Harry still looked antsy. “The expenses on this thing are headed over budget,” he told Gordy. “The Veritas people are saying the forensics workup may run twice the estimate. And we hadn’t really planned on getting the last half of the first sketchbook transcribed as Mac Quarles says we need to—which could run at least a couple hundred thousand. And if we land in court now with the Swiss government, our legal bill could go to the moon—and their pockets are slightly deeper than ours.”
“Then bail out of this thing, chief,” Gordy urged. “But I say, even given our legitimate fears, bailing out now would be pennywise and pound-foolish. Admittedly, it’s a gamble.”
Harry turned to Mitch. “I agree with Gordy,” he said. “And if we hang tough, we can’t nickel-and-dime the forensics process. If their lab findings don’t kill Tell outright—and I’m guessing they will—then we’ve got some breathing room. Our panel of Beethoven experts may even come up with a calculated guess to explain the Rossini connection—and whatever else is still open to question. But for the moment, we need to hold our horses—or quit the race.”
Gordy reminded Harry that the house’s position had been strengthened by the precautionary language in the contract it had signed with Jake Hassler. Under its terms, the company had been granted two years—long enough not to require a precipitous decision on the authenticity question—to act as exclusive sales agent for the Tell manuscript for a 15 percent commission, and here Gordy had inserted the words “whether the sale be made by auction or any other form of purchase, including a preemptive private negotiation.” Thus, if the Swiss government wished to buy all rights to Tell from Jake, as it had now indicated, C&W could entertain a fair offer for it on his behalf. “But this one isn’t it,” Gordy said.
“Okay,” Harry agreed. “Then I say we politely tell Mr. Saulnier that we would be willing to consider a sale, but they need to get real—say, five million up front, five million more once they’re satisfied about authentication, and if it proves a forgery, tant pis for the first five. We’re ready to bear the risk, and so should they be.”
“Is that really our price?” Gordy asked.
“We are talking Beethoven here—maybe that’s way low. Maybe we should use whatever they’d counter with as a floor and shop it around—maybe to the record companies—and we’d give the Swiss a topping privilege.” Harry’s hands conjured the air. “Or am I dreaming?”
“You are,” Gordy told him. “Nobody else will touch this thing until it’s been fully vetted and labeled kosher. The Swiss government is a special case—for them it’s a twofer because a couple of iconic figures are involved: their superstar folk hero and the undisputed German-speaking king of symphonic music.”
In the end, Gordy was instructed to tell the Swiss attaché that his government’s offer was unacceptable but that in principle a transaction could be arranged, provided the Cultural Ministry—perhaps in league with a consortium of private Swiss citizens—wished to make a suitable bid. Short of that, C&W was prepared only to add a nonbinding condition to its auction terms, whereby the winning bidder would be respectfully urged to arrange for Tell’s premiere performance to be given in Zurich as a gesture of respect to the Swiss people. This condition, however, would require the Swiss government’s prompt certification of Otto Hassler’s will and, with it, Jake’s title to the manuscript, ending the threat of legal efforts to thwart its sale.
Within forty-eight hours, C&W had its answer. Forget about a purchase for more than the “exploratory” offer price—unless the entire transaction was conditioned on Tell’s authentication. But in exchange for C&W’s pledged “best efforts” to have the said work first performed publicly in Zurich or another community in Switzerland, its government had decided not to pursue any legal action to recover the manuscript “at this time.”
“But they neglected to say anything about certifying Otto’s will,” Gordy added. “So I told them if they didn’t validate the will forthwith, Jake would be filing suit over there against their government—I didn’t say when—and telling the world press how the cold-blooded Swiss had been trying to strongarm him into selling out for peanuts. Saulnier said they’d think it over.”
.
one of the changes Mitch had effected within months of joining C&W was switching its forensics business to the Anglo-American firm of Veritas Laboratories, with offices in Washington, London, and the two Cambridges, with their easy access to top scientists and scholars. Though more expensive than their competitors, Veritas had a notably deeper staff than the firm Harry and Sedge had long relied on. When confronted with a complex case such as Tell, Veritas hired the most knowledgeable individuals available for the length of its investigation. To head up the Tell field inquiry, they had enlisted a roly-poly Viennese named Stefan Rodewald, the curator of music at the Austrian State Museum and one of the world’s foremost experts on Beethoven’s manuscripts and papers.
Rodewald flew to New York with a crew of operatives from Veritas’s London office, and the team, wearing cotton gloves most of the time, spent ten days poring over the Tell manuscript and the other documents found in Otto Hassler’s attic trunk, photocopying them, and getting lab tests done on the paper and ink. Finally satisfied, the investigators presented their report in the C&W library to the firm’s top officers, reinforced by Mac Quarles, who had taken the train up from Philadelphia; Clara, who made a point of not taking a seat next to Mitch; and Sedge Wakeham, who had asked to be teleconferenced in on the keenly anticipated proceedings.
“It’s all pretty much in here,” said Rodewald in a choppy, modulated voice as he drew a clutch of ring binders from a locked metal case and handed them out to the assemblage, “but we’re going to walk you through it.”
Veritas’s starting point had been the paper and related physical properties of the Tell sketchbooks as well as the several letters found with them and addressed to Beethoven. Carbon dating and other such sophisticated tools had unfortunately been of no use, the Austrian scholar explained, given the relatively recent span—in geological terms—of Beethoven’s life. “They help us determine age by millennia but not within the range of just two centuries from the present.” What he could say with confidence, however, was that the manuscript paper found in the cedar box in Zurich was handmade of linen on a wire frame, of the type commonly used in Austria and Bohemia in the early nineteenth century. More to the point, it was of a color and texture similar to the fifty or so varieties of paper on which Beethoven was known to have composed.
Equally consistent, said Rodewald, unfolding a paper clip that he fiddled with while he spoke, were the watermarks the laboratory had found. “Researchers have identified fifty-seven different such markings on the paper Beethoven used in his composition books,” Rodewald told them. Those on the pages in the two Zurich sketchbooks differed from each other, one composed of the capital initials “GFA” topped by a kind of loosely drawn tiara, the other a row of three crescent moons in descending size order—“but both were among those we have found in other surviving Beethoven manuscripts.”
The methodical archivist warmed to his task. The Tell sketchbooks had been fashioned, he reported, from twenty-four large sheets known as bifoliums, each folded first horizontally and then vertically, cut on the first fold, and assembled into oblong books of ninety-six leaves of two sides each for a total of 192 pages, measuring roughly thirty-two centimeters wide by twenty-three centimeters high. “Some of the well-authenticated Beethoven sketchbooks we examined were thicker than these, some thinner, but most were about this size and of these dimensions.”
Particular note was taken of the markings on the sketchbook pages made by the rastral, the tool used in Beethoven’s time to draw the parallel five-line staves across the page in a single sweep. “These staff lines were usually placed onto the paper by the shopkeeper selling the composition books,” said Rodewald, “and typically reveal slight but recurring irregularities, seen most often at th
e ends of lines as the hand lifts the tool from the paper.” Here again, the Veritas investigators had found nothing odd or atypical about the way the staves—sixteen per page—were drawn in the Tell sketchbooks.
“So far, so good,” said Harry, “right?” His blasé façade seemed to be cracking.
“Well, yes and no, mein herr,” the highly proper curator replied. “Unfortunately, none of this means a great deal, because any determined forger could have obtained paper typical of this period.” Blank pages could be found at the back of many two-hundred-year-old books held in major libraries and surreptitiously removed for illicit use, Rodewald expanded. And antiquarian bookshops commonly sold old volumes of the same type with empty pages on which forgeries could be committed. “They can even be obtained from online vendors, with no questions asked.”
“Bad show,” lamented the ghostly visage of Sedge Wakeham. Even on screen, his baggy eyes looked alert as he followed the session from London.
Rodewald turned to the ink used for composing the Tell manuscripts—a more likely indicator of forgery, because tests now existed to gauge roughly how long a particular ink batch had adhered to a given sheet of paper. The inks Beethoven employed, made of finely ground carbon, were very stable and did not attack the paper to which they were applied, in contrast to the aniline inks, introduced a generation after Beethoven’s death, which were water soluble and far more likely to run.
“The ink in these William Tell composition books, upon chemical analysis, we also found to be made from ground carbon—but it could have been whipped up yesterday, of course,” Rodewald cautioned. The carbon-based inks Beethoven was known to have used were of several tints, most often blue, brown, and green, “with an occasional dash of orange or purple.” He sometimes used more than one batch of ink at the same sitting or perhaps applied ink of a different color to a given passage when making corrections or revisions. The writing in the Zurich sketchbooks was mostly in a brownish black “with an occasional bit of greenish.” There was no consistent thickness to the nibs of the quill pens Beethoven generally used, Rodewald added, because they were cut by hand, “and often by different hands, belonging mostly to friends of the composer. Usually he wore them down until the flow of ink was far thicker than when he had started using that quill.” This same unevenness of applied ink was evident in the Zurich manuscripts. Nor was the laboratory in doubt that the Tell sketchbooks had been composed with a quill; the handwriting showed the variations characteristic of quills due to their flexibility and responsiveness to pressure exerted by the writer’s hand. But even today, Rodewald warned, anyone with a bit of perseverance could find, buy, or create a quill pen and learn to write with it.
“So what you’re telling us so far,” Gordy put in, “is that we’d be dealing with a painstaking forger—if there is one.”
“Certainly,” the Austrian archivist agreed. Still, there were several positive indications, he continued, that the Tell manuscript might well have been written by Beethoven himself. The great speed with which he composed at times and his frugal habit of using quills beyond their normal lifespan caused frequent blobs and splatters, which he often failed to clean up with absorbent sand, the blotting paper of its day. When in a creative frenzy, he would often turn to the next leaf without having allowed time for the ink on the previous right-hand page to dry thoroughly, resulting in “offsets,” blots in the corresponding places on the left-hand page opposite. At times he wrote passages in pencil and inked them over later when he was ready to include them permanently. “All these features that we typically find in the archival Beethoven materials are present here as well,” Rodewald told them with brisk assurance.
The accumulating evidence was formidable, Clara thought, edging ever closer to elation despite herself. She stole a glance at Mitch, who, professionally noncommittal, wore a deadpan mask as he scribbled notes to himself in a loose-leaf binder. Was he really as emotionless as he looked, she wondered, when they were being presented with such largely corroborative findings? Well, if she were on the verge of being carried away, Mitch was probably right to keep cool. Any moment, no doubt, the Veritas team would let its other shoe drop.
But the next words from the staid Viennese archivist proved even more supportive of the authenticity claim. One of the most common errors by forgers, he noted, was due to their ignorance that paper turns more absorbent as it ages, so that ink newly applied to old paper rapidly spreads in a feathery or blurry pattern around the core of the pen stroke. To avoid this telltale effect, adroit counterfeiters had learned to bathe old or antique paper with ammonia hydrochloride or plain old hydrogen peroxide. “What few of them know, though, is that applying either of these compounds raises the pH level—or alkalinity—of the newly applied ink, causing it to coagulate, harden, and break down in microscopic cracks resembling the skin of a reptile,” Rodewald explained. “But we found no such cracking on the Tell manuscript pages—which suggests that if it’s a forgery, it’s probably not a recent one.”
“Meaning just what, Herr Rodewald?” Sedge’s voice boomed out of the video hookup.
“Dr. Rodewald,” the scholar gently corrected him. “I meant merely that the totality of our findings does not remove the possibility that some Beethoven intimate or perhaps another knowledgeable contemporary of his could theoretically have created the manuscript. For a modern forger, it would present a far more difficult but not insurmountable challenge.”
Clara admired Rodewald’s hypercaution; nothing less would satisfy the demanding standards of Germanic scholarship. Her own dreamy musings were causing her to stray into some enchanted realm of wish fulfillment. Enough, she told herself sternly. Yet a moment later, the Austrian superintendent of orthodoxy was feeding her fantasies with a report from the Veritas handwriting experts. Fooling them would surely have proven the most daunting test for any forger. Here the analysis involved two separable aspects—the words of the libretto and the musical language of the scoring. The former lent itself more easily to microscopic scrutiny.
“Normal writing by honest people is rapid and flowing, with a natural smoothness,” Rodewald explained, “so the first thing we look for in examining a questionable specimen is the absence of relaxed fluidity—far more likely when a forger is at work. He’s often trying too hard to replicate the original and paying too much attention to detail. This stress may result in a drawn or labored look to the letters or a shakiness or slight wavering in the lines—or both—which a trained eye can spot almost immediately.” Forged writing, moreover, often left a heavier-than-normal deposit of ink at the beginning and end of strokes, phrases, or sentences because the pen is more likely to be lifted off the page as the writer proceeds at an unnaturally deliberate pace.
“None of these revealing phenomena were observed in the material that the Veritas staff has examined for you,” the Austrian asserted. “But now comes the hard part.”
He and his co-investigators, Rodewald said, had focused on a number of the characteristic elements in every individual’s handwriting: the angles, curves, and joins of the letters; the spacing between words and between capitals and small letters; the length, width, and slant of the looped letters; and especially the formation of the most common of all words, “the” and “of.” Their task soon became excruciating because Beethoven’s penmanship was notoriously difficult—jerky and tortured, often sloppy, and at times flat-out indecipherable. But thankfully, no other composer’s writings had been more closely studied, “so we are fortunate to have a broad basis for comparison.”
He directed his listeners to look in their ring binders at photocopied blowups taken from well-authenticated Beethoven letters, all written between 1812 and 1819. The time frame was highly relevant, said Rodewald, because Beethoven’s handwriting changed noticeably after 1798. As the composer’s health and hearing began to deteriorate and he became emotionally turbulent, his writing suffered—“because our penmanship is not an isolated phenomenon but a
reflection of our inner being,” the scholar noted. Beethoven’s increasing angst was evidenced by many changes in his writing: his letters became larger, the pressure on the hand shaping them shifted from the downstroke to the sidestroke, and the writing grew more rapid, even frenzied at times, and less legible, “particularly in his fallow years after 1812.” Line by line, word by word, letter by letter, the Veritas experts examined examples from the lyrics scattered in the Tell manuscript, including every der, die, and das in sight, and compared them to the writing in the certified Beethoven letters from 1812 to 1819.
The close similarity between the two sets of examples presented in her ring binder was striking even to Clara’s untrained eye. And nothing was too minute for the investigators’ attention. “Note, if you will,” Rodewald instructed, “the precision with which, in both the previously certified letters and the Zurich examples, the dot over the letter ‘i’ is placed—not wandering somewhere in the vicinity, as most of us haphazardly place it. Given the general sloppiness of his writing, this would seem a contradictory element—until one recalls that Beethoven was primarily a composer, for whom the exact placement of notes and signs in relation to a pageful of fixed parallel horizontal lines—a most unforgiving universe—was an occupational necessity.”
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