Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  The attaché did not care to be lectured to; he broke into Gordy’s rationale. “My government’s position, Mr. Roth, is that your firm’s and Mr. Jacob Hassler’s claims to proprietary commercial rights are a fiction—and that your assertion of them is an insult to our people and their cultural heritage.” The German turned toward Harry as the only worthy authority figure among his listeners. “The posthumously discovered work of one of the great masters of musical composition does not belong to anyone—and if you persist in your claims, my government is prepared to invoke the provisions of the Bern Copyright Convention, of which the United States has been a signatory since 1988.” Neugebaur’s tone now assumed a steely edge. “This agreement among the civilized nations recognizes the moral rights of the creator of an artistic work, even if—as is perhaps the case here—legal title to it may be in dispute or in the hands of others—in which case we Germans, as the countrymen of the deceased composer, are morally entitled to oversee the disposition of his work and to protect its integrity—how it is treated or mistreated, whether it is artfully orchestrated or brazenly prostituted—or, in this instance, whether it should ever reach the world’s ears in view of the composer’s reported wishes to the contrary.”

  Gordy replied with quiet defiance. “And it’s our position, Mr. Neugebaur, that your government has no legal standing whatever in this matter—no rights recognized in this country to march in here and demand title, in effect, to this property in the name of some vague, nationalistic kinship to a composer who died a generation before your country existed as a sovereign state. As to your so-called moral claims, some would say that Germany has another century or so of penance to pay before qualifying to invoke such grounds.”

  The diplomat’s demeanor turned from steely to wrathful. “I had assumed that I was dealing with more sophisticated people,” he said and turned away from Gordy. “Let me urge you, Mr. Cubbage, to reconsider your firm’s options, bearing in mind that you’ll find no German academicians willing to serve on your self-certified investigatory panel—our ministry will shortly issue an official caveat along those lines to all our institutions of higher learning. And we are advised that our friends in Switzerland are sympathetic with our views of this matter, as are we with theirs—and are unlikely anytime soon to certify the will of your Mr. Hassler’s grandfather, indefinitely blocking your ability to transfer legal title to the work to any would-be buyer.”

  The gauntlet having been tossed across Harry’s desktop, revealing the iron fist beneath it, Gordy and Mitch glanced beseechingly toward their proprietor to deliver a parting blow in C&W’s behalf. “Well, many thanks for stopping by, Herr Neugebaur,” said Harry, the embodiment of cordiality. “Oh, one last thing—if I may?”

  “Bitte—” Neugebauer was on his feet now.

  “Since your government harbors such powerful feelings in this matter, why doesn’t it simply buy the Tell manuscript from Mr. Hassler? I’m sure he’d be open to a fair offer. After all, Mr. Jefferson bought one-third of America from Napoleon and saved quite a lot of fussing. Everything, they say, has its price. Why not a likely masterpiece by a titanic German genius?”

  The diplomat, momentarily befuddled by the proposal, pivoted on his heels and said, over his shoulder and halfway to the door, “I’ll be sure to relay your thoughtful suggestion to my ministry. Good day, gentlemen.”

  {9}

  News reached Mitch two days later about the remaining critical piece of evidence found in the cedar box with the manuscript—the letter allegedly addressed to Beethoven and signed just “R.” The Veritas forensics team had now corroborated that its author was almost certainly the composer’s friend, patron, piano and composing pupil, sole protector at the Hapsburg court, and frequent correspondent, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the emperor’s kid brother. Once his convoluted handwriting had been deciphered, the translated German text was sent to both Mitch and Mac Quarles, as the latter had requested, to be put into historical context. The following afternoon, Mac came lumbering excitedly through Mitch’s doorway, waving his translated printout of the archduke’s letter. “I think maybe we’ve got our elusive critter caged,” he said.

  Harry and Gordy joined them within the hour, along with Clara, whom Mitch had corralled by cellphone and summoned to the parley. “Let us return, friends, to that memorable year of 1814,” Mac buoyantly opened his analysis, “so you can see the whole hog. Be warned, though—it’s not a particularly pretty animal.”

  That year, the musicologist related, Beethoven had been on the verge of defecting from Vienna and imperial Austria. He had told friends he was thinking hard about going to live elsewhere, most likely back to Germany, while admirers in London and Paris were urging him to move to their cities. As the war clouds began to part after twenty-five years of revolution and bloody turmoil across the continent, tastes were shifting in Europe’s music capital, and Beethoven had fallen out of favor with the Viennese public. Added to his sagging popularity were the maestro’s endless problems with his hearing, his finances, and his brothers and their families, all of which left him in a foul mood.

  “And so he had every reason to be receptive,” as Mac painted this predicament, “when his kindhearted Swiss publisher urged him to visit Zurich to have his tragic hearing impairment treated.” And after having nearly been commissioned five years earlier to compose music for a local production of Schiller’s Tell but lost out to a lesser but likely more congenial competitor, he may now have gone straight to his bookcase or a bookseller for a copy of the play—“perhaps the very one,” Mac guessed, “that turned up in Otto Hassler’s attic trunk. ‘What a jim-dandy idea for an opera,’ Mr. Beethoven might have told himself, admiring its theme of liberty that was churnin’ through his heated brain just then as peace was finally restored across Europe.”

  But it was peace that came at a high price. The forces of political reaction, led by the resurgent Hapsburgs under their crafty minister-in-chief (and soon-to-be de facto ruler), Clemens von Metternich, were already gathering, as statesmen from the coalition of nations that had at last cut down Napoleon prepared for the Congress of Vienna that autumn. The aim of the great conclave was to redraw the map of Europe and reapportion the balance of continental power. Metternich, Mac explained, was demanding restoration of the old order and, above all, eradicating the revolutionary drive for unification of the German-speaking peoples. That dream had long been inflaming the minds and hearts of student radicals and subversive reformers opposed to the repressive regimes ruling the multitude of principalities from the Baltic to the Alps. “And a unified Germany,” Mac added, “would have greatly reduced Hapsburg Austria’s clout.”

  Beethoven, though, suffering from a profound sense of dislocation and ever more deeply sunk in his own angst-racked inner world, was distracted from the nationalist conflicts of the moment. And so, likely rationalizing that high art was above petty politics, the maestro plunged earnestly into his adaptation of Tell—“if we’re to accept the evidence Jake Hassler found in Zurich,” Mac theorized. Yet by that summer’s end, despite prodigious labor, Beethoven had apparently abandoned not only the operatic format for Tell but the nearly finished symphonic version as well. “But why would he do such a thing? We need to answer that question—or else dismiss this work as somebody’s inventive joke on us.”

  If they accepted Nina Hassler’s word for it, “and we have no other,” she was asked by the composer to discard the sketchbooks as artistically wanting and told that their very existence posed some sort of danger to him. Mac paused in his recitation and studied the ceiling a moment. “Now what kinda ‘danger’ could possibly have driven this supergenius of ours to toss out a big ol’ symphony in mid-creation like a tub of dirty bath water?” He paused again, then said, “I think we have a plausible explanation.”

  If Beethoven had been politically astute instead of informed largely by gossip retailed by habitual tavern-goers—“of whom he was one,” Mac recounted—he ne
ver would have dreamed in the first place of devoting a full-scale musical tribute to William Tell and the Swiss revolt against their Austrian occupiers—and tormentors. Such a gesture of nose-thumbing at the Hapsburgs would likely have been taken as a willful insult, especially at a moment, as Mac put it, “when ol’ Ludwig was still hankering after hugs and kisses from their imperial majesties and official recognition as the star composer of the realm,” which would have made him, given the supremacy of German music, the foremost practitioner of the art in all of Western civilization. The fact was that Beethoven wished mightily to be insulated from the frowns of the fickle Viennese public, from further need to produce voguish work, “like his god-awful ‘Battle Symphony,’ a piece of wartime claptrap,” and yearned for a plump state sinecure and, with it, garlands and elevation to the pantheon of immortal music-makers alongside Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.

  So after he had impulsively launched his Tell project, Mac speculated, it probably began to dawn on the maestro that the fulfillment of his material ambitions might depend now more on his public display of political correctness and the obsequious behavior it entailed—never exactly his strong suit—than on his artistic merit, which was never in dispute.

  “In short, Brother B smartened up,” said Mac. Belatedly mindful of the combustible political climate, he asked himself whether his presentation of a major new symphony commemorating the heroic rebellion of the downtrodden Swiss against their Austrian rulers—even though it had happened five hundred years in the past—might be received by Vienna’s upper crust as a traitorous attack on the still-intact and still-repressive Hapsburg regime.

  To help him answer the question, Mac argued, Beethoven would naturally have turned to his uniquely placed ally at the palace, in whom he had often confided his still-unrequited hopes for the crown’s official recognition as court composer and the subsidy that came with it. “And this, according to your forensics experts,” said Mac, handing around copies of the translated document, “was how Archduke Rudolph replied to him in a letter sent to Zurich”:

  2 September 1814

  My dear Beethoven,

  May I first reiterate to you the great joy with which I welcomed the honor you bestowed upon me this past April with the first performance of your B-flat piano trio named “The Archduke” after your greatly devoted pupil? It is not the first work by which you have honored me with the dedication, but it is the one I most prize. All the more reason for my acute distress upon the receipt of your most recent letter with its disclosure of your present composition.

  It cannot have escaped your notice that, with the blackguard Bonaparte now sent away to Elba and licking his highly deserved wounds, Hapsburg blood is once again coursing freely and nourishing a renewal of our national pride. Even as this is our beloved Austria’s glorious moment in the sun, so, too, may it be—if my wishes are heeded—for her most illustrious musical genius. I hope and fully expect that your works will be the most prominent of all that mark the season of celebration to begin at our capital this autumn. The plan being forwarded in this regard would start, at the gala gathering of crowned heads and their ministers, with a presentation of your new, improved Fidelio. Your presence and introduction to the notables would of course be expected. Word reaches me that financial as well as ceremonial tributes are at long last to be paid to you—though I cannot speak for our shared hope of your gaining a court appointment, which I have vainly solicited on your behalf. But my confidants tell me there is growing sentiment to bestow upon you another and most rare honor: election as an honorary citizen of Vienna in recognition of your contribution to our national culture.

  The value and sincerity of such rewards, it seems to me, are heightened when one takes into account that Maestro Beethoven is not universally beloved at the imperial court. I have been told more than once that your private sentiments, which have been overheard at taverns you frequent, are outspokenly republican. There is, moreover, whispered lamentation that you have never deigned to dedicate a work of yours to my brother, our sovereign liege—an omission made yet more glaring by your repeated tributes of this sort bestowed upon me. When we add to this your famous rough-hewn independence of spirit and insufficiently deferential conduct, which some in my own circle take for impertinence toward their royal highnesses and their officers, you will perhaps appreciate my deep unhappiness at your having begun an ambitious composition dealing with a subject that can only prove a sharp irritant to the crown.

  My dear valued friend, does this precise moment strike you as an auspicious one to employ your matchless genius in reminding the world of Austria’s long-discarded policy of oppression toward our small, sweet cousin-nation to the south? Those who have slandered you out of envy or ignorance will leap at the chance to denounce you for so blatant an indiscretion as lionizing the Swiss rebel leader of yore. All plans to do you honor are likely to cease forthwith. You will be forever labeled an Auslander, unworthy of the palace’s kindnesses and recognition this coming season (or ever after).

  As your avowed enthusiast and glad patron, I, too, would likely suffer the pain of your disgrace, to the point that I may be forbidden to continue the financial arrangement between us or to welcome you at Schonbrun or even at my home in Baden. The days when I have so proudly stood at your side during social receptions at the Stadt Hotel will become a distant memory. Is this, my dear maestro, what you wish to be the outcome of our friendship?

  Let me now confess to you that when, five years ago, your august name was proposed to write music for a staging of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell at our state theater, I was among that clandestine cabal who saw to it that the idea was dropped in favor of your doing Goethe’s Egmont—and the result was a small gem. I opposed Tell for you then for much the same reason as now, but it is all the more pressing today.

  If you are truly, as you sign yourself in letters, my faithful and most obedient Beethoven, then heed my urgent counsel. There is great danger for the both of us if you persist in this Tell venture. Any word of its existence or even that it might have been seriously contemplated will be promptly detected by a certain minister and his minions, and worse than mischief will ensue. Please do believe that my only motive is for your genius to be celebrated, not sullied, amidst the general rejoicing of the realm we are soon to enjoy.

  — R.

  “That our titan displayed feet of clay on this occasion may not have been commendable,” Mac remarked after the others had fully digested the archduke’s remarkable letter, “but at least we can sympathize with his fears.” That Beethoven totally capitulated in the face of Rudolph’s warning was further confirmed, Mac disclosed, by several other documents that the Veritas team had found in the Beethoven archives and attributed to that year, suggesting how abjectly the now vigilant composer was heeding the protocols of discretion as the Congress of Vienna convened. In a letter to Johann Kanka, his attorney, Beethoven pledged, “I shall not write about our monarchs, etc., you can read all about that in the newspapers. I prefer the spiritual realm…” And in a stern diary entry during this period he instructed himself, “Do not show your contempt to all people who deserve it, one never knows when one might need them.”

  Thus, Mac concluded, the greatest composer of his age, or possibly any age, dishonored his muse in exchange for the rewards of that historic moment when Vienna basked in the continental spotlight. Never again would he mention the William Tell Symphony. Instead that fall he produced several insipid cantatas—in particular, the fawning Der Glorreiche Augenblick (“This Glorious Moment”)—to mark the age’s jubilee of peace. The prizes of his Faustian bargain were the ones the archduke had held up for him to glimpse: Fidelio did indeed inaugurate the gala concert programs accompanying the Congress of Vienna. The maestro was showered with four thousand florins—a year’s living expenses—in tribute money. And the next year he was made an honorary citizen of Vienna after having lived there for twenty-three years.

  But there wer
e to be no enduring medals for him. The emperor did not give him a title or appoint him Composer of the Realm, kapellmeister of his court, or even the royal organist. And soon Metternich’s spies were operating everywhere, trying to ferret out alleged enemies of the state. “The Austrian citizenry, as was their habit,” Mac added, “bowed low to its mean regime, and the Hapsburg banner fluttered with renewed glory. End of story.”

  Mac’s interpretation of the purported archduke’s letter made perfect sense, Mitch and Clara agreed on their walk home through Central Park. “So Beethoven overreacted to Rudolph’s warning,” she said. “I mean he was only human, clay feet and all. The funny thing is, now I’m feeling rather better about this whole discovery business—because we’re not profaning his genius on aesthetic grounds by going against his wishes in the matter. If he really killed Tell for political and mercenary reasons and not because he thought it was bad music, then we’re actually righting a terrible wrong—even if he did it to himself, or let himself be cowed into it.” She squinted against the still-bright western sky. “That poor man—he must have felt hugely insecure—to be that needy of honors—”

  Mitch looped an arm around Clara’s shoulder. “Something still bothers me, though,” he said. “It’s the way these letters in the box all seem to fit together so neatly with Nina’s story. How come there weren’t any other letters in there—no chatty notes from friends?”

  She gave a flippant laugh. “You can’t take yes for an answer, can you, mister?”

  “It’s not that—it just seems too—too—”

  “Too good to be true? Why? I think you’re forgetting—he didn’t want people to know he was in Zurich, so he probably didn’t get much mail. And he probably tossed away the pedestrian stuff—and saved the important things, like the Rudolph and Nägeli letters, until he was ready to head home—and since he evidently didn’t want to keep any trace of Tell, he probably asked Nina to get rid of them, too.”