Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “Maybe I’ll just stand straighter,” he said and comically stiffened his spine. “Seriously, though—what is it with Dutch girls—the drinking water? All that cheese? Droste’s cocoa?”

  Clara decided he was not just making conversation or a clinical observation; the guy really wanted to know. “Since I’ve probably had a thousand cups of tea for every one of cocoa in my life, we can eliminate that explanation right off.”

  “Well, then—what? Something to do with wearing wooden shoes in infancy, maybe?”

  “A tiresome cliché,” she said with a poker face. “Look, we’ve just met, but I feel I can trust you with a national security secret—okay?”

  He nodded, but with eyes narrowing.

  “Well, you know how clever the Dutch have been about reclaiming their land from the sea—more than half the country used to be under water five hundred years ago—”

  “I had no idea it was as much as that.”

  “Oh, absolutely. We keep building these immense dikes, then pump out the water with the energy our windmills generate, and finally we plant lots of reeds of a certain species—which cleverly absorb the sea salt from the soil—and after ten years, the land is arable.”

  “Amazing. But I don’t quite see the connection to—”

  “I’m getting to it,” she said. “The secret part is that the very month that every Dutch girl experiences her first period, she gets fed about a bushel of these salt-gorged reeds—often sautéed with parsnips and garlic—it tastes better than it sounds—and bing-bang-boom, it does something no one can explain to her hormonal secretions, and soon she’s sprouting just like the reeds—”

  She paused and waited for his response. He looked blank for a long moment, then caught her sly, sideways glance. His whooping, unconditional laughter recommended him to her at once as a promising soul mate.

  The rest of the weekend she tried to satisfy his gentle but endless inquiries about who she was and how she got that way. Her parents were at the root of many of the answers she provided. Her dad Piet Hoitsma, she confided, had been embraced as a national paragon when he was barely out of his teens. A daring operative who repeatedly risked his neck sabotaging Nazi cargo truck convoys for the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, he was considered all the more admirable because he never spoke publicly of his heroics. When peace returned, Piet blazed through his studies at the university in Leiden and, through his connections with former agents in British intelligence, won a tuition-free doctorate from the London School of Economics before entering the business world with the Anglo-Dutch giant, Unilever. Transferred from its Amsterdam office to company headquarters in the Blackfriars neighborhood of London, he rose over time to serve as Unilever’s chief financial officer, just half a rung beneath the pinnacle of corporate power. Although as a practical matter Piet had become a de facto Brit, he had never relinquished his close ties to the Netherlands and he became a fixture on the board of overseers of the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam’s classical music showcase.

  While every sprouting inch a young Englishwoman, Clara was awarded dual citizenship at her father’s request and spent many a holiday with her Dutch grandparents, sopping up their national and folk heritage. Out of respect for her Hoitsma lineage, she chose her father’s alma mater at Leiden over Cambridge, where many of her London friends spent their university years. Her degree with highest honors in fine arts, supplemented by her father’s deft pull, won her a job with the Concertgebouw, writing the performance programs and seeing to the care and feeding of visiting artists. From there, she moved to Philips Electronics’ classical music division, writing liner notes and arranging recording sessions as she shuttled between London and Amsterdam. When the Philips album label was bought by PolyGram, she found herself transferred—quite willingly—to New York and a churning new environment that she took to at once. She also began to rethink her career path and signed up for graduate studies leading to a doctoral degree in musicology at Columbia. Midway through her course work, she came upon Mitch Emery, then a hotshot young prosecutor for upscale Montgomery County, Maryland. After a year of passionate courting, they married in London, where Piet Hoitsma gave the bride away and, as a wedding gift, a trust fund amounting to mid-seven figures in Unilever and other stocks. Clara put her doctoral studies at Columbia on hold—it would prove to be a three-year hiatus while she worked as a low-level staffer at the National Endowment for the Arts—and the newlyweds moved into a pleasant but hardly extravagant garden apartment in Chevy Chase, not far from Mitch’s office.

  The couple’s first order of business, in working out a modus vivendi, was determining how to deal with Clara’s trust fund. Mitch, whose job provided enough for them to live on—Clara’s modest salary was strictly for extras—wanted nothing to do with her money. “That’s yours,” he told her. “Your father worked hard to make it and was proud, I’m sure, to be able to present it to you. I’m not interested in living off it or you, sweetheart.”

  “That’s really dumb for you to say,” Clara told him, “and you’re not really all that dumb, so what’s going on? You’re annoyed with me because suddenly we’re financially independent?”

  “I’m not in the least annoyed,” he said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “And what is it you think I’m going to do with my treasure—buy a stable of race horses? Or jet to my two-hundred-foot yacht moored at Piraeus for a weekend spin around the Aegean?”

  “Why not berth it on the Chesapeake? Much more convenient—”

  “Stop it, Mitch—I’m serious—”

  “I’m serious, too,” he said. “It’s yours, sweetheart—do whatever you’d like with it.”

  “What I’d like is to share it with you—and make our life together more comfortable and pleasurable—I mean, we share everything else. What am I missing, Mitch?”

  Her vehemence sent him backpedaling. “I…it’s…I don’t know exactly. It feels as if I’d be sponging off you or something. I’ve always been self-reliant—”

  “Spongers are leeches—no one could possibly accuse you of that, buddy—”

  “I know, but it might spoil me, turn me lazy, rob me of incentive—to, you know, make the best of myself, become more useful, run something…”

  “I don’t believe that,” Clara said. “I think it may actually be sexist. It bothers you that my parents have made me financially self-sufficient—and guys want their women to be dependencies—to be subservient. Admit it!”

  Mitch shook his head.

  “That’s feminist bullshit,” he said. “I like your independence—you were that way before they set up the trust fund for you. The truth is, your being such an independent character makes you trés sexy—but don’t let it go to your head.”

  “Okay, look,” she said, dipping her head onto his shoulder, “instead of fighting me on this, why don’t you embrace it—help me run the trust fund and figure out how to invest it?”

  “I don’t know crap about investments,” he said. “You should get expert advisers to help you manage it—it’s not a toy.”

  “Hey, we’re not talking rocket science here—we can learn together—and no doubt we’d make mistakes together and learn from them. It could actually be fun. That way, you’d be taking a real part of the responsibility—and earning whatever uses we put the money to—see?”

  His adamancy finally cracked. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Okay—I’m on board. Happy?”

  “Delirious,” she said. “And your manhood will grow back to normal in a month or two.”

  The annual payout from her trust came to three times his salary. They never discussed the disparity.

  Her leftover distaste from lunch with Lolly had fled by the time Clara greeted the doorman to their apartment building and hurried to catch the elevator for the pokey twelve-story climb up to her floor. To unwind once inside their door, she kicked off her shoes, tossed her handbag onto the
sofa nearest the piano, and sat at the keyboard, accompanying herself while singing a pair of her favorite Schubert lieder in the original German, one of the five languages in which she was fluent.

  Her singing voice was sweet, clear, and always on key, but a touch warbly, so she sang only when alone or, diffidently, with Mitch on a long car trip or after they had killed a bottle of wine over dinner. Her piano playing, on the other hand, was assured and energetic—but a touch too athletic for her to have qualified as a performing artist. So she had chosen to sublimate her love of music by accumulating knowledge of its history, theory, and practice. By now, the fifth year of her marriage, she had completed all the course work and the orals for her Columbia doctorate and was devoting herself, when not trying to scare up funds for Lincoln Center, to research for her dissertation. The task was made more manageable by her ownership of a personal, multi-language music library of nearly a thousand volumes, filling a whole wall in the spare bedroom she and Mitch had designated the study.

  She had chosen Franz Schubert as the subject for her doctoral thesis because his brief life struck her as having been so poignant. The twelfth child in his Viennese family, he had struggled to survive without benefit of an indulgent patron, earning his bread as a mere songwriter whose serious compositions were rarely performed in his own lifetime of just thirty-one years. To focus her thesis, Clara had decided to concentrate on Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, called “The Great” because it was so much longer, more complex, and accomplished than any of his other works, and right up there with Beethoven’s best symphonies.

  Mellowed by her piano fix, Clara slipped out of her street clothes and into her running shorts and shoes and headed for the treadmill in the corner of the study. En route, she picked up her iPod, dialed up Schubert’s “La Truite,” and stuck a notepad on the instructions panel to jot down any insight that came to her while chugging away on the exercise machine. Before boarding it, she lifted her phone receiver and retrieved the single message left for her. It was Mitch, at his breeziest and most winning.

  “Hi, you gorgeous, long-stemmed tulip,” he said. “Guess I forgot you were chowing down today with the lovely Mrs. C. Hope it went okay. Just remember—you don’t have to genuflect on my account. She’s Harry’s problem, not ours. Speaking of whom, something has come up that Harry wants you in on—for actual consultant’s pay. Off what I’ve heard, though, it sounds like a bad joke, but I’ll know more by the time I get home. Here’s a hint—take a quick look through your library, in the Beethoven section, and see if you can find anything about Ludwig ever being in Switzerland. Love ya.” Click.

  She stretched her long limbs for a few minutes while pondering Mitch’s curious message, then mounted the treadmill with a sigh and flipped on the iPod to soothe her Lolly-tattered nerves. As the belt began to move, she remembered that Schubert had participated in Beethoven’s funeral procession. What turmoil might have overtaken Franz, she wondered, if he had known he would outlive the fallen colossus by just twenty months? Would he have hurried to finish the Unfinished? And if he had, would the work have been any more affecting or better loved? She doubted it. Even incomplete, it remained the most delicious fragment in all of music.

  She strode on, ramping up the treadmill’s speed until it was in sync with the allegro giusto of the “Trout” finale. Go, Franz, go.

  .

  he emerged from the park at Eighty-First Street, strode down Central Park West past the Natural History museum, and turned onto Seventy-Seventh heading for the river. The traffic lights were with him, and he maintained his rapid pace as he swung onto Riverside. Each time Mitch came home, even after two years of living in the building, he was freshly pleased with its location near the downtown end of the drive. True, the wind whipping off the river could turn the street bitter cold in winter, but their apartment’s unobstructed Hudson view, ten-foot ceilings, elegant crown moldings, and generous layout more than compensated.

  Greeted as usual by a flood of Clara’s favorite music pouring out into the foyer, Mitch paused for a moment with his key still in the lock, trying to identify the composer. Debussy? No—Ravel? No, no. Satie? Close. Now he had it—Poulenc! She craved the French modernists, F. P. in particular, she had told him, for the way he coursed between jittery atonality and poignant, almost achingly melodic sweetness.

  Still in her running shorts, often a signal of further disrobing to follow soon after his arrival, Clara welcomed him with an artfully coordinated hug and kiss, more than dutiful but less than urgent. They were not, after all, newlyweds. “What’s the big news at your shop?” she asked and arranged herself cross-legged on one of the living room love seats. “From your message, I’m guessing there’s been an Elvis sighting on the Matterhorn, climbing arm in arm with Beethoven. Am I close?”

  “Closer than you’d think.” Mitch smiled and sat beside her. Trying to mask his disbelief in the implausible saga of the William Tell Symphony, he recounted Jake Hassler’s visit to the C&W premises in four or five sentences and watched her eyes grow wider with each one.

  “Wow!” she said softly but without a dismissive peal of laughter. “Now that’s a showstopper.” Her brow furrowed. “Was this fellow a madman, do you think—or just your textbook con man?” Clara studied his face as he hesitated before answering. “Wait—don’t tell me you masterminds think he’s neither one—”

  Mitch shrugged. “Well, the guy came prepared, anyway,” he said. “The composition books sure look like beatup old music manuscripts—and there was a marked-up copy of Schiller’s play about Tell—and our visitor was far from a smooth operator—he seemed pretty earnest, actually, though that could well have been part of the con. Or it’s entirely possible he’s being set up by some people over there.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Oh, I brought this along for your enlightenment,” he added and handed her his copy of the Nina Hassler letter. He watched her eyes drink in the astonishing revelation—or fabrication—with rapid shifts of focus.

  “Incroyable!” Clara cried at the end and dropped the document onto the cushion beside her. “It’s a wonderful—story.”

  “But totally absurd, you mean?”

  “Well—I don’t know. It has a certain coherence, I’ll have to admit.”

  “Yes—perhaps too much, is what I’m thinking,” he said. “It should be more disjointed—maybe less consciously composed—”

  “Not necessarily—it says she was writing this for posterity—for any future members of her family, or possibly anyone else, who might find it someday—so this Nina would likely have been quite deliberate in writing it to explain herself—and her story.” Clara’s mind started shifting gear as she began dissecting the letter’s contents. “The thing is,” she mused aloud, “I can more easily believe that Beethoven composed such a thing than I can swallow the idea that he just threw it away like that. It’s almost inconceivable—”

  “But Nina claims—oh, there apparently was a Nina, by the way, according to the Zurich records office—that he thought it was crap, so why keep it?”

  “A composer of Beethoven’s genius would almost surely have figured that out long before he got so far into it.”

  Mitch was pleased by her immediate absorption in the matter. “Unless—unless he’d been plugging away in the hope he could fix it and—and finally, when he was ready to head home to Vienna, he decided to cut his losses, so he told Nina to trash it for him. Or—or—what about this? Maybe his hearing, or non-hearing, deceived him—he was getting treatments—they no doubt distracted him, maybe even caused him pain. Or maybe there were extenuating circumstances—as the Nina letter implies—that reference to the Tell manuscript being ‘too dangerous’ for him to proceed with—whatever the hell that was about—”

  She looked into his eyes. “You sound a little manic, sweetheart. You’re not letting your imagination run away with you, by any chance…” It was more a caution than a dismissal.

  �
��Hardly,” he said. “It’s just that Harry—supreme skeptic that he generally is—let it be known after we met with this Hassler guy and his lawyer that he thinks it’s just possible Cubbage & Wakeham has been blessed with a divine deliverance—and the house could run up a very big score with it. Unless, of course, we take the bait and wind up the laughingstock of the cultural world; Harry recognizes the risk. He asked me if I feel up to the challenge of authenticating the manuscript—or dismissing it as a fraud, with the accompanying risk that another auction house will certify it, presumably because it discovers stuff that we missed and makes a fortune off the commission while we stand around in the cold during the world premiere performance of Beethoven’s Tenth.” Mitch tried to sound lighthearted. “At the end, Harry added, in his intimidating fashion, ‘This could make or break your career with us, Mitchell—I hope you understand that. So if you’re at all uneasy about taking on this thing, given your still-limited experience as our authentication honcho—and that music isn’t exactly your field of expertise—just say so, and we can bring in someone else.’”

  “That sounds like a threat. Why does he have to be such a bastard about it?” Clara asked.

  “It’s just Harry’s sweet way of putting me on my mettle.”

  “Frankly, I’m surprised he’s excited about this—I didn’t think he was the gullible sort.”

  “He’s not—he’s just your garden-variety grasping entrepreneur. So he’s also open to the possibility that Beethoven may have been sufficiently inspired by the Schiller play to try setting it to music—it makes a certain amount of sense to him, given that the Choral Symphony ends so euphorically with the Schiller ‘Ode to Joy’—”

  “But anyone who knows anything about Beethoven knows that much,” Clara pointed out, “and any shady types trying to fabricate a Beethoven symphony might bring in the Schiller connection for that very reason—to make a far-fetched idea seem plausible.”