Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  Adrian was beside her.

  ‘Ready, Jelly?’

  ‘Ready.’

  He turned and motioned her onto the stage ahead of him. She crossed herself and stepped out into the light. The wave of applause drenched her like a baptism.

  *

  In less than half an hour, it was over. Thomas Hardy, Tom’s favourite novelist, once wrote that experience is not as to duration, but as to intensity; the expression drifted into Jelly’s mind while she shook Adrian Boult’s hand, accepted the flowers that were brought to her, and swished her sweat-soaked dress, puffed sleeves and all, into a deep bow. Some of the audience were standing. She thought she could glimpse Anna at the side of the stalls, snow or none. She couldn’t see Tovey, though imagined he’d be holding forth to Alec, or the friend he had brought, in an enthusiastic mini-lecture about why Schumann chose to finish the piece with a polonaise. Nor could she see Adila; she’d be clasping Alec’s right hand with her left and Erik’s left hand with her right. Jelly could scarcely see at all, so blurred was her vision with tears of relief.

  It was done. Now she could begin to let go.

  *

  Jelly ushered the throngs of well-wishers and autograph hunters out of her dressing room so that she could change before they went home for the party, for which Adila had been cooking these past three days. Through a tiny window she glimpsed falling snowflakes, generous clumps of them, sliding down from heaven to bless the earth. Her blood was rushing through her so fast that she could scarcely feel her feet touching the ground inside their sensible winter boots.

  The rustling dress was back in its carrier, the room cleared of her make-up, violin case and enough bouquets to fill a greenhouse. Even within the hall’s corridors there lay a snow-hush, despite a Sibelius symphony blustering through from the distant stage, the music of winter.

  At the artists’ entrance she paused in the doorway, sniffing the ice in the air, looking for Alec’s car. An eiderdown of snow sapped London’s colour: a red bus seemed filtered to black and white, a sepia wash of clouded night sky hovered over the sooty façades, while dark silhouettes hustled along Upper Regent Street, anonymous against the whitening pavement. Around her, could she feel the spirits of those who had lived and died and been reborn tonight? In the end, that was all there was: music and consciousness, both eternal.

  ‘Sai, quick! Out of the snow!’ came Adila’s cry, with the purring of the car engine.

  Jelly looked back into the arc of the Queen’s Hall entrance, empty but for the ghosts of her concerts. What did it matter if she had lost the world premiere? That was no longer the point. Now, whatever lay ahead, she was ready. No certainty could be greater than the one she had attained.

  ‘I am the only person who has ever had my name. I am the only person who will ever live my life. And live it I have, and I do, and I shall. My name is Jelly d’Arányi and I know that love shall live for ever.’

  She blew the Queen’s Hall a kiss and took a step towards the car.

  ‘Jelly, wait! It’s me… ’

  She turned. Outlined in the night, a dark figure with hat and overcoat was moving round the curve of the hall towards her, arms outstretched.

  Coda

  On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.

  Also in 1939, another previously unknown work by Robert Schumann was finally released to the public. It was a set of solo piano variations on the theme that Brahms had adopted for his own Op. 23 Variations (as played to Jelly by Myra in Chapter 5). It became known as the Geistervariationen – Ghost Variations – because Schumann believed the melody had been dictated to him in his sleep by spirits. What Schumann, in his disturbed state of mind, seemed to have forgotten is that he had already written the germ of this melody himself, in the slow movement of his Violin Concerto. He was writing the variations when he made his suicide attempt in February 1854. The day after his rescue from the Rhine, he gave the manuscript to Clara. She preferred to leave it unpublished.

  Alexander Fachiri died of pneumonia on 27 March 1939. Devastated, Adila sold the house in Netherton Grove. She and Jelly lived together in a succession of London flats, then moved to Ewelme, Oxfordshire, to escape the Blitz.

  Jelly apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in 1939, following Alec’s death and some negative reviews of her concerts. Her career flickered on through the 1940s, but her glory days were over. Later the two sisters emigrated to Italy and lived in Bellosguardo, Florence, for the rest of their lives. Adila died in 1962 and Jelly in 1966. Adrienne married an Italian and, like Adila, had one daughter.

  Baron Erik Palmstierna went to live with Adila and Jelly. Among other books, he published two further volumes based on spirit messages received with Adila’s help. He became chairman of the action committee of the World Congress of Faiths. He died in Adila and Jelly’s Italian house in 1959. His daughter Margareta died in 1942, aged 37. Her granddaughter became a celebrated supermodel.

  Sir Donald Francis Tovey died of a stroke on 10 July 1940. His editions of Brahms’s symphonies and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, among others, are still used widely today.

  Myra Hess founded a series of daily lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery during World War II, which became legendary for boosting the spirits of Londoners in the Blitz. Jelly performed in several of them, but their duo appears to have foundered. Hess was made a DBE in 1941. She died at her Hampstead home in 1965.

  Yehudi Menuhin became an iconic figure in the classical music world and beyond it. At the end of World War II he played to survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; thereafter, performing music to people who were suffering, ill or disadvantaged became a lifelong preoccupation. This led him to found the organisation Live Music Now, and numerous other initiatives to assist the training of young musicians. After settling in Britain he took UK citizenship and was ultimately awarded the Order of Merit. He died in 1999.

  Georg Kulenkampff left Germany in 1943 in protest at the regime. He died in 1948, aged 50.

  Hans Gál moved to Edinburgh after Tovey invited him there to catalogue the university music library. He later became professor of music at the university.

  W.B. Yeats died in January 1939 and his wife George in 1968.

  Richard Strauss wrote some of his finest works after the end of World War II, when he was in his eighties, including Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs.

  The Queen’s Hall was destroyed by a direct hit during the Blitz in 1941. The Charlottenburg Opera House was destroyed by Allied bombing.

  Ulli Schultheiss is fictional, but his moral dilemma is very real. Had he indeed lived, his move to Britain would have seen him interned as an enemy alien, possibly in the Isle of Man, but he might well have joined his principled friends and colleagues in rebuilding British musical life after the war. If only Jelly could have had an Ulli in her life. Perhaps she did.

  The Schumann Violin Concerto has overcome its difficult start to become a staple part of its instrument’s repertoire – even though in the US, after Menuhin’s premiere, it was not performed again for some 23 years. Today, though, some violinists speak of it as perhaps the most personal, exquisite and heartbreaking of all the great concertos.

  Author’s Note

  I first read about the strange history that has become Ghost Variations when I was researching my third novel, Hungarian Dances. I had found a second-hand copy of The Sisters d’Arányi by Joseph Macleod, the sole biography of these remarkable women. A chapter entitled ‘The Truth about the Schumann Concerto’ contained the whole extraordinary saga.

  Of course creating fiction out of real events and people is far from straightforward. I humbly beg forgiveness from ‘my’ characters’ living relatives, should it be the case that I’ve put two and two together and made seven, and I hope this novel will be accepted in the spirit in which it is offered: the evocation of a vanished world and a tribute to its vibrant inhabitants and their artistry. I hope, too, that it may help to win fresh appreciation for them and for their reco
rded and written legacies.

  It became clear to me, through talking to a number of people who knew Jelly and Adila, that the sisters believed 100 per cent in the ‘spirit messages’ they were receiving. That others were less convinced is unsurprising. Baron Erik Palmstierna’s book, Horizons of Immortality, contains transcripts of the messages, as does The Sisters d’Arányi.

  The hiatus between the arrival of the first ‘message’ and Jelly’s efforts to start looking for the concerto is fictional: it is a chance to explore the conflict between her passion for giving charity concerts, and the pull of so-called ‘psychical research’, which must have been at odds with her Christian faith (and Adila’s). The culmination of Jelly’s love for simply bringing music to her audience is the scene at the Savoy – which, along with her fall-out with Adila, is also entirely fictional. The cathedral tour, though, is very much real: Jelly’s first cathedral tour in 1933 raised £2,500, including a government grant of £1,000 (the equivalent of around £118,250 in 2016). She gave a further tour in 1934 and in summer 1938 performed a recital at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

  Jelly never married. The account of her friendship with Sep Kelly is based as far as possible on reality. The relationship with Tom Spring-Rice, however, is a matter of reading between the lines in The Sisters d’Arányi. The glass-game session with Anna Robertson that produced the first communication from ‘Schumann’ was inspired, according to Macleod, by the end of a love affair; with whom, we don’t know. Tom Spring-Rice, Lord Monteagle, died in a Dublin nursing home in autumn 1934. Macleod makes it clear that Jelly was much affected by his death, mourned him deeply, and sustained a succession of illnesses and injuries at this time. The nature of Adila’s friendship with Palmstierna is not documented.

  I have it on good authority from Jelly’s family that Moshe Menuhin did give Jelly harsh words about her involvement the Schumann concerto, though the precise details of where, when and how are not clear. He has been depicted to me, by those who knew him well, as a difficult, somewhat pugnacious character.

  A few of the characters are purely fictional: Ulli Schultheiss, the critic James Gambrell, the pianist Bernhard Rabinovich, Lady Chiltington, Charles and Mary Southern, Fräulein Kammerling, Maria the maid and the journalist Lionel Hartshaw.

  The letters from Sir Donald Francis Tovey, Elisabeth Joachim and Eugenie Schumann, plus the published articles mentioned in the novel, are all real (and the reviewer of Palmstierna’s book, Harry Price, has been accorded his own TV film). Eugenie Schumann’s extended letter was published in The Times. Letters to Jelly from Tom and obviously from Ulli are invented.

  The meeting between the Streckers, Ulli Schultheiss, Peter Raabe and Goebbels is evidently invented, since Ulli is not real, but many of the arguments in it derive from the Streckers’ correspondence about the concerto, outlined in an in-depth study by Ann-Katrin Heimer published in the journal of the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main in 2002. Willy Strecker attended Jelly’s performance of the Mozart ‘Adelaide’ Concerto himself and subsequently helped to unearth the Schumann manuscript, and he did apparently organise a meeting with some powerful officials of the Reich to determine that Schott’s, not Breitkopf, should publish the concerto and to argue that Jelly should be accorded the moral right to the first UK performance.

  It is possible that a serious rift took place between Jelly and Myra Hess; in Hess’s fullest biography by Marian McKenna, Jelly, the pianist’s duo partner for some 20 years, is mentioned only once, in passing. Nevertheless, when Hess started work on her National Gallery concerts during the Blitz, she devoted so much time to their organisation that apparently friendships often fell by the wayside. Their break may be as simple as that. Asked what went wrong, Jelly reputedly said only: ‘The war.’ The wonderful recording of the pair playing the Schubert Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat with the cellist Felix Salmond and the Brahms Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 87, with Gaspar Cassadó remains the only surviving memorial to their musical partnership.

  A recording of Adila Fachiri and Tovey playing Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 96 in G major is testament to the warmth, rigour and dedication of these two exceptional people. I doubt that my portrait of Tovey can begin to do justice to this towering musical mind, a man of complexity, great personal integrity and true ‘heart’.

  Even though Jelly lost the concerto’s modern premiere to Kulenkampff, and some glory to Menuhin, and was even pipped to the post by the Jerusalem performance in January 1938, without her investigations it would have taken much longer for the work to re-emerge. It may not have been technically ‘lost’, but it still needed to be found. Along with the many magnificent pieces of music written for Jelly, its resurrection has helped to assure her immortality in the canon of great musicians of the 20th century.

  Among the countless individuals I would like to thank are Jane Camilloni, John MacAuslan, Nigel Hess, Steven Isserlis, Lucy Cowan, John and David Gwilt, Rohan de Saram, Chris Latham, Peter and Chris Lockhart Smith and (posthumously) Margaret Lockhart Smith, Tully Potter, Sara Menguc, Fiona Lindsay, Sally Groves and Bernhard Pfau of Schott Music, Katy Bell and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Hungarian Cultural Centre London, David Le Page, Viv McLean, Philippe Graffin, Sir András Schiff, and my patient family, including my brother Michael and my long-suffering husband Tom. Profound apologies to anyone I may inadvertently have omitted. My deepest thanks, too, to the excellent team at Unbound and to everyone who has pledged support for the book.

  Jessica Duchen, London, 2016

  Bibliography

  These are a few of the principal books and articles on which I’ve drawn for Ghost Variations.

  Nora Bickley (selector and translator), Letters From and To Joseph Joachim, Macmillan, 1914

  Humphrey Burton, Menuhin, Faber & Faber, 2000

  Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History, Harper Press, 2010

  Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey, OUP, 1952

  Ann-Katrin Heimer, ‘…wie sie vom praktischen Standpunkt des Geigers aus notiert werden müsse… ’, Hindemiths Bearbeitung der Solostimme des Violinkonzerts von Robert Schumann, Hindemith-Jahrbuch, Annales Hindemith, 2002/XXXI

  Erik Frederick Jensen, ‘Buried alive: Schumann at Endenich 1’, Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1861 (March 1998), pp. 10–18.

  —, ‘Buried alive: Schumann at Endenich 2’, Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1862 (April 1998), pp. 14–23.

  Denise Lassimonne and Howard Ferguson (eds.), Myra Hess By Her Friends, Hamish Hamilton, 1966

  Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich, Macmillan, 1994

  Marian McKenna, Myra Hess: A Portrait, Hamish Hamilton, 1976

  Joseph Macleod, The Sisters d’Arányi, George Allen & Unwin, 1969

  Rollo Myers, ‘Finding a Lost Schumann Concerto: A Recent Discovery based on “Spirit Messages”’, The Listener, 22 September 1937

  Roger Nichols, Ravel Remembered, Faber & Faber, 1987

  Tony Palmer, Menuhin: A Family Portrait, Faber & Faber, 1991

  Baron Erik Palmstierna, Horizons of Immortality, Constable Press, 1937

  —, Widening Horizons, Psychic Book Club, 1940

  Tully Potter, Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician, Toccata Press, 2010

  Harry Price, ‘Quest for Reality – Horizons of Immortality by Baron Erik Palmstierna’ (book review), The Listener, 13 October 1937

  Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats, OUP, 2002

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