Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “So if we decide to go for the whole nine yards and conclude that this miraculously uncovered Tell Symphony is genuine, we’d need to anticipate some claimant, wacko or otherwise, popping up to challenge Jake Hassler’s title to it—and very possibly killing our chance of auctioning it and recovering our investment.”

  Gordy nodded with approval of his only client’s perceptivity. “Or postponing it till any legal challenge is adjudicated. But I wouldn’t let that prospect alone deter us. Nut jobs abound.”

  Of much greater concern, Gordy said, was whether Jake’s de facto ownership of the manuscript gave him—or anyone he might sell it to—the power to obtain copyright protection of the work for commercial use. “Selling ownership of the manuscript itself as a genuine artifact is one thing,” he said, doodling hoops on his otherwise blank notepad. “But if holding title to the composition fails to convey an accompanying right to license it for public performance and electronic reproduction and sale—I’m talking about creating zillions of records, tapes, CDs, videos, you-name-it—its value at auction would be seriously reduced. With that right intact, however, you’d likely have the whole music industry salivating buckets and willing to pay handsomely for it at a Cubbage & Wakeham auction.”

  “And so?” Harry asked, betraying no impatience with Gordy’s didactic bent.

  “First, the bad news.” Newly discovered works of art were not typically afforded copyright protection under American law, Gordy advised them, if they were no longer controlled by the creating artist or his or her heirs. “Which seems to mean, so far as I can tell, all that Jake Hassler owns outright—and is entitled to get paid for—is the manuscript itself, in the form of the two sketchbooks he says he found in the box in his grandpa’s attic—and not for any copyrightably protected use or commercial exploitation that might eventually be made of them.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Harry. “What’s the good news, counselor?”

  Gordy turned away from the window to consult a memo beside his notepad. “It would appear—under the rules of our glorious US Copyright Office—that anyone owning a newly discovered work of art is entitled to copyright protection thereof if he, she, it, or they do something to it—do almost anything, the way I read the language of their byzantine rulings.” Under a provision covering what the government bureau called “derivative works from newly discovered works,” as Gordy interpreted the legalese, copyright protection could be extended to newly found literary manuscripts if they were subsequently edited or translated. Likewise, for freshly uncovered musical compositions that were afterward arranged and/or orchestrated in order to be performed. “And that applies even if what the copyright office calls ‘the underlying work’—which, in our case, seems to mean what’s in Jake’s cedar box—cannot, in its present form, be copyrighted.”

  Harry slowly digested the hairsplitting technicality. “That sounds stupid, but good,” he said after a moment. “So any commercial bidder for the Tell manuscript would have to be prepared to invest whatever it takes to get the work into performable shape—which can then be copyrighted—and turned into gold.”

  “Correct. And Clara tells me—she’s trying to get a realistic take on the present condition of the thing—that it looks as if the manuscript was about forty percent orchestrated before the composer quit on it, leaving the balance of the rough draft in need of editing and scoring before it could be copyrighted and performed.” Gordy flipped his doodling pencil aside. “And that, Clara says from her superficial examination of it, is likely to prove a formidable task, given the ultra-messy state of the composition book.”

  “All in all, that doesn’t sound like such hot news to me,” Harry complained.

  “Because you’re not paying close enough attention,” Gordy chided. “The disheveled state of the other sixty percent of the manuscript may very well work to our advantage as its vendor, because the more effort that needs to be expended to turn the whole thing into a presentable work, the surer the new owner of the manuscript would be of obtaining copyright protection.”

  Given Clara’s warning about the condition of the unscored balance of the manuscript, it seemed to Mitch that the law might raise more difficulties than Gordy was suggesting. “If there’s all that much work to be done orchestrating the manuscript in order to bring it artistically and commercially viable,” he asked Gordy, “wouldn’t that seriously reduce the chances of the symphony being accepted as authentic Beethoven by orthodox scholars and music critics? They might very well argue that the finished product—however good—is a hybrid reworked by modern repairmen, and not pure Beethoven, and therefore question its legitimacy as part of his oeuvre. Which, of course, would negatively affect the bidding at our auction if the recording companies—to name the most likely group of bidders—knew they’d have to foot the bill for all that editing and scoring before this wonderful new Tell Symphony could be eligible for copyright protection and ready to be performed.”

  Gordy spun sideways in his chair and considered Mitch’s speculation. “Very possibly, but that’s going to depend on what shape the remaining sixty percent of the music is in. Meaning, I suppose—and I’m in over my head here since I know beans about music theory—it matters to what extent the themes and their developmental lines are decipherable in the main composition book—Clara’s take at this point is that the basic musical guts of the work appear to her to be there, to exist already, but need to be cleaned up and refined, or culled from among several versions of the same passage the composer may have been noodling with, and then the whole thing can be orchestrated without doing violence to what the composer intended.”

  Gordy’s look turned cautionary. “This is pretty technical stuff, and Clara tells me she’s underqualified to make more than a wishful guess about all of this—and she’s not just being modest since we’ve all had a look at the composition book and seen what a mess it is.”

  It pleased Mitch to hear Gordy taking serious note of Clara’s views, tentative though they sounded. But it worried him just how fraught with problems the whole project seemed to be. “What I’m hearing,” Mitch said, “is that even with a best-case outcome, we wind up in a catch-twenty-two bind. I mean, if too much rejiggering is required to turn the manuscript into a playable—and copyrightable—work, it’s by definition no longer completely original Beethoven. But if too little reworking is done, it won’t qualify for copyright and/or be performable—is that it?”

  “Ahhh,” Gordy said, “I see where you’re going—and it’s a fair point.” He glanced down at the memo on his desktop. “But I think we’re all right on that.” He scanned the top page at laser speed and then the next. “Yeah, okay—here. It says you can qualify for copyright protection ‘by virtue of the original effort expended…even if no new material is added.’ To me, ‘original effort’ in this case would mean editing and orchestrating the work.”

  “I love it when you lawyers start playing your weasel-word games,” Harry said. “I think I follow what you’re both saying, but where exactly, if I may ask, does that leaves us?”

  Gordy sat back. “I’d say we’re still very much in the game—if we want to be.”

  Harry rubbed his chin. “Pretty dicey stuff, though.” He tossed Mitch a quick look. “I think it’s time for you to pay a visit to our diamond-in-the-rough in the Jersey outback to see if we’ve missed something about this Jake Hassler.”

  .

  a squat, ruddy blur of purposeful motion, Jake Hassler resembled nothing so much as a spinning fireplug. His navy-blue T-shirt, tucked into faded jeans, advertised “Sylvan Lumber & Hardware” in no-nonsense white block letters. One hand locked onto a cellphone that he was chattering into, the other signing a receipt from a hovering deliveryman, he had a manic busyness about him that seemed to energize the whole establishment.

  Mitch edged closer to him, counter by counter, pausing in front of a long row of kegs each holding a different caliber of brads or nails. Bac
king toward his prey, Mitch sensed that the present owner of the William Tell Symphony was every inch in his element. Jake greeted by name, a wave, or a slap on the hand fully half the customers milling about the hardware section of the sprawling store. Peppered by rapid-fire questioning from every side, he was a human whirligig. His aging choirboy face betrayed an underlying gravity that suggested his job meant a lot to Jake Hassler and he was not about to screw it up.

  Mitch waited for him to find a few minutes of relative repose in a corner of the garden tools section, where he was leaning against a rack of rakes and shovels and checking off model numbers in a slick-paged order catalogue. “Nice merchandise,” he said to Jake. “Looks like the department head knows his stuff.”

  Jake glanced up, took in Mitch’s open-collar polo shirt and birdman sunglasses, and tried unsuccessfully to place their wearer. “Sorry,” he said, “you look familiar, but my friggin’ age must be catching up with me. Remind me again who you—”

  Mitch reintroduced himself, and far from looking as if he’d been ambushed, Jake greeted him cheerfully and ushered him to his disorderly cubbyhole of an office, where he shut the door behind them. “Nobody around here knows about the—you-know-what—and I’d just as soon keep it that way for now.” Jake grabbed a stack of order forms off the fold-up chair beside his desk and invited his visitor to take a load off. “Hey, I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so fast, but I’m glad you guys are into it. The sooner, the better, right?”

  “Right,” Mitch said, then apologized for not having phoned ahead, claiming that he had a few days of business to attend to in Trenton and thought he’d stop by since it was so close. Before long, Jake was saying he wished he could give Mitch the time to go into whatever was on his mind, but since he was up to his eyeballs at the moment, why not come by his house after work—“we’ll do some dogs and burgers out back—if you don’t mind peasant food.” Mitch said not at all, and the next instant Jake dialed his wife to say they were having a dinner guest.

  Mitch killed a couple of hours at the little Lambertville library by sifting through back numbers of the local weekly paper in a random search for any mention of the Hasslers or Jake’s employer, but found none. A leisurely swing through the sweet-smelling countryside brought him back to his red-meat rendezvous just before six. Daisy Hassler, a curly-haired charmer, greeted him no less hospitably than her husband had, but with a more amusing turn of phrase.

  “Jake is definitely into this Swiss thing,” she confided after he had wandered off to their basement to get charcoal for the grill, “ever since he got back from the funeral.” He kept repeating to her how Switzerland set the world standard for banks, trains, watches, cutlery, and milk chocolate, hosted the planet’s biggest food company as well as the Red Cross, UNESCO, and the League of Nations—“I’m not sure he knows the League’s been dead since before he was born,” she quipped at Jake’s expense—and was presently the oldest, still-running democracy on earth. “It’s got to the point where every night he flips through the Bean catalogue asking how come they don’t carry lederhosen.”

  Their house, on a quiet stretch of country road going nowhere, was a bare-bones affair about a century old that served as a showcase for Daisy’s skill in the decorative arts. Owner of an interior design business run in conjunction with an upscale antique shop in nearby Hopewell, she had enlivened the place with pickled-pine floors, beaded wainscoting, floral print curtains, and stenciled grape vines and cornucopias parading around the top of the kitchen and breakfast nook walls. The furniture was a covey of unrelated antique pieces, the floors covered with oval braided rugs, and the walls draped with appliquéd album quilts. Not Mitch and Clara’s style, to be sure, but he appreciated its studied coziness.

  Over the cookout supper taken on their small, screened porch, the Hasslers volunteered most of what Mitch wanted to know about them. They were not rich but certainly not poor, thanks to a double income that had allowed them to retire their mortgage a few years back, lease Daisy a Chevy wagon for her business, and send a small gift of cash every now and then to their two grown children. The older, a bachelor son, had overcome a drug habit and a minor run-in with the law—an indiscreet disclosure on Jake’s part that drew Daisy’s frown. “Mitch here, he’d find out anyway if he snoops around,” Jake told her by way of excusing himself. Their troubled firstborn had reformed and now worked on Long Island as a delivery driver for a big construction outfit. Their married daughter was a registered nurse in Albany and expecting a second child in the fall. “It’s not that the kids can’t get by on what they make,” Jake added, “but it’s nice we can help ’em out a little.”

  A devoted family man, from the sound of it, with a pleasing knack for cutting through polite society’s pretensions to say his piece, Jake Hassler was growing on Mitch as an amiable character and a most unlikely conspirator in some convoluted international fraud. Yet each new bottle of Sam Adams passing through Jake’s lips—Mitch was beginning to lose count of them—revved up a torrent of profane, less-than-comforting revelations. Among these was a big, throbbing vein of resentment toward his customers (“bunch of royal assholes, most of ’em”), his employer (“a prick and a half—and that’s on his good days”), his lawyer (“a buttoned-down rip-off artist”), and anyone else he suspected of slighting him as a social or mental cipher.

  After a dessert offering of Dove bars, which Mitch regretfully declined, Jake asked him, in the midst of wolfing down the thickly chocolate-coated treat, where he was spending the night—“not that it’s any of my friggin’ business.” When Mitch answered that he would be heading off shortly to check in at the Bon Soir Motel on Route 31, Daisy impulsively urged, “Stay here—we’ve got two empty bedrooms and a full bath on the third floor.”

  It was not the sort of gesture made by people with something to hide. Furthermore, Mitch thought, it might serve his purpose to observe the couple closeup for a bit longer, so he accepted the invitation with grace.

  Judging by the contents of the small bookcase in the living room alcove that served more importantly as their TV den, the Hasslers’ literary tastes ran to Civil War history, the full range of home carpentry, mysteries featuring female detectives, and Tom Clancy state-of-the-art weaponry novels. Their taste in movies—Jake’s, anyway, probably—was reflected by a CD of Independence Day that he had brought home to play some evening. Having responded at tireless length to all his guest’s inquiries, Jake invited him to join them in watching the film, part of the genre of blockbuster movies featuring mindless violence, superfluous profanity, gratuitous sex, and stupefying special effects—the sort of thing Mitch and Clara studiously avoided. But under the circumstances he could not be finicky. As it turned out, he outlasted both Daisy, who, to her credit, slipped away before the film was a quarter over, and Jake, who was snoring away like a balky chainsaw long before the finale.

  Unmonitored, Mitch scanned the first floor for any sign of knavery. He had about abandoned the all-but-pointless search when his eye brushed over a book spread face-down on the small round table next to the larger of the two parlor armchairs. Gliding across the room to examine the book, he discovered that it was an English translation of Schiller’s play, William Tell, published by the University of Chicago Press, no less. The English translation was based on an old German edition of the same play that Jake said he had found in the cedar box in his grandfather’s attic trunk. Not the sort of fare, apparently, that the Hasslers usually turned to for pleasure reading. On loan from the Mercer County Library System, the book had been taken out only recently, Mitch could see from the due date stamped on the slip inside the back cover. Interesting. The presence of the volume signaled an intellectual curiosity on Jake’s or Daisy’s part, or perhaps of both, that he would not have suspected.

  “It’s heavy going,” Daisy said, startling him. She had finished her kitchen chores and come up behind him noiselessly. “I give Jake a lot of credit—he wanted to see what it
was all about—since this Beethoven symphony is supposed to be based on this play.”

  “Makes sense,” said Mitch, recovering his nonchalance. “Never read Schiller myself.”

  “I got through most of it—not bad. I guess Beethoven didn’t dig comedy all that much.”

  “Not from what I hear.”

  She ran a hand through her hair to tame a wandering curl. “Do you people think—I mean, is there any way of telling for sure if the manuscript is really real?”

  Nothing coy about the woman. “It would be amazing, wouldn’t it?” Mitch said noncommittally. “What do you think?”

  Daisy gave her head a saucy tilt. “How on earth would I know?”

  “What’s your gut feeling?”

  Daisy sighed. “Honestly?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too good to be true—though I guess weirder things have happened.” She sat on the arm of the chair beside them. “But it sounds like you people think it’s a phony.”

  Her directness was disarming.

  “Not necessarily. It’s our professional responsibility to be suspicious, especially with something that’s this…extraordinary.”

  “We get that. But it sure makes Jake edgy. He’s got high blood pressure already, and this whole business has his numbers spiking. I mean, it’s not as if he went looking for this thing. Jake likes to think of himself as very honest—he told me he was conflicted as hell about what to do with the—with all the stuff in the attic trunk—he phoned me from over there. I guess I was the one who put him up to it—to just take it and not ask any more questions and bring it home—and then we’d sort out what to do with it. He keeps hoping it’ll be our winning lottery ticket, so we won’t have to work so hard or worry any more.”