Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “Maybe,” Mitch said, nodding slowly. “But Harry was also impressed when I told him what you said about Schubert’s Ninth, his greatest work, not being discovered until ten years after his death, so why not a comparable Beethoven find? He also reminded me about that Shakespeare play—what was it, Edward the Something—Edward the Third, I think he said—that was found only a few years ago. So he’s thinking this William Tell Symphony may not be entirely off the wall.”

  Clara shook her head. “That was quite different,” she said. “The Shakespeare play—it wasn’t suddenly discovered at the bottom of a dry well in the Hebrides or someplace. Scholars knew about it for three hundred years—they just couldn’t decide whether Shakespeare wrote it himself or someone else in his company did. Besides, nobody has said it’s good Shakespeare.”

  “Hey, nobody’s claiming this Tell Symphony is good Beethoven,” Mitch said a bit irritably. “That would be putting the cart about fifty furlongs before the horse—I’m not that naïve.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” She reached a hand over and squeezed his upper arm. “Look, here’s the main thing you all need to face before getting in deeper. We, the world, know virtually everything about Beethoven’s whole life. He left a ton of stuff behind—notebooks, diaries, letters, bills, hundreds of pieces and scraps of manuscript, maybe thousands—all of which scholars have been combing over for two hundred years. How come nobody anywhere has found or heard a word about a William Tell Symphony until now? The composition books you saw and the old copy of the Schiller play about Tell may look convincing enough, and this confessional letter by Nina Whatsherface may be very appealing, but it’s all just too convenient for something of this magnitude to pop up out of the blue.”

  “Sure,” Mitch said and took her hand, “and that’s what I get paid for—not to accept anything at face value. But that’s the adventure—always looking for gold in a pile of poop.”

  Clara studied his earnest expression. “Well, I hate to be a party pooper right at the start,” she said, “but I did what you asked and looked through about fifteen of my books on Beethoven’s life and work, and there’s no mention anywhere about his ever having been in Switzerland.” She stopped short. “Well, I see this Nina letter more or less addresses that objection—it says his visit to Zurich was supposed to be a big secret, and I guess that makes a degree of sense—Beethoven wouldn’t have wanted to advertise just how desperate he was to cure his loss of hearing—a deaf musician is like a blind painter or a tongueless chef.” She tilted her head in a gesture of concession. “Well—okay—so what’s the plan?”

  Mitch tossed off his jacket and tugged her toward him.

  “Ah, that’s where you come in, my lovely Miss Tulip. You are Step One in the master plan.”

  “Me? Get serious—and I’m not sure I like you calling me Tulip anymore.”

  “After seven years? Really?” He looked crestfallen. “I thought it was endearing. Tulips are beauteous—and, you know, highly Dutch.”

  “I get that—and I liked it for a while—but it doesn’t work unless I’m in a playful mood.”

  “How about Stinky, then? Nothing playful about that—”

  She gave his arm a mock punch and broke into a broad smile. “Okay, call me whatever you’d like—now what’s this Step One?”

  The plan, he explained, was for C&W to undertake a preliminary inspection of the Tell manuscript and of the leading biographical and musicological studies of Beethoven and his work and habits to determine if, based on the bulk of the evidence, the alleged symphony was an obvious fraud—“or,” Mitch added, “conceivably authentic by any leap of imagination. The quality of the composition, other than whether it sounds detectably like Beethoven’s work product, is not an issue at the beginning of the process. The point is to determine whether we’d need to organize a thoroughgoing examination of this material by a panel of international experts to make a definitive judgment about its authenticity.”

  This preliminary survey of the standard Beethoven sources, Mitch added, would try to establish, for example, if there was contradictory evidence that the composer was living somewhere other than in Zurich during the summer of 1814; what other creative projects he was known to have been working on during the several months he was purportedly in Switzerland; the known degree of his deafness at that time and if it would have justified his travel to a foreign country for treatment by a specialist, and whether the musical handwriting in the Tell manuscript bore a close similarity to Beethoven’s recognized style, including his idiosyncratic markings, tempi, and even ink colors. “There must be books available in any decent music library that include illustrations of sample pages showing what his composition books looked like,” Mitch speculated, “which, at a guess, were probably pretty distinctive.”

  “Extremely,” Clara said. “His musical penmanship was horrendous, a notorious muck-up that in many places only he could decipher—which may not have been an accident.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I own a copy of the leading study of Beethoven’s sketchbooks. As I said, scholars have churned out endless volumes about him—there’s practically a whole Beethoven industry out there in musical academia.”

  “Excellent,” said Mitch. “That’ll give our preliminary investigator a lot to work with right off the bat.” He separated himself from her by half a cushion. “We’d like you to start as soon as possible—and sop up as much historical evidence as you possibly can in one seven-day week—a kind of crash course so at the end you can sense whether this thing is worth our bothering with—and investing in a full-scale effort to authenticate it.”

  Clara gave him a startled deer-in-the-headlights look. “Me? That’s ridiculous—I’m just a graduate student. You people need a top-flight scholar to make even the most tentative sort of judgment—and, at any rate, it can’t be done in a week if it’s worth doing at all.”

  “You’re not hearing me, Clara—we’d bring in all the top-flight scholars we might need, starting with an all-star to head up the study group. But right now we need someone who has advanced musical knowledge, and whose period of concentration includes Beethoven’s career and the German Romantics—someone who’s immediately available and can keep this thing entirely confidential and is a sufficiently accomplished musician to try to read these composition books well enough to figure out if what they contain sounds like Beethoven—at least remotely so—and isn’t just a jumble of notes intended to pass as something genuine.” Mitch opened his palms toward her. “Voilá—you fit the bill perfectly, Madam Emery.”

  She sat back, dazed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely, hon—and don’t be so friggin’ modest. You’re perfect because you’d have more detachment than a Beethoven specialist—but Schubert had a whole lot in common with him, from what you’ve told me, and was a great admirer of his. Also—and don’t let this go to your head—some people think you’re going to make a brilliant musicologist someday.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at his ardor. “So you’ve nominated me for this great honor?”

  “No,” Mitch said, “this was Harry’s idea, I swear. It would have been unprofessional of me to put you up for it. Harry says it’s a no-brainer—and I’m not to take no for an answer.”

  Clara’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t much like Harry, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I’m not sure that’s relevant at the moment. Anyway, he thinks you’re a knockout—and Lolly, of course, sings your praises to him constantly.”

  “More’s the pity,” she said ungratefully. “Anyway, I’ll bet the main reason Harry wants me is he thinks I’ll work for him on the cheap, being a mere grad student—”

  “Not so,” said Mitch. “He’s authorized me to offer you a stipend of five thousand dollars for one week, during which you’ll be expected to bust your lovely buns—on a twenty-four seven basis, if necessary. You
’ll understand that the Tell manuscript has to remain under tight security on the C&W premises, so you’ll be allowed exclusive occupancy of the top-floor apartment above our offices for the entire time in case you don’t want to waste your energy commuting across town—there’s a well-tuned baby grand in the apartment, Harry says—and one of the company vans will pick up and haul over to the apartment any of the Beethoven books or other related ones in your library or any other revealing material you may find up at Columbia—where, if I may be so bold, you should go for a search of the music stacks first thing in the morning.” His firm would also assign a staffer to see that she was well fed, at company expense, with gourmet cuisine. “They might even let you go out for an hour’s walk every day, but no other recreation. It will be a grind, without a doubt.”

  Clara tried to sort it all out—the suddenness of the challenge, the enormity of the responsibility, the unjustifiably generous assumption of her knowledgeability on Harry’s and Mitch’s part, the total disruption of her life for a whole nonstop week… “Is this a command performance?” she asked, already wearied by the prospect of such a Herculean labor.

  “At least it’s not slave labor,” Mitch consoled.

  She sighed. “And tell me again why the big rush for such a possibly momentous artistic work? Shouldn’t the vetting process be done with great deliberation?”

  “Sure—and it will be, if you tell us it’s worth the trouble. But meanwhile, we don’t want to lose the opportunity. The owner has agreed to let us hang onto it for a month to determine if we’re willing to go through an exhaustive—and expensive—full-scale investigation.”

  A sudden fear of inadequacy engulfed her.

  “I’m not sure this is such a hot idea,” she said quietly, “however much I appreciate the honor—”

  “Hey, it’s you who’d be doing us a big favor. So why not?”

  “Well,” she wavered, grasping for an excuse, “for one thing, I can’t just drop everything and plunge into this. I’ve got commitments all week—work time at Lincoln Center, an appointment at my hairdresser—I need a cut badly—and Madge Engler and I have matinée tickets for that Beckett revival you weren’t interested in, and oh! We’re supposed to have dinner next Tuesday with your dysfunctional cousin and his bimbo—”

  Mitch threw up his hands. “Listen, angel, Lincoln Center will survive without your services for a week—and your hair’s just fine,” he said, raking a hand through it gently. “And Madge can watch those guys in the garbage cans without you. I’ll reschedule with Cousin Ken—and let’s face it, his lady friend isn’t a bimbo—she’s a tart.”

  “Poor thing.”

  Clara sat back and weighed her final words of objection.

  “Look, I’ll be excruciatingly honest with you. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to intrude upon your business. It’s like the separation of Church and State in your Constitution. This is your arena, and I shouldn’t get involved stomping all over your turf. No good can come of it—we could have fights, or at least serious disagreements—and when it’s all said and done, I may not come out where you and Harry would like me to. Why do we need discord when we’ve got such a good thing going between us?”

  Mitch paused respectfully before taking up her concerns. “First of all, Harry and I have definitely not prejudged this Tell thing—it’s just intriguing enough to warrant our serious attention, at least initially. Second, there won’t be any fights between us—I respect you too much—and I won’t try to sway your opinion one way or the other—”

  “You can be a wee bit intimidating, darlin’, when you’ve a mind to—and I don’t think you even realize it—”

  “And you, darlin’,” he said evenly, “are not exactly a shrinking violet. But we like that about each other, so cast that aside. As to your intruding onto my turf—no way. You’re not intruding, you’re being invited to share in my business for a brief engagement, not a long-term commitment—because I need you, and I trust your wily brainpower.” And he fell still.

  Clara pondered for a long moment. “Well,” she said finally, “okay—provided you promise we don’t say a word about it to each other the whole week I’m working on it—and until after I make my report. Not even a conjugal visit—”

  Mitch grinned at her capitulation.

  “Whatever Tulip wants, Tulip gets.”

  “Tulip has to pee just now, so stuff the endearments for a while.”

  That night, while they were both having trouble falling asleep, Clara lifted her seething head off the pillow and said, as if still in the midst of their earlier conversation, “The thing that gets me is that Ludwig supposedly told this Nina person that he wanted her to throw out the composition notebooks mainly because they weren’t good enough. So I’m wondering what gave that girl—or any of her heirs or some fathead who might come into possession of it someday—the right to bring their contents to public attention—and possibly sharp ridicule because the work is such inferior Beethoven? He apparently made his wishes in the matter known to her. Why don’t they deserve to be respected?”

  His mind churning as busily as hers, Mitch flipped his pillow over and addressed her anguished concern. “But what if he was wrong? He may have been distracted for a whole lot of reasons we’ll probably never know—”

  “That’s not the point. Shouldn’t his wishes prevail, however many years have passed? Doesn’t posterity owe Beethoven that much respect—assuming for even a moment this really is Beethoven’s work—or is all this just about the fucking money?”

  The same question had occurred to him on his walk home through the park, but he had not allowed himself to dwell on it. “How do we know,” he asked back evasively, “that Nina was telling it straight? There’s only her word to go on at the moment.”

  “But if she’s lying about why he asked her to get rid of it, who says she’s telling the truth about any of this? Maybe she stole it—or schemed to get it away from him—or…or…”

  He ran his fingers lovingly through her hair. “I think you’re hooked, sweetie. Go to sleep, and you can start unsticking this nasty little wicket first thing in the morning.”

  {4}

  Mitch, a practicing lawyer for five years when he first set foot in Gordon Roth’s office, had determined at once that its occupant was one of the less conventional, more irreverent practitioners of the trade—and all the better for it.

  Not that Cubbage & Wakeham’s house counsel (and administrative vice president) was a rebel or radical, but his disdain for orthodox wisdom often cast him in the role of a contrarian or devil’s advocate, with Harry Cubbage’s encouragement. “I like thinking out of the box,” Harry would say by way of explaining Gordy’s value to the company despite his superficial quirks. On his only office wall not taken up by windows or bookcases, Gordy had put up three large photographic posters: on the left, Albert Einstein, in all his shaggy glory, sticking his tongue out at the universe; on the right, a tipsy W. C. Fields, top hat askew and winking naughtily; and in the middle, an upside-down Richard Nixon, fuzzily imaged on the TV screen and captioned with the words of his eloquent disclaimer, “I am not a crook.” Hanging on the back of his usually closed office door was a heavily pocked dartboard, a deterrent to drop-in visitors who entered at their peril if they forgot to knock. Below the target, a small-framed sign declared, “Dogs Are Entirely Unnecessary.” Stacks of legal papers covered nearly every horizontal surface, the floor included, suggesting the resident wizard was either overtaxed by work or functioning in an intergalactic time warp. What Mitch had also learned since joining C&W was that Gordy Roth was a very competent attorney indeed.

  Harry was already enthroned in the tufted leather recliner in the corner that Gordy preferred for meditation, so Mitch took the wicker rocker angled at the front of the lawyer’s heaped desk. It had been only five days since Jake Hassler and his spellbinding cedar box had appeared on the C&W premises, but Go
rdy had already completed his preliminary findings on the problematic legal status of the Tell manuscript. The results, he told his two colleagues, were somewhat iffy and did not fully dispose of the matter.

  “If the starting point of our concern is whether Mr. Hassler is the rightful owner of the property and can legitimately ask us to auction it for him,” Gordy began, “I think the answer is yes, so far as his grandfather’s will is concerned.” All family papers and related personal memorabilia had been bequeathed to Jake and exempted from the lien-holding neighbors’ claims against the estate. But that, said Gordy, raised the separable question of whether all such papers were Jake’s property to do whatever he wished with them. And in the case of a manuscript attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven but evidently never purchased from him or anyone else, the answer might well depend on whether a legitimate heir of the composer suddenly stepped forth now to claim title.

  “So we’re not primarily concerned about the Erpf family next door?” Harry asked. “Our friend Jake Hassler says they’re pissed—especially this Ansel character, the prodigal son.”

  “They could file a claim, probably without merit on its face, but it might serve to intimidate Jake and discourage us from proceeding until the courts dismiss it.”

  “And will they?” Harry asked.

  “Odds are. I’d have been far more concerned about some obscure Beethoven relative creeping out of the woodwork until my conversation upstairs yesterday with Clara Emery.” Gordy gave Mitch the semblance of a salute. “Clara tells me that Beethoven never married and had no known children, and that the male line bearing the family name seems to have ended when his beloved nephew Karl’s grandson died in a Vienna army hospital during the First World War.” Gordy glanced out the window at C&W’s landscaped courtyard, as if communing for a moment with the forces of nature. “Could some presently unknown relative suddenly materialize and claim title to the Tell symphony? Possibly—but that seems even less likely than the manuscript itself surviving our investigation unsullied. It’s a worry, certainly, but a minor one.”