Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  His charm was largely in abeyance, though, at their hastily arranged meeting in Provence as he listened expressionless to Mitch’s narrative of the Zurich discovery and briefly inspected a pair of double-page spreads photocopied from the two Tell sketchbooks to whet Mac’s interest. “I’m afraid somebody’s been yankin’ you fellas’ chain,” he said, handing back the copied pages.

  So much for down-home courtliness. “I’m totally aware of your matchless credentials, professor,” Mitch said evenly, “but, with all due respect, how can you be so certain—from just a glance—that this is a fraud?”

  “Well, I do feel bad about that, Mr. Emery—your having come all this way. But I sure didn’t encourage you. This thing just doesn’t sit right to me. You’re talkin’ about Beethoven here, not Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber, the good Lord help us. An unheard of Beethoven symphony doesn’t just come popping outta the pea patch, my friend. I’m just flat-out not up for lendin’ credibility to a bad joke like this by getting involved in it any which way—if I’m makin’ myself clear to you and your pretty missus.”

  Mitch could not hide his chagrin. “Abundantly.”

  “I’m truly sorry, son—and appreciate your thinkin’ I was your man.”

  “Right.” Mitch nodded, turned slowly, and began to retreat toward the hotel room door.

  Clara was dismayed her idol’s peremptory dismissal of Mitch’s appeal for consideration. But her husband’s turning tail seemed equally baffling. “Mitch!” she called after him.

  “C’mon, hon—we’re interfering with the professor’s vacation,” he said over his shoulder.

  “But—he’s—not—” She wanted to add “giving us the time of day.”

  “We can just make the noon flight—and the professor can get on with his sightseeing.”

  Abject surrender was not like him. Wait—ahhh. Now she got it. This was her cue. Time to bewitch this stubborn son of a gun she had so ardently recommended. She geared up her pluck and turned to Quarles. “Have you a minute more?”

  “For such a lovely lady—sure.”

  She managed a quick smile. “Frankly, I felt exactly the same as you, Professor, when Mitchell first told me about this—this absurdity,” she said, all earnestness. “It sounded like a complete fairy tale.” But, she went on to explain, after examining the material for a solid week to the best of her ability and reviewing some of the notes she had accumulated during the seminar she had taken with Quarles at Columbia, she was far less sure. “I know it’s implausible, but there’s something going on here—I don’t pretend to know what,” she said, managing to sound both plaintive and defiant.

  Her appeal caused the scholar to retrieve the manuscript photos and scrutinize them again, this time more deliberately and moving closer to the windows for better light. Meanwhile, Mitch reappeared behind him and slathered on the butter. “Our firm feels you’re the ideal person to direct the broad musical aspect of our investigation,” he said, “and work with a group of international scholars who, quite frankly, may need to be coaxed into cooperating with one another.”

  “You been told right, Mr. Emery. Bunch of egomaniacs, every last one—except me.” Quarles’s grin encouraged Mitch to add quickly that chairing the panel of experts would require relatively little of his time. “And, not to be coy about it, you would be extremely well compensated, as would your eminent colleagues.”

  The news of unspecified largess was not lost on their quarry. But he was far too canny a specimen to leap at the bait. “Now listen, my friends—even if I were half as intrigued as Mrs. Emery by this polecat here,” he said, beginning to bend, “I have lots of prior obligations. I just can’t bug off on some fishin’ trip, no matter what’s bitin’.”

  Mitch replied that C&W needed him for no more than a week, ten days tops, to make an initial assessment as soon as possible, and if he was not satisfied by the end of that time that the manuscript could well be authentic, his mission would have been accomplished. Otherwise, his presence would be required for one day a week for a month while the other members of the expert panel—“entirely of your choosing, bear in mind”—flew in to examine the manuscript, plus an additional week to chair their final deliberations and a few more days to draw up a summary statement of the panelists’ findings. For these services, he would receive a fee of $175,000 plus expenses while staying in New York.

  The stipend had a certain gravity to it. “Not bad pay, I’ll have to admit. Decent hotel?”

  “Your choice,” Mitch said. “Not the honeymoon suite, though.”

  Mac Quarles gave a down-home horselaugh. “I guess you folks are mighty stirred up.”

  “Mighty curious, that’s for sure,” said Mitch, feeling the tide now running in his favor, “and eager to get to the bottom of this business.”

  Quarles drifted to the window and watched the traffic beetling along the boulevard below the hotel. “And I get to choose the Beethoven people I want?”

  “Yes, sir, if you decide a comprehensive investigation is warranted.”

  “And if I do, but I wind up not agreein’ with my own panel’s consensus, what then?”

  “That would be up to you. You could issue a ringing dissent—”

  “How about I do what you ask, but my name gets left out of it? This should really be the Beethoven people’s call. I’m a kinda generalist, anyway.”

  The professor’s defenses were crumbling fast. “But that’s exactly why we want you, and not just Beethoven specialists,” Mitch pitched still harder. “They may all have their own predisposed attitudes. We want an expert who’s above this explicit battlefield. Frankly, by connecting your name to the effort, my firm would be telling the music world that we’ve approached the crucial authentication issue as conscientiously as possible.”

  “So no hideout for me?”

  Mitch gambled now to close the deal. “We’d be paying you for both your judgment and your reputation—you’d be our brand name, to be perfectly honest with you. But what an immense thrill for all of us—to be in on a discovery of this magnitude, if it proves genuine.”

  Quarles nodded. “You talk a good game, Mr. Emery. Let me run this by my better half when she gets back to the hotel—I hate to break up our holiday. But it sounds as if Mrs. Quarles is gonna get a nice little Manhattan shoppin’ spree out of it in exchange.”

  .

  her parents’ saturday morning call from London came as a bit of a surprise to Clara—only because it was out of sequence. Normally they phoned on Monday night for a chat and reassurance all was well with their beloved daughter.

  “Nothing wrong here, darling,” Gladys Hoitsma explained as soon as Clara came on, “but your father wants to speak to you when we’re done.”

  She could tell them nothing about the Beethoven development, of course, since Harry had clamped a lid on the entire subject until C&W was ready to go public with it, so Clara groped for a few items of trivia to hold up her end of the conversation until her father came on the line with a kindly reprimand. “A little bird has told me,” said Piet Hoitsma, “that you and Mitchell are involved in evaluating a possibly remarkable discovery—I won’t say the ‘B’ word just in case Scotland Yard is tapping my line—heaven forbid.”

  Clara was briefly dumbfounded but quickly put two and two together. “Your little bird wouldn’t happen to be named Sedgwick Wakeham, would it?”

  “That’s the very bird—haven’t seen him to talk to for a while except during intermissions at Albert Hall or Covent Garden. He can be a bit of a trial, but very warm-hearted. He had good words about Mitch from his partner, Cubbage, but he surprised me by saying he’d been in on a conference call lately with his New York office and you were sitting in, contributing brilliantly by sharing your musical knowledge and good sense with them. It made me proud, madam.”

  “Very nice of him to ring you,” Clara said, “but I think he was overstating it by ha
lf. Still, why would he go into—he told you what the meeting was about? I don’t get that.”

  “Made me swear an oath to keep it under my hat. Old Sedge, though, is a lot shrewder character than he sounds. He wasn’t just calling to compliment my daughter. He was on a mission—and my calling you means he’s succeeded.”

  “I—I’m not following you, Daddy.”

  Sedge had called him, Piet explained, at the urging of Harry Cubbage, out of sorts because neither he nor Mitch had been able to persuade Clara to stay with the Beethoven project.

  “Sedge says Harry says Mitch has practically begged you to come on board as a paid consultant but you’ve said no—and Mitch doesn’t want to make an issue of it anymore.”

  “Sounds about right,” said Clara. “It’s lovely that they think I’d be of help, but the truth is they can hire all the expertise they need.”

  “Sedge seems to think, from what his partner has told him, that this could be the biggest payday their company has ever had—if this discovery is for real. And to a man like Sedge—you know, loyalty to the old regiment, God save the empire, and all that—your walking away from this thing is a bit of slap in the face—not just to their auction house but to Mitch’s career there.”

  Checking to see that Mitch hadn’t yet returned from his grocery shopping on Broadway, Clara sank onto the living room sofa with a sigh. “Oh, my—this is escalating out of all proportion, Daddy. And I think Mr. Wakeham, old dear that he may be, should keep his nose out of Mitch’s and my business. Sounds like they’re ganging up on me, and frankly, I don’t like it. I’ve got a career, too—or would like one if I can get my damn dissertation finished.”

  “Right,” her father said, “and I told Sedge as much. But then I had an afterthought. How wedded are you to your Schubert topic for the dissertation—it’s all about his Ninth Symphony, correct? And what about it, specifically—that it’s so difficult to play—”

  “Yes—that and everything else I can dredge up to explain what makes it so marvelous. What are you driving at?”

  “How close are you to completing it?”

  “I don’t know, a year more maybe or a bit longer—there’s no timetable. But that’s just why I don’t want to be snookered into this William Tell Symphony project—it’ll turn out to be very time-consuming. You don’t know the half of it.”

  “But it sounds incredibly exciting, Clara. Why don’t you write your dissertation on this Tell Symphony discovery—even if it proves a fake. The whole investigation would make for instructive and fascinating reading—and I’m sure my friend Dickie Montrose at Faber & Faber would love to publish it. It could be a big hit—put you on the map right at the beginning of your academic career. And then you can go back and pick up with the Schubert and have a better chance of getting it published, too.”

  He spoke with such caring and conviction that she had to pause and consider the idea instead of dismissing it out of hand.

  “Well,” she said, “I never thought of that.”

  “Perhaps you should, Clara. I certainly don’t mean to be intrusive, but it just seems…”

  She was appreciative of his thoughtfulness and smarts—his success as a high-powered corporate executive commanded respect, not to mention her gratitude for all that he and her mother had done for her in life. But it was, after all, her life.

  “May I be totally honest with you, Piet?” She would call him by his first name only at moments of particular delicacy.

  “I should hope so, child.”

  “I’m afraid if I mix into this whole thing—which is in Mitch’s primary business sphere but in my area of advanced learning—we might have rather a row over where it all comes out—if he and I should see it differently. He’s quite protective about his turf—it’s his form of independence, his impregnable castle, sort of. I’m afraid it all stems from my trust fund—not that he resents my having it, exactly, but, well, it’s understandable in a way—”

  “Hold on, Clara—I was told Mitch is all for your getting into this thing with him—that he values your brain power—likewise Messrs. Cubbage and Wakeham.”

  “I think Mitch wants me around just so long as I’ll back up his judgment—for moral support, more or less. If I dare oppose him, it could bollix things up between us. Do you see?”

  Her father did not.

  “If you’ll forgive me—my turn now to be totally honest—I think you’re underestimating Mitch,” he said, “or making a lame excuse to escape from the responsibility that comes with this invitation to take part in a potentially historic event. But what a challenge, Clara—it’s a superb opportunity—and all opportunities come with risks. I say go for it, girl.”

  Which is why the next morning she asked Mitch if his offer to her to play his sidekick in the Beethoven venture was still open—“for a salary, you understand, but not an excessive one.”

  In response to which, he shouted, “Hell yes, you gorgeous creature!” and squeezed her half to death.

  An hour later, the two of them packed up all her Beethoven books and hauled them back over to the C&W office in a taxi, to be at Mac Quarles’s disposal while he was examining the Tell documents the following week. And when Mac reported his tentative findings ten days later, she was again on hand in the company library, this time taking copious notes.

  .

  at the end of his second day on the job, Mac Quarles had issued a bracing caveat based on the derelict appearance of the first sketchbook, containing the rough draft of the Tell Symphony.

  “Its ratty condition may well testify to its authenticity, friends, but that doesn’t make it any less problematic for purposes of analysis,” he memoed the C&W brass. The material in the final two movements had to be gone over measure by measure, page by page, and before that could be done, it all needed to be transcribed for legibility. “As is, it’s just too hard—too messy, too broken up—which we do know is how Beethoven composed—to get a clear, overall sense of this thing. Right now I’m reduced to calculated guesswork.” And even if the manuscript were to be deemed authentic, he added, “sooner or later somebody—or a committee of somebodies—will have to make a series of choices that the composer, whoever it was, chose not to do for the last half of the work.” Melodic lines and harmonic treatments had to be resolved, Mac explained, “and even if the music is all in there, down on paper—and a lot of it is in unconnected pieces—unraveling it and making sure the edited passages jell with the surrounding ones—that’s going to require a whole bunch of hard, sweaty, intuitive work.”

  Harry was confused.

  “I get what you’re saying, Professor,” he remarked, dropping by Mitch’s office, “but don’t the first two movements, given their relatively clean shape, provide enough sense of the whole for you to form a preliminary opinion on the authenticity issue?”

  “Now that’s just what I’m fixin’ to see to for you fellas.” Mac motioned for the C&W security guard to keep an eagle eye on the manuscript while he headed out to lunch. “Anyone for the tuna and egg club at Three Guys? Nothin’ half as good in Provence.”

  After Mac had labored all week, through the weekend, and two days into the following week, the C&W brain trust gathered to hear his tentative judgment. Delivered orally, unaccompanied by a written memorandum, the report started off sounding more upbeat than Mitch had expected and Clara had dared to hope. Just why she was anxious for positive feedback from this formidable academician she had managed to snare for Mitch’s employer was puzzling to her; she had never thought of herself as a wishful romantic. Still, miracles were worth chasing after.

  “The most striking thing of all for me,” Mac began, without beating around the bush, “is the very nature and structure of this composition. Y’see, what I’ve kept askin’ myself is why, if I were a crooked schemer, I’d create something that’s such a radical departure from anything else Beethoven had done to that point—or w
ould ever do afterward. You’d suppose just the opposite—that a forger would try to make up a Beethoven symphony very much in his heroic style. Yet that’s not at all what we’ve got here.”

  Gordy cut in. “But isn’t that also a strong prima facie argument against its authenticity?”

  “Hang onto your britches, Mr. Roth, while I say my piece.” Gordy subsided, and Mac drove home his point. If an imposter had composed Tell and put Beethoven’s name to it, he had to be one shrewd cookie, thoroughly aware that every symphony the master wrote was markedly different from those that had preceded it and not just a variant on what he had already achieved. “Mr. B was always pushing the envelope, always comin’ on with new structural dynamics, unsettling tonal twists, shifts of key and tempi, and unexpected melodic developments, so that he never let you relax, thinkin’ you’d already been there. He just loved surprisin’ his audience.”

  Yet as innovative as Tell was—with vocal passages daringly interspersed inside a full-scale symphonic work—it did not strike Mac as an implausible departure for Beethoven at that troubled moment in his career. No one else had tried to tell an explicit story in music without costumed actor-vocalists in front of stage scenery. “But, doncha see, that would have been the excitement of the challenge if you’re the supreme maestro of the symphonic form,” Mac theorized. Each of the four Tell movements included three vocal pieces—an aria, a duet, and a chorale—and a short passage from Schiller’s text that the manuscript labeled a “dramalogue” to be recited by an actor with a pianissimo accompaniment. The whole unorthodox creation, as Mac read it, was designed to marry a perceptible story line to highly suggestive passagework, with all the driving tension that marked the great Beethoven symphonies—but without disintegrating into some kind of Swiss peasant hoedown or off-putting cacaphony.