  Strecker lowered his voice. ‘Yehudi Menuhin.’

  ‘Menuhin?’ Ulli tried not to squawk with amazement. ‘But he is a… ’

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’ Strecker sat back in his chair, smiling, circling his thumbs around each other. ‘Ulli, there’s a world out there that doesn’t have race laws, and Yehudi lives in it.’

  Ulli rose, clicked his heels softly together and went, dazed, to ask Fräulein Kammerling to book him a room at the Hôtel Lutetia, Paris.

  *

  ‘Strawberry ice cream!’

  Yehudi Menuhin’s face shimmered, pink, white and sweaty, in the candlelight. At the Brasserie Flo in Paris a waiter was carrying towards the party a tray on which stood an outsized glass piled with pink stuff, one extra-long silver spoon at the ready. As he set it in front of the young violinist, the entire gathering gave a cheer.

  ‘Always.’ The man seated beside Ulli gave his elbow a nudge. ‘His favourite. If a boy can’t eat strawberry ice cream after finishing such a session, then when can he?’

  ‘Naturally,’ Ulli said. His neighbour was the boy wonder’s father, Moshe Menuhin.

  ‘When I first came to America, the first thing I did was to have a strawberry ice-cream soda. Now it’s his favourite. There’s a heritage for you!’ Moshe – sharp, lively, slightly pugnacious, Ulli thought, with a high-domed forehead and receding hairline – raised what was left of his glass of champagne.

  The entourage, which Ulli observed against the glow of the brasserie’s wood panelling and stained-glass insets, consisted of the recording team: George Enescu – who’d conducted that day for Menuhin, his ex-pupil; an assortment of young girls vying for attention; and Yehudi’s parents, plus his two sisters, one of whom, apparently a fine pianist and inseparable from him, had draped herself over his right shoulder. They were all clinking and cheering for the pleasure of the handsome young star in their midst. One of the girls had grabbed a piece of tinsel from the restaurant’s Christmas decorations and placed it around Yehudi’s collar, so that it cast up minuscule points of light around his face.

  Moshe paid for dinner for everyone. ‘Please, let Schott’s help,’ Ulli offered.

  Menuhin senior paused in amazement before giving way to laughter that turned heads across the sizeable restaurant. ‘Don’t worry, Dr Schultheiss. You know what my boy earns per year? My friend, when this tour’s over, he’s going to take a sabbatical until his 21st birthday. And while he’s away, this is time in which he could have earned 2 million dollars! So it’s my pleasure that this dinner should be on us.’

  Ulli made impressed noises. The generosity was admirable, yet he didn’t entirely approve of the freedom with which such quantities of money were openly revealed these days – a trend, of course, of the new world. Ulli, though only 33, was a man of the old one; he would have been happier, perhaps, in the 19th rather than
the 20th century. He wasn’t sure, moreover, that it was sensible for any musician to earn as much as that; if everyone were to demand the same, the concert world would go bankrupt in no time. Think of Jelly, playing in those freezing cathedrals to help the unemployed, without taking one penny for herself!

  It was nearly midnight, after a recording session that had lasted all day and well into the evening; the pressure on young Yehudi had scarcely let up. Compared to the world tour he was completing, it was probably easy. He’d been to South America, South Africa, India, Singapore and all the way to Australia. But not Germany. Back in 1933, before anyone had had time to ban Jewish musicians, he had taken the initiative and declared he would not play there as long as Hitler held power.

  Ulli had come to the studio for most of the afternoon, capitalising on the chance to see Menuhin at work, close to, from the control room. What a face he had: fine brows, almond-shaped eyes, a patrician nose. His skin hadn’t yet lost the glow of boyhood, and his smooth hair shone gold in the studio lights. His violin not only sang, but spoke. This marvel might not help them to winkle the Schumann concerto out of the library, but if they managed to winkle it and he were then to champion it, he could make the piece as famous as he was himself, anywhere in the world beyond Germany – most particularly in America – along with any of Schott’s other violin concertos that he happened to like.

  Since the head of the Reichsmusikkammer had changed – it used to be Richard Strauss – a blacklist had been brought in that banned the music of Jewish composers. This hit their publishers squarely in the pocket: in Germany no sheet music could be sold, no orchestral parts hired out for concerts. Schott had relatively few Jewish composers on their roster: Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold from Vienna and Mátyás Seiber from Hungary, but not many others. It seemed, though, that the biggest worry was not the immediate effect, but how much worse the future might be. ‘Once people start banning things, it can be difficult to know when to stop,’ Willy warned. Therefore they had to shore up their resources. There was, after all, an outside world, as he had said; and Yehudi was the young musical king of it.

  Poor boy: fancy having to be known these days by the very name from which the term ‘Jew’ was derived. Moshe explained to the gathering that when he and his wife, Marutha, were looking for lodgings in New York they were welcomed by a landlady who misidentified Marutha by her blue eyes and declared she’d rent them the room because she did not want Jewish tenants. Marching away, Yehudi’s mother-to-be chose the name of her unborn son in fury. At least, she vowed, nobody could ever take Yehudi to be something or someone he was not.

  Ulli was aware that some of the party had been keeping their distance from him, or casting sideways looks when they thought he wouldn’t notice. Whoever he was, whatever he thought, to them he was simply… German. Paris was nationalistic, opposed to political refugees from further east, yet also left wing; on the train he’d been reading a newspaper article about an alliance called the Popular Front which had created rare unity among the left only months ago, resulting in marches, riots and a strong presence for communism. A visiting German, however opposed he might be to his own government, was bound to sense the effects of that. He measured every word he spoke, changing the subject if a conversation sidled towards politics, for he was on edge with fear – rational or otherwise – that he might be overheard, then reported to the German authorities for fraternising with Jews. This would have been a fearsome concern in Mainz; and if Paris’s walls lacked such ears, his nerves could not quite believe it. No call-up papers had come; he should not be an immediate target, but it was not impossible, and one mistake on his part might result in just such an eventuality. He couldn’t help wondering if he had been sent here because he, rather than a company director, would then be the cannon fodder if something went wrong. Surely not? He trusted his employers not to put him in danger.

  ‘Relax, Dr Schultheiss.’ Moshe spotted his unease. ‘We know it’s not your fault. But I’d be telling a lie if I pretended we’re not anxious to get home to California before everything blows sky-high. This city feels like a volcano.’

  ‘I’m surprised you are here at all,’ George Enescu told Ulli.

  Ulli nodded. He much admired Enescu as a composer, performer and conductor, and longed to tell him the truth: that despite his fears he appreciated his employers’ mercurial games and rather enjoyed engaging, together with them, in a type of passive resistance that entailed pushing as far as one could contrary to the authorities, but without shouting about it. If it were good for business, Schott’s would find a way to do it. Sometimes he wondered how close to the sun his employers were prepared to soar without singeing their wings, or his. Unless he was indeed being followed, hopefully the authorities would not know he was in Paris to meet an important Jewish musician, hoping to persuade him to play a special and newsworthy German work. But if they found out… He pushed the idea away. He was here now.

  Outside, he made sure he gained permission from Moshe and Marutha to travel alone with Yehudi in the first of several cabs that were to take the family and their friends back to the hotel through pre-Christmas Paris.

  ‘There’s something interesting I’d like to run by you, Yehudi,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ The violinist turned his bright, girl-preoccupied eyes towards him.

  Ulli prepared to unleash Willy Strecker’s idea. ‘Now,’ he began, ‘what would you say if I were to tell you that there is a violin concerto by Schumann that is never played?’

  ‘Schumann?’ said Yehudi, his face alight as if a magic strawberry ice cream had materialised before him. ‘And… is there?’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Really? Where? Why? What’s it like? Why isn’t it played? Can I see it?’

  ‘It’s in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. We have been attempting to acquire the rights to publish it, but the family is very resistant and at first they made it impossible.’

  ‘And now they’ve relented?’

  ‘Not exactly, but we’re working on it,’ said Ulli. ‘There’s a new director at the library’s music collection – his name is Dr Georg Schünemann, and he used to be director of the Berlin Hochschüle für Musik, which is where I studied. We’re hoping he will be a little less intractable than the gentleman who has, er, gone.’

  There was, unfortunately, reason to believe that Schünemann had already been tractable – as Ulli had discovered that very morning.

  With several free hours in Paris before joining Menuhin’s recording session, Ulli had taken the Métro to the Rome stop, intending to spend some time visiting music shops near the conservatoire to meet and charm the proprietors, as Willy had requested. Music transcends politics, he said to them; they hastened to agree. He wondered if they really believed it. He scarcely did so himself; it was, as always, a useful excuse for deflecting more important issues. One store was displaying the latest issue of the magazine La Revue musicale. He picked up a copy and leafed through it. Then he stopped, blinked, stared.

  He had not imagined it. He was gazing at an article about the Schumann Violin Concerto, written by a German musicologist named Hermann Springer. There, on the bright new paper of the December 1935 edition, was a facsimile of the first page of the piece’s slow movement, in manuscript. Ulli hurried into a spot where the light was better. The bulb cast its glow onto the staves of Schumann’s handwriting. He saw a suggestion of syncopation, some offbeat counterpoint, a simple melody written in an odd, complex way. For several minutes, focused on the very thing he’d been trying in vain to unearth, Ulli lost all sense of time and place.

  Once the shock wore off, he forced the cogs of his brain into action, trying to visualise how this could have happened. Clearly, the Nazis were letting their own people in on the secret concerto. Perhaps there was more to that official ‘embargo’ than he had been led to believe.

  ‘Here’s an article about it,’ he said to Yehudi now, taking one of several copies of the journal out of his briefcase. ‘Thi
s fell into my hands earlier today, quite by chance.’

  ‘Incredible. It must be fate!’ Yehudi, in the dim pulse of the passing streetlights, bent his head towards the page that bore the photo of the manuscript. Ulli heard him humming a rough outline of the solo. ‘Dr Schultheiss, this looks extraordinary. I have to see the whole thing. I have to.’

  *

  Back in Mainz, Willy Strecker sat poring over La Revue musicale while Ulli stood nearby, shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘They’re up to something,’ said Strecker.

  ‘Who do you think… ?’

  ‘At a guess, probably the Reichsmusikkammer, the culture bureau.’

  ‘This piece says Breitkopf will publish it. First I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘They can’t. It’s to us that Johannes Joachim gave his permission. At least, I believe that’s the case. We need to stand up to this. We should have a sound plan for bringing it out and having it performed, sooner rather than later.’

  Ulli nodded slowly. Every cool-headed argument now must go in favour of Menuhin as the sensible destination for the Schumann concerto if it were to be saved, long-term, from official meddling. Menuhin was the superstar of the moment, the one who drew the crowds and the reporters.

  ‘We can’t leave it only up to Miss d’Arányi,’ Strecker insisted. ‘Twenty years ago, yes, but I can’t see much evidence in her favour now.’

  ‘She filled nine cathedrals in a row,’ Ulli pointed out. ‘Everyone adored her when I saw her play at the Queen’s Hall.’

  ‘That was then. But she’s had injuries, she’s been cancelling performances, she doesn’t seem to have any coherent long-term planning beyond her regular circuits. We need more than that to put this concerto on the map. Yehudi only has to play a scale to land his picture on the front pages.’