Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “But why,” Mitch asked, “didn’t he just do an operatic adaptation of Schiller’s play?”

  “That’s not too hard to figure.” Mac tilted his chair back. “It’s no accident that Beethoven wrote only one opera, and Fidelio was an agony for him—he was no damn good at writin’ music for singers. He even admitted as much once in a letter, saying that—and I’m paraphrasin’ him now—‘When sounds ring within me, I always hear the tutti’—that’s the full orchestra—‘because I can ask anythin’ of the instrumentalists. But when writin’ for the voice, I must continually ask myself, “Can that be sung?”’” And so, Mac speculated, Beethoven (or his pretender) must have decided, after composing a few scenes of an operatic Tell, that he had run into the same old problem and settled on a different approach—a dramatic symphony, infused with operatic elements. He had the perfect librettist in Schiller himself, and as he started over, this time Beethoven, or whoever, chose passages from the text that allowed him to compose simple, melodic vocal segments in a narrow range and fixed key—“in other words, they’re highly singable but don’t intrude much on his overall symphonic scheme because they’re musical asides, pleasin’ diversions that can stand by themselves as songs and yield seamlessly to the next thematic progression. It’s an ingenious solution to a problem that we know bedeviled the real Beethoven.”

  “Mmmm,” said Harry, riveted. “Okay—if you say so. But then why William Tell? And why Schiller’s play about him? Just because Beethoven supposedly headed for Switzerland to see a hearing specialist? That’s not overly convincing to me.”

  “Oh, I agree,” said Mac. “There are plenty of other historical and biographical factors, though, testifyin’ to either the brilliance of your forger or the authenticity of the work.”

  The maestro, titan or not, was very much a child of his time, place, and social station, Mac related. “Like the rest of us, the man put on his drawers one leg at a time.” Though neither an intellectual giant nor a political activist, he was fully aware of the revolutionary ferment sweeping across Europe during much of his lifetime. And as a commoner struggling for his daily bread in a world run by preening aristocrats, Beethoven was highly susceptible to the lure of German Romanticism, which sang to him of universal liberty, brotherhood, justice, and the cultural yearnings of the Volk.

  The liberating precepts of the Romantic Movement were preached to Beethoven, Mac said, by one of his first music teachers who saw in the remarkable young keyboard artist the next Mozart. While the callow Beethoven could be considered a radical only for the departures from orthodoxy in his musical works, he was known to have attended lectures on Kant’s iconoclastic moral philosophy, to have read deeply in the avant-garde literature of the period, and been thrilled by news from abroad—republican France, in particular—promising that the age of the divine-right monarchies was coming to an end.

  “But that shinin’ future had not yet arrived,” Mac recounted. By the time Beethoven was establishing himself as a fixture of the Viennese music scene, the Hapsburg reaction had set in under Emperor Franz I. Faced with choosing between pauperism and expediency, young Ludwig opted out of martyrdom and sought the favor of—and commissions from—the entrenched social order. He did not air his political views any more than his contempt for most of his aristocratic keepers; his disreputable social status stemmed, rather, from his bad manners and indiscretion, attributable probably to his hardness of hearing. His crush on Napoleon hit the skids when the Corsican war lover crowned himself emperor—“on account of which ol’ Ludwig took Bonaparte’s name off the dedication line on the title page of the Eroica, his breakthrough symphony,” Mac related.

  Beethoven’s disenchantment spread to encompass all the oppressive regimes and ideologies that ruled his age, Austrian absolutism included. He became an unsparing cynic about his adopted country. The maestro barely paid lip service to Austrian patriotism, refusing to dedicate any composition to his emperor, who repaid this slight by never attending a Beethoven concert or making him an official musician of the Hapsburg court. His only ally there was the emperor’s aesthetic younger brother, Archduke Rudolph, who helped keep him afloat. “All of which may help explain,” Mac wound up, “why creating a work celebratin’ the exploits of ol’ Willy Tell could have appealed to Ludwig right about then.”

  “So 1814, you think, might have been payback time for the maestro,” Harry said.

  “That’s what I’m sayin’. Five hundred years earlier, Tell and his downtrodden Swiss buddies were rebelling against an occupyin’ army of Hapsburg bullyboys from Austria who’d invaded their peaceable little land. Here, have a look at this.”

  He handed around the translated lyrics, drawn from the text of Schiller’s play, to the first vocal piece in the Tell Symphony, a duet between a tenor playing the Swiss yeoman patriot, Stauffacher, and a mezzosoprano playing his wife, Gertrud. The Tell composer had titled the duet “How Shall a Quiet Shepherd Folk Do Battle?” and written out the words in the spaces between the staves that carried the corresponding music. The duet began with Gertrud’s lines:

  The folk are weary of the yoke they bear,

  For Gessler’s insults are endlessly hurled,

  And no fishing boat comes here across the water

  But brings report of some new mischief done,

  Some act of violence by the governors.

  So it would be well if those of you

  Of firm intent should quietly take counsel,

  Debating how to rid us of the scourge,

  And believe God won’t abandon you

  But will show favor to our righteous cause.

  “Who knew any of this?” Harry asked rhetorically. “I flunked Swiss History two-oh-one.”

  Even more to the point, Mac pushed on, “We know that Schiller’s play about Tell had been on Beethoven’s mind for at least five years.”

  The news jolted Mitch, who had thus far not heard anything particularly persuasive—only plausible hunches, like Clara’s had been. “And how do we know that?” he asked bluntly.

  “Several ways.” Beethoven had made no secret, Mac said, of his keen admiration for Schiller, whose favorite subject was the heroic defiance of tyrants. The composer’s letters and diaries contained many references to the works of Schiller, who, like him, was a native of Weimar. Early in his career, Beethoven had expressed the hope of one day setting the poet’s words to music. The opportunity seemed ripe in 1809, five years after Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell had premiered in Germany. The Vienna court theater planned that year to stage one play each by the two foremost German Romantic dramatists, Mac reported, plucking a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and opening it with exaggerated care. According to the memoirs of the eminent pianist and teacher Carl Czerny, who at the time was a devoted pupil of Beethoven and fully familiar with his professional activities—and I’m quoting now—

  …When it was decided to perform Schiller’s Tell and Goethe’s Egmont in the city theaters, the question arose as to who should compose the [incidental] music. Beethoven and Gurowitz were chosen. Beethoven wanted very much to have Tell. But a lot of intrigues were at once on foot to have Egmont, supposed to be less adaptable to music, assigned to him. It turned out, however, that he could make masterly music for this drama also, and he applied the full power of his genius to it.

  “Beethoven’s Egmont Overture is a short, movin’, and very sad composition—it may be the best piece of background music ever written for the stage,” Mac said. “Also—and this may be critically important for our purposes—it includes two lieder—folk songs—and a spoken monologue requirin’ two vocalists and an actor.” Mac bolted forward in his chair. “So you see this concept of combinin’ instrumental and vocal music in a non-operatic form did have at least an abbreviated precedent in Beethoven’s work,” he said. “And so what this Tell of yours might actually be is an elaboration, at symphonic length and about a similar drama
tic subject—heroic resistance to tyrants—of what he’d begun in miniature five years before.”

  Now this was hot stuff, Mitch thought but ventured no opinion. It was Harry who, having gnawed midway down the barrel of one of his chewing pencils, asked, “So where does all of this leave us exactly, Professor?”

  “Nowhere exactly,” Mac replied gently. “I’m surely not givin’ you nice folks yes for an answer—far from it. But what I am sayin’ is that there’s enough goin’ on here to deserve a white-knuckle investigation by that panel of experts you want assembled after your forensics people have examined this animal from snout to tail.”

  Then he added a note of scholarly restraint. “Even if this technical crew gives you the green light, let me clue you in on what you may be up against the moment that some pedigreed Beethoven bloodhounds start sniffin’ around this thing. There’s one damn funny business goin’ on right at the start of this composition.” The thematic statement opening the Tell manuscript, Mac told them, bore a striking resemblance to the famous overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera, William Tell, based on the same Schiller play. It was Rossini’s last opera, first staged in 1829, which was two years after Beethoven’s death—“so it’s mighty temptin’, so long as we’re playin’ detective here, to suspect the timin’ may not have been an accident.”

  “That’s amazing,” Clara said. “I didn’t see that. Just how close is the music?”

  Mac gestured to her to sit beside him. “I think you’ll be able to make out some of it in the autograph score in this second sketchbook if you read along with me.” He looked up at the others. “Just so y’all’re with me, I’m talkin’ about what used to be played at the beginnin’ and end of the Lone Ranger radio and TV shows when I was a kid—you could hear the hoofbeats of his great horse Silver poundin’ through a canyon pass, to Rossini’s stirrin’ strains.”

  “Wait—are you suggesting Rossini stole the theme from Beethoven and waited until he was dead before staging it?” Gordy asked in disbelief.

  “I’m only tellin’ you what I find in this manuscript.” He turned to Clara and, an outsized index finger hovering over the faded manuscript page, cited the similarities in terms too technical for the rest of them to follow. “But Beethoven,” he wound up, “or whoever we’re talkin’ about here with this Tell thing, veers off less melodically than the Rossini version, jumps to the dominant, and goes his own way, tryin’ to build harmonic tension and instrumental repartee.”

  Clara nodded tentatively, in awe of her mentor’s perceptive powers. “And what does it all mean? How on earth could Rossini have—”

  “You tell me, ma’am. It’s anybody’s guess.”

  Clara looked deflated. “Do we know if the two men ever met?”

  “Haven’t had a chance to look into that, but someone ought to.” Mac scanned the table. “You’ve also got a bigtime mystery on your hands in figurin’ out why Mr. Beethoven would have junked any manuscript this extensive. The letters by this Nina Hassler and the music publisher Nägeli may hold part of the answer—that the maestro simply felt the whole construct didn’t hang together, so why keep chewin’ on a bare bone? But you’d have to think there’s somethin’ more to it—that is, if there’s anythin’ at all to any of this.” He guessed that the letter signed only “R” on stationery with a royal crest, found in the box with the manuscript and sent to Beethoven in Zurich seemingly by Archduke Rudolph, might prove highly illuminating.

  “I’ve got our German handwriting experts lined up and raring to get at it,” Mitch advised the room. As soon as the “R” letter was checked out and translated, it would be sent to Mac.

  “See to it, y’hear?” the musicologist wrapped up amiably and hoisted himself upright. “Now I have a plane to catch—a pleasure, gentlemen and lady.”

  Two days later, on the premise that Cubbage & Wakeham would be better off trying to control news about the Tell discovery than risking its leakage and possible, even likely, premature dismissal, the auction house issued a press statement from both its New York and London offices. The New York Times reported it as the lead in its Arts section. The writeup began:

  NEW YORK—A musical manuscript purporting to be a complete and previously unknown symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, apparently composed during 1814 and abandoned by him for reasons as yet unknown, is now under tight security guard, according to Harrison E. Cubbage III, president of Cubbage & Wakeham Auction Galleries, located here and in London. The manuscript was recently found in Switzerland, Mr. Cubbage stated, under circumstances that are to be made public “upon completion of an exhaustive investigation of the authenticity of the composition and documents found with it.”

  No details on the nature of the symphony, its suitability for public performance, or possible plans to auction the manuscript would be disclosed, Mr. Cubbage said, until a team of experts headed by the highly regarded US musicologist, author, and composer, Macrae Quarles, now associate director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, “has addressed all aspects of the claim.”

  According to the Cubbage & Wakeham statement, an American scholar was chosen to head the investigative effort as a matter of convenience because the manuscript is currently in the possession of an American citizen, a New Jersey resident whose name would be divulged “eventually.” It is expected that a panel of international authorities on Beethoven’s music will soon be enlisted by Mr. Quarles.

  If declared authentic, the work would be the tenth symphony composed by Beethoven (1771-1827), but the ninth if counted in chronological order. Music experts around the world apprised of the announcement greeted it with uniform skepticism. Anna Wertham Hayes, British author of a widely acclaimed 1987 biography of Beethoven, called the news “mind-boggling and fanciful,” adding, “We will need to hear a great deal more about it before daring to become excited.”

  A still harsher view was voiced by Emil G. Reinsdorf, of Germany’s National Institute of Music in Berlin, whose books and articles about Beethoven rank him among the foremost experts in the field. “It is almost surely a publicity stunt,” Mr. Reinsdorf commented. “I trust a judgment on its authenticity will not be left to the American entertainment industry or to American music academia—it is far too serious a matter to be treated so lightly.”

  “You and Mac sure called it—about a hostile reception from the experts,” Mitch said to Clara as they devoured the article together over breakfast. “And those are two of our choicest prospective panel members.”

  “Can’t say I blame them,” she said. “Sounds as if poor Tell may be DOA.” She looked up from the news article. “The thing is, everybody thinks it’s crazy—until they start looking into it seriously, the way Mac and I have.”

  Mitch nodded.

  “I get that. But my trouble is that anyone talented and motivated enough to try forging a Beethoven symphony would also probably know all that stuff that you and Mac have come across and told us about and—well, would set up the scam accordingly—to make it seem circumstantially and historically—and even musically—plausible.”

  “You mean even though at first blush, it all sounds wild and loony?”

  “Right. Maybe it’s supposed to come across that way at first—which is why, on careful investigation, it all makes a kind of sense. Just like Mac Quarles said—for a forger to have crafted Tell, which is almost entirely out of keeping with all his other symphonic works, seems a stupid mistake; perverse, almost. He should have done something altogether in keeping with the Beethoven style and form, but that’s exactly the genius of the scheme. A forger would be expected to make it sound like classic Beethoven, but that would have been too easy and readily suspect. So he goes for a radical departure, just as Beethoven often did, so it’s not perverse at all—it’s shrewd in the extreme.”

  Clara’s head hurt. “So you’re thinking—what? That this thing may really be genuine?”

  “Ask me after the fo
rensics reports are in,” said Mitch.

  {7}

  Clara slept fitfully, perhaps two hours altogether, on the night flight to Zurich. In a semiconscious haze much of the time after the pathetic meal was served and the lights were lowered, she kept asking herself why Mitch had seized her hand during takeoff—something he had never done before—and tightly interlaced his fingers with hers until the plane had cleared JFK and was over the ocean. How could the gesture, given its timing, be anything other than prayerful? Was he telling her this might prove a portentous flight, likely to fix the course of both their lives?

  The decision to go to Zurich on short notice had been prompted by a heads-up call from Johnny Winks. C&W’s top undercover operative overseas, after ferreting in and around Zurich for a few weeks, had found enough disturbing dirt on the Erpf family in general and on Ansel Erpf in particular to justify a prompt investigation into the circumstances of the Tell discovery. “This Winky person,” as Clara referred to Johnny, had infiltrated the city’s social, financial, and cultural circles and concluded that Ansel was, at the least, a very odd duck—and, at worst, a deeply troubled, frustrated, and combustible character capable of who-knew-what mischief or antisocial conduct. Almost everyone agreed that, on the one hand, Ansel was brilliant and gifted; on the other, he had never gotten his act together, choosing instead to wallow in anxiety, indolence, self-pity, and drugs to escape the demands of adulthood and the price of professional attainment.

  “Are you telling us he’s a basket case?” Mitch asked Johnny over the phone.

  “He’s in therapy and heavily medicated, I’m told reliably,” Johnny answered. Ansel’s behavior was a never-ending embarrassment to his family, his marriage was an open scandal at their social club, his gross insubordination while he played with the Swiss Philharmonic made him notorious in the arts community, and his slanderous tongue would have got him shot in a duel years ago if such an expedient were still lawful. More to the point, Ansel was a composer manqué who had tried repeatedly to foist his creations on the local symphony orchestra and then bristled when they were summarily rejected. He was, however, a deft mimic of instrumental and vocal styles, and his local night club act featured comic blends of classical and pop icons—Irving Berlin tunes as if rendered by Bach, Cole Porter standards with a Mozartian lilt, and his showstopping take on Beethovenized Rodgers & Hammerstein, the uplifting ballad “You’ll Always Walk Alone, Liebchen.”