The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Susannah’s first thought is that he is having a fit. She frees the noose and runs over the road to her friend Elizabeth Dalton who lives in the house opposite. ‘I have hanged a man! and I am afraid he is dead,’ she cries. Together they go back. Kotzwara shows no sign of reviving. Leaving Elizabeth to do what she can, Susannah runs to the nearest tavern, whose publican is also a friend, and he in turn goes for a doctor who comes and unsuccessfully tries to bleed the corpse. Not long afterwards the terrified Susannah is arrested and taken to the watch-house in St Martin’s. That evening she is interrogated and committed to the New Prison in Clerkenwell pending the Coroner’s inquest. The next day she is charged with murder.

  *

  Kotzwara’s death is the talk of London. The news-sheets are fascinated but details are lacking. Saturday’s St James’s Chronicle gives the fullest account while doing its best to accord the victim some sort of obituary:

  The name of the unfortunate man was Kotzwarra, a German; he lodged in Bentinck-Street, Soho; and was a Musician, and very eminent in his profession. He came from Ireland about a year since, being engaged by Sir J. Gallini for the Haymarket Opera-House, where he played the tenour the whole of the last season. From some very extraordinary circumstances, that came out upon the woman’s examination, there is every reason to believe the man was insane.

  Susannah Hill’s case is heard a fortnight later on the 16th by Mr Justice Gould at the Old Bailey. The next day The Times reports the outcome with unavoidable self-restraint:

  Susannah Hill was put to the bar charged with the murder of FRANCIS KOTZWARA, a German, by hanging him at her lodgings in Vine-Street, St Martin’s Lane: the circumstances of this case being extremely improper for publication, we shall merely inform our readers the jury returned a verdict of – Not Guilty. It appeared that the case could not be satisfactorily made out, and therefore the trial was stopped, after having engaged the attention of the Court nearly one hour. Indeed, it was the particular request of the Court, that the notes taken by the shott[sic]-hand writers might be torn.

  Eventually the buzz dies down. London’s musical community stops missing one of its more dissolute characters; the waters of history close fairly without a ripple over Kotzwara’s head while for the next fifty years his Battle of Prague sonata continues to outsell all Beethoven’s. In any case this portentous year is still not out. Three months after Kotzwara, Mozart, too, is dead, a loss of which all Europe is conscious by Christmas. Still, the circumstances of the Bohemian’s death are not easily forgotten. Luckily for us (the salacious, the ever-curious) the short-hand writers’ destroyed notes were not the only source of detail. Someone in the Old Bailey that day must have had the sort of memory which stems from a vested interest. Shortly afterwards an anonymous book appears, written largely around the case. It is entitled Modern Propensities or, An Essay on the Art of Strangling and, although we learn little new about Kotzwara from it, we are given a good account of Susannah Hill, the country lass up from Somerset in search of her lover Thomas who had betrayed her and left her pregnant for the second time. ‘The unfortunate Susannah sank among the vilest wretches,’ the book observes, ‘yet amidst this scene of riot and debauchery, she was visibly the most decent in appearance and language; no doubt, the result of a mind founded in a virtuous education.’ That Susannah is in essence a Good Girl forced into corruption is emphasised by a description of her in court at the point where she is allowed to step out of this temporary and horrid limelight and back into welcome obscurity. One hopes but doubts that she made it back to Frome.

  She was neatly dressed in common apparel; and, on her countenance we could discover nothing that seemed to indicate a rooted depravity; nor was there anything in her person particularly attractive: from which it may be inferred, that the unfortunate – if not lamented Kotswarra – trusted more to the charms of the cord, than to those of his fair one. When she first came into court, she appeared intimidated; but on her dismission, the signs of excessive joy were visible …

  Poor Kotzwara! To have had the skill to pass music off as Haydn’s or Mozart’s at a time when Haydn was in town and Mozart still alive, yet to have been able to write nothing under his own name with heart in it or distinctiveness or which wasn’t merely mellifluous eighteenth-century gesturing: this surely was a true impotence. It constitutes a corrosive knowledge such as haunts Jacks-of-all-trades. Playing in front of Haydn or holding Black Masses with friends of Mozart are as close as they may come to self-expression, even as they ply an honest profession as jobbing musicians.

  This autumn two centuries later that notorious nonentity Kotzwara seems to haunt the house. I leaf through a bound volume I have had in my library for years: a collection of late eighteenth-century English songs and arias printed on the watermarked paper of the period. Here are scenas from those operas by Rauzzini for his Bath concerts; by Stephen Storace, his sister Nancy and Michael Kelly (all friends of Mozart’s); by Pleyel, Hook and Shield, in any of whose orchestras Kotzwara might well have played. At the front of the volume are two songs billed as ‘Mozart’s Celebrated English Canzonetts’. Surely Mozart never wrote such a thing? Haydn did; but Mozart?

  Then for the first time I notice that on each of their title pages someone has written in an ancient sepia hand the letters F. K. For a long moment I wonder if I have before me two of the ineffable Bohemian’s bogus utterances. Certainly each piece is Mozartean while neither is particularly inspired. After much foraging I finally identify them as genuine Mozart: two obscure and minor works pirated and set to unauthorised English words. One is a Masonic song called ‘Lied zur Gesellenreise’ (K.468), originally of arcane and occult import and now blithely appearing as ‘Henry’s Fate’ (‘Hope alas! is fled from me, Henry’s lost, ah! lost at sea’).

  I am indeed sorry not to have a genuine Kotzwara forgery in front of me, but I go on speculating all the same while continuing to gaze out across our own community of tramps. At the fag-end of a cultural tradition it appears increasingly to matter whether one hacks a niche, no matter how small, into the immemorial slopes of Parnassus. This becomes still more true as suppressed millennial frenzy grips us with the possibility that one day soon Parnassus itself may have to be bulldozed to afford a new view. The prospect is hideous, thrilling. In the meantime the scramble to be recognised by the only tradition apparently worth recognising is thought to transcend the mere earning of a living. Those glances one intercepts are full of dread. How can one infallibly tell charlatan from genius? Supposing it turns out that one of these local bohos living within earshot of the huntsmen’s fusillades has been producing acknowledged masterpieces and going to all-night orgies? One supposes one must just go on working regardless (the glances imply), living as productively as one may in the undifferentiated shadows of genius and charlatan alike …

  Only members of communities watch each other so nervously and think in such terms. The sole shadows in which I live are those of the usual mortal chills now hastening with fleeting blots of cloud across the October hills. A small sadness gathers – not for the pathologies and perversities to which anyone, including geniuses, may be prey, nor even quite for the pasticheur whose whole artistic life passes in perpetual strangulation by those he imitates. But the mere accident of playing a sonata and then having a book fall on one’s head can be enough to jolt us momentarily out of that private patch of sunlight which we like to claim as our own unique creative space. Suddenly those wry internal clouds begin drifting across. Why are people so bothered about posterity? (how the proofs keep rolling off the presses!). W. T. Parke, in his Musical Memoirs of 1830, described Kotzwara as ‘poor, although his talents were such that he might otherwise have acquired a respectable competency. In fact he was a genius, and like many of that class, as uncertain as the climate or the stock exchange.’

  ‘Genius’ has a different flavour nowadays. Our fellow exiles need not recognise it in the splendid, unscrupulous getting by of a minor character like Kotzwara now that he is safely and luridly dead.
Their narrow glances are levelling, not elevating. Playing their game just for a moment, we indulgently suspect each other of being hardworking and unoriginal: small voices in no new mould, forging a living. Forging and re-forging that compulsive, private pasticcio like itinerant contract workers, like tinkers, plodding ever on with the backward lordly glance of mandarins.

  ENDS

  *

  When I had finished reading, the late autumn light beyond Frank’s study windows was already waning. Subdued, I went to his music shelves and looked up the pieces he had mentioned with their ‘F. K.’ intitials in faint brown ink. As he had written, there they were.

  I flew back to London from Pisa taking few of Frank Bewley’s literary effects with me. In the aircraft’s hold were some folders of his letters and the original manuscript of Feathers. When Gillian had picked over the rest of his stuff it could be bundled up to follow in due course, together with the furniture and the grand piano. For now, I held on my lap what for me was his most evocative relic. I re-read it as we crossed Europe and was left in no doubt that when Charlie Stedall also read Frank’s Fate he would think as I did. In his bleak and punctual manner and without for a moment foreseeing his own sudden death, our talented friend had contrived to write his own obituary.

  The Dell

  I WAS, of course, proud to be accompanying the Adeptus into the mountains where he lived. Few pupils were invited to spend time with him outside tuition hours, let alone be singled out for a private journey. So my heart was light as I hopped from shadow to shadow in his thunderous wake, my new straw sandals singing on the forest path like crickets at the season’s height. My tabori bounced in its bamboo sheath at my side, nestled in crimson silk. From time to time I wondered where the Adeptus had stowed his, for there was nothing tied around his waist but his linen girdle. I presumed it was in the bag slung over his shoulder, for how could a teacher teach without his flute? Also, it was hard to imagine a man of his legendary skill and fame travelling without his voice, so to speak. As each variety of bird has its distinctive song by which it can be recognised from one end of the country to the other, so the Adeptus’s tabori playing would be identified anywhere and at once. Innkeepers would make ready their best room; poets and even merchants would sleep on the hearth with their dogs in order to say that the Finch of Bado had passed a night in their own bedchamber.

  I was not a poet, nor a merchant, just a humble apprentice skipping along for happiness between the dapples on the path. Well, perhaps not altogether humble; didn’t I just say I was proud? Humble about my own abilities, then, and proud that this famous Adeptus had chosen me out of all the Academy. Could I doubt that, no matter how short our time together, my playing would be transformed? I had already mastered all Thirteen Modes in Water, Sky, Mist and Rock. My rough passing was not up to much, admittedly, but would do at a pinch. Maybe the Adeptus was planning to start me on the Three Gateways as well as smooth passing? But no; that really was vanity on my part. Not even the most virtuosic musicians were introduced to such difficulties before they were eighteen.

  ‘What did it say? What did it say?’ broke in the voice ahead.

  ‘Who, sir? What, sir?’ I increased my skipping to catch up.

  ‘The bell-bird.’

  ‘Oh, Adeptus, I didn’t hear it.’

  ‘Did you even see it?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘It had horns and was mooing. You missed a rare sight.’

  A chastened silence was the best way to react to his more cryptic utterances. I listened out for a bell-bird but heard nothing but ordinary forest twitterings. The pine needles underfoot crunched agreeably. The early sunlight struck in golden shafts between the dark trunks. Every so often a large butterfly wobbled through a shaft on unmoving wings and for an instant blazed like a handful of flung jewels, to land on a dark bed of moss beyond as drab and unremarkable as a dead leaf. The sunward side of the rocks we passed glittered with mica and from time to time there were glimpses of snowy mountains so distant and so light their crenellations seemed to float halfway up the sky, clear blue above and misty blue beneath.

  At midday we reached the Adeptus’s house. At once I knew the stories about his austerity and simplicity were true. Less a house than a rude hut whose single room, floored with beaten earth, was only the size of six or seven mats. There was a heavy table with an inkstone and a few scrolls of music pinned to the brushwood walls with long thorns. A cape of oiled rhododendron leaves hung in one corner awaiting the autumn rains. Some rolled mats were tucked up into the rafters, together with a couple of soot-encrusted clay cooking pots.

  ‘Should I call your servant, sir?’

  ‘I have no servant, boy. You could shout till you were hoarse. Nobody would hear you but foxes and rock-doves.’

  ‘Not even a boy?’

  ‘No-one. If you would fetch some water from the stream I shall cook us rice.’

  I couldn’t easily relax as we ate. It didn’t seem right that so great and noble a man should have cooked my food.

  ‘And how was the stream, boy?’ he asked while picking his teeth with a dried fishbone.

  ‘Full, Adeptus. And as clear as glass.’

  ‘But its sound?’

  ‘Like rice wine flowing from the neck of a chōsu flask,’ I hazarded, fidgeting a little. The image suggested itself in a flash; I felt something of the sort was expected of me, although truthfully I had never heard that particular sound in my life. I dared a glance at my master and was horrified to see his bushy gaze fixed on me accompanied by a sardonic rumpling of his scalp.

  Without a word he got up from the floor, went outside and began blowing the cooking fire back to life. When it was sparking and snapping he sat down beside it and called me over.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, patting the ground. ‘Give me your tabori.’

  My heart leaped in anticipation. Already I was about to have a lesson on my own instrument. I unfastened the scabbard from my belt and handed it to him with a bow.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and placed it on the fire.

  Much, much later – months, in fact – I could acknowledge that moment as the beginning of all I have since become, albeit woundedly, like Goshō the village kid who was thrown by his horse and turned from being a dull boy into a brilliant cripple. I could hardly see for tears as the lacquer bubbled and peeled, the bamboo split and finally exposed my flute lying naked and innocent in its silk bed before that, too, danced orange and red and sank to char.

  ‘I deserved that,’ I said when I could speak, the obligatory phrase acid in my mouth just as there was acid in my heart.

  Adeptus looked at me kindly and nodded.

  ‘My father saved three years for that tabori,’ I couldn’t help adding. ‘It was made by Nanjuk, the great craftsman.’

  ‘Had it not been such a valuable instrument it wouldn’t have been so valuable a lesson,’ was the unyielding reply. ‘Does one weep more for spilled water or spilled wine?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘Only for a ruined instrument, sir.’ It was an impertinent retort on my part and at once I steeled myself for more just deserts. But impertinence or not, the Adeptus seemed to have taken it to heart.

  ‘We shall see,’ he only said. ‘And we shall hear. First we must hear. That was your first lesson, by the way.’

  ‘The burning of my flute?’

  ‘Certainly. Now we are equal since I, too, have no tabori here. I left all mine in my room at the Academy.’

  I thought briefly of his instruments in their taffeta scabbards. All were priceless; the most famous was made from the wood of the very tree that had sung to the divine Shakoji the night before he charmed the unruly provinces into submission. Many said – and some certainly believed – that anyone other than an Adeptus who tried to play that dark and fearful thing would be turned into a lone pine tree standing by itself on the bleakest mountainside, waiting for the lightning bolt.

  ‘It’s time for your second lesson,’ said Adeptus. He led the
way to the stream where I had drawn water and followed it for some yards along a path which led among rocks and trees until we emerged on a promontory overlooking a series of valleys receding into misty distance. Here the stream spread into strands like a hank of horsehair dashed against the ground, each rivulet leaping and coursing its own way down among the boulders. The great teacher descended steeply. Seen from above, the brown egg of his skull gleamed among the rhododendrons, floating from outcrop to outcrop until we reached a place where the many rivulets became somewhat enclosed. On either side rose steep cheeks of rock bristly with plants and netted with vines. It was a dell of astonishing beauty, perched on the lip of space. Beyond, the wooded valleys fell off into deep forest which, tens of miles away, thinned into the emerald stain of fields. And floating on the far horizon were the mountains, the very margin of the world itself.

  Here Adeptus halted and stood attentively, his head cocked. Then he busied himself at a pool little bigger than a rice pot which had been worn into the rock by a thread of clear water falling and falling on the same spot. He plunged in his hand and withdrew a pebble, paused a moment and withdrew a second one. Apparently satisfied, he moved to a rill which tumbled down a gully and tore away a dripping handful of green beard. I couldn’t imagine what he was up to but he suddenly turned and motioned me over.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, pointing to a flat stone among ferns. ‘Now tell me what you think.’

  In some magical manner the stone’s position seemed to be at the focal point of the entire scene. ‘I think‚’ I said truthfully, ‘I am surrounded by perfection.’