Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “No, not mine—but it seems to have worked well enough for Beethoven. My limited understanding is that the onset of his deafness more or less coincided with his most fruitful period. Perhaps there was an ulterior purpose to his reverence—forgive my cynical nature.”

  “Perhaps so,” the professor responded. “And may I ask, Mr. Emery, if, accordingly, you’ve abandoned interest in God’s unalterable mercy and goodness?”

  Not inclined to reveal his core beliefs—and doubts—to a stranger, Mitch closed down. “Let’s just say they seem to be somewhat arbitrarily bestowed. Not that I’m not unappreciative of my life thus far—it’s been fulfilling,” he said, hoping to leave it there.

  “But you nonetheless doubt God’s grace as a universal proposition?”

  “Let’s just say I doubt I’d do as well as Beethoven submitting to a divinity I find capricious about who’s worth blessing and who isn’t.”

  “But isn’t that the whole point, young man? The only real choice left to us in the end is whether we submit calmly or in anger to the Lord’s command of unconditional faith. Defiance gets you nowhere—at least nowhere I’ve discovered.”

  They parted amicably after Reinsdorf promised to call Mitch’s hotel room early the next morning with his decision.

  “I think we may have bearded the lion,” Mitch told Clara on the phone to London that night. “I’m not so sure about his bulldog, though.”

  Word came at 9:05 a.m. “I’m astounded,” Reinsdorf began. “You’re quite right—it all looks too important—just from what you’ve given me to read—to dismiss it as I did. I’ll gladly participate on your panel. Just give me a few weeks’ warning when I’ll be needed.”

  “Great—wunderbar!”

  “There’s just one thing I’ll need your help on.”

  Uh-oh. Was Frankenstein’s monster about to surface? “Anything, Dr. Reinsdorf—within reason, of course.”

  “You need to understand that I’ll be vilified—if not crucified—for participating in your investigation.”

  There was a pause, then: “I need something, Mr. Emery, to cover my derrière, or they’ll kick it black and blue.”

  “Like what?”

  “If this thing—this so-called ‘dramatic symphony’—should prove authentic, the Berlin Philharmonic must be the first to perform it—and right here.”

  Mitch’s mind reeled. He knew it had gone too well. How exactly had Gordy left things with the Swiss government? “I don’t believe I’m at liberty to make that promise.”

  “Why not? It’s only right—and just. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, Beethoven was a great German. If the Tell Symphony premiere is promised to Berlin—if there ever is a premiere—then I can hold my head up as a defender of our cultural tradition. Otherwise, I’m a traitor.”

  Mitch phoned Harry and Gordy with the good news/bad news, then asked, “Isn’t our commitment to the Swiss pretty iffy—only that we’ll recommend to our buyer that the premiere be held there? Their government is still stonewalling on processing Otto Hassler’s will, isn’t it? So why are we beholden to them? We need this man on our panel, or—at a guess—there won’t be any premiere for anyone to worry about.”

  “We gave our word,” said Gordy. “Tell him no can do—maybe he’ll cave. Even musicologists have been known to bluff.”

  “Not this one,” Mitch told him and then went back glumly to Emil Reinsdorf.

  “How droll,” he said dryly. “You’ve tentatively promised to help arrange for the premiere to be in Zurich—not precisely the world’s music capital. It’s ludicrous.”

  “But it’s called the William Tell Symphony—the Swiss, too, have their national pride.”

  Silence. And then: “What about this, then, Mr. Emery? Suppose your executives suggest to the Swiss that they’re being rather selfish—and that in the interest of historical fairness, the honor of the premiere should be shared among the three German-speaking peoples. The premiere will be held simultaneously in Zurich, Berlin, and Vienna, each with an equal claim to the event. What could be fairer?”

  Mitch decided he liked Emil Reinsdorf. He was a pragmatist as well as an ivory tower scholar. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll try to work it out.”

  “Well,” Gordy said when he heard the proposal, “I can run it by Saulnier.”

  “Start with me,” said Harry. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. It ties our hands. Suppose a Japanese bidder wants to pay ten zillion yen for the manuscript and hold the premiere on the slopes of fucking Fujiyama? Or an American outfit—maybe one of the entertainment conglomerates—wants to do a global simulcast of the premiere from Carnegie Hall—like Oscar Night, with a billion viewers? Do we refuse their bid because one haughty German bastard has crowbarred us into an all-Deutsch extravaganza?”

  “But he’s our bastard,” Mitch argued. “Emil could be a major troublemaker if he’s not on board. Why don’t I tell him we’ll try to get the Swiss to buy the three-nation deal, but the broadcast rights have to be reserved for the winning bidder to sell off without restrictions?”

  “That’s better,” Harry said, “but it still narrows our possibilities. I’m not wild about running auctions with any conditions attached to the sale.”

  “Suppose I ask the Swiss to buy Reinsdorf’s proposition,” Gordy tried, “and Mitch offers Reinsdorf the same toothless deal we sold the Swiss. Translation: we’ll respectfully urge our buyer to go for the triple premiere, but it’s not a condition for making a bid.”

  “Mmmm,” said Harry. “Okay, Mitch, you trot it past Emil, and if he’s on board, Gordy can try it on the yodelers.”

  Emil Reinsdorf took the face-saving offer. So, too, forty-eight hours later, did the Swiss, still clinging, nonetheless, to their refusal to probate Otto Hassler’s will until the Tell authentication issue was decided. Even so, Reinsdorf rose in Mitch’s esteem—until his return to London, where he was greeted by an emailed attachment from Johnny Winks consisting of a translated excerpt from the arts section of that week’s Der Spiegel. It read:

  Prickly scholar Emil Reinsdorf of the Berlin Conservatory this week broke ranks with German music experts boycotting efforts by an Anglo-American auction house to try to authenticate a recently unearthed symphony attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven. Conceding that the investigation ought ideally to be made under the aegis of academicians “and not treated like a commodity by US materialists,” Reinsdorf, 63, argued that he had “a responsibility to assure that this manuscript is not the victim of inexpert opinion or the permissive standards presently debasing the arts and much else in contemporary society.” In announcing his decision, Reinsdorf, author of the landmark trilogy on Beethoven’s work, Maestro 1, 2, and 3, let the cat out of the bag by revealing for the first time that the work in question is called the William Tell Symphony, a hybrid vocal/instrumental composition inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama. As a condition for his cooperating, Reinsdorf said he had been promised that the premiere public performance of the so-called “dramatic symphony” would be given—if ever—simultaneously in Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich as a tribute to Germanic culture.

  “Sly bastard,” Mitch whispered to himself and phoned Berlin at once.

  “I’m more outraged than you are,” Reinsdorf told him hotly before dissolving into a spasm of hacking coughs. “I made no announcement, as the filthy magazine has it—they must have been eavesdropping around our building, where I did mention our arrangement to a few people, as I told you I would have to—a preemptive strike, you might say.” He denied claiming the three-city premiere was a certainty, allowing only that it was a distinct possibility. “As to calling your distinguished firm ‘US materialists,’ that’s standard rhetoric around here for any commercial promoters—hardly a slur, I should think. Materialism has its place, as most Germans would be quick to agree.”

  “Very sly bastard,” Mitch said on reporting the conv
ersation to his unhappy home office.

  “Well, he’s your monster now, Dr. Frankenstein,” said Harry. “Keep a lid on him.”

  .

  no call came the morning after her encounter at the Central Park reservoir from anyone with a proposition for Clara to betray Mitch and his employer by spilling the beans about the Tell manuscript and its chances of being authenticated. Why would anyone think she’d be susceptible to such a blatant enticement? If these people had checked her out the way the approach by this Betty Smith creature suggested, surely they knew the Emerys were not impoverished and that Clara’s family was probably worth a tidy sum. Or was that their game? Would they try to grab her and hold her for a fat ransom if she didn’t do as they asked?

  On due reflection, she decided to quit panicky fantasizing—but also not to tell Mitch when he returned from London on Sunday about her double scare while out jogging without him. All it would do, probably, was make him insist that to avoid further endangerment, she had better sever her formal involvement in the Tell investigation, and that was the last thing she wanted now. In truth, she had become as fixated emotionally as Mitch was professionally by the whole mind-blowing mystery.

  Among all its vaporous pieces, none remained more mysterious than the Rossini connection. No doubt Mac Quarles’s panel of Beethoven experts would address the authenticity issue grain by grain as soon as the transcribed sketchbooks were available for intensive review. How, though, to explain the symphony’s abandonment in 1814 but the recurrence of its opening theme as a recognizable variation in Rossini’s most famous overture, first heard in public fifteen years later—and two years after Beethoven’s death? No clue had been forthcoming from Mac’s end.

  Clara decided to attack the question head-on. She fished out from her vast CD collection a disk of Rossini overtures, including those from The Barber of Seville, Tancredi, Semiramide, and, naturally, William Tell. She had always enjoyed the Tell overture as alternately rousing and lilting. But now it took on a dimension of intrigue for her.

  The whole piece ran just eleven and a half minutes, according to the liner notes inside the plastic holder. While the hushed first half of the work floated about her study, Clara sat staring at the drawing on the front of the slick-paper pamphlet lodged inside the CD holder. It was illustrated, predictably, by a large red apple in the process of being severed by an arrow. When the heralding horns suddenly burst into the soaring section of the music that Mac Quarles referred to as the Lone Ranger theme, after the old western adventure series on radio and TV that had adopted the Rossini passage for its musical signature, an impulse drove Clara to tweeze the folded liner notes out of the container and read them. Though brief and in tiny type, the contents of the pamphlet included one startling sentence: “The four sections of the William Tell Overture, virtually a miniature tone poem, represent dawn in the mountains, a thunderstorm, the pastoral countryside, and the triumphant return of the Swiss troops (to the music of a quickstep march for a military band that Rossini had written seven years before in Vienna).”

  In Vienna! And seven years before the premiere of Rossini’s Tell opera would make it 1822; Beethoven, at fifty-two, was still very much alive and grousing—and composing. But had the two men ever met while they were in the same city that year? And why would they have? Beethoven was admired everywhere as the aging titan of Western music, without a serious rival among living composers; Rossini was a younger upstart whose operatic oeuvre could hardly have been considered in the same galaxy with that of the supreme music-makers of Vienna. Why would Beethoven have deigned to cross paths with the likes of Rossini, whose gossamer works would likely have been beneath his contempt, assuming they were ever performed in Vienna?

  To find answers, Clara camped out the next day at Columbia’s music library, a favorite haunt, scouring its stacks for any volume that seemed remotely related to the subject. Unconsciously at first and then with uneasy self-awareness that she was displaying the symptoms of incipient paranoia, she intermittently glanced over her shoulder to be sure nobody was watching her. To be less than vigilant after her two scary jogging episodes would have been foolhardy.

  Satisfied nobody was lurking about, she set to work. Her starting point was the index in each of the thirteen Beethoven biographies she found, six of which she owned and had already read, and three on Rossini that were new to her. Her excitement quickened in the course of a two-hour search when she found several references to a meeting the two composers has indeed had in April of 1822, exact date unspecified, at Beethoven’s studio. Trying to find out if there was any record of what had transpired during their encounter consumed the rest of the day and half the next morning.

  While several of the biographies touched on the meeting, none did so more extensively than Thayer’s classic but flawed two-volume work, published in the 1870s, which said Rossini arrived in Vienna for the first time that spring of 1822 at the age of thirty for the presentation of his new opera, Zelmira. At the time, Rossini was all the rage in the music capital of the world. His operas had been performed there for several years and met with an ardent reception, The Barber of Seville in particular. His airy, melodic music suited the buoyant, sensuous spirit of the post-Napoleonic age and made the dashing Italian composer, with his elegant manners and sparkling conversation, the object of adoration in the drawing rooms of the Viennese aristocracy as well as with the spectacle-craving masses. He and Beethoven were, beyond dispute, the two most celebrated composers alive, but the latter, while still venerated, was old news, souring wine in a crystal decanter, and everything that Rossini was not—ill-mannered, gloom-ridden, and isolated in his soundless world.

  Savoring the limelight, Rossini had nevertheless heard enough of Beethoven’s music to recognize his immense genius and wished to make the acquaintance of the reclusive maestro. While Beethoven suffered few visitors, fools and savants alike, he did not begrudge the younger man his vogue. He had read and admired the score of The Barber of Seville and once described Rossini as “a good scene painter”—a genuine enough talent but hardly on a monumental scale like his own. On at least three occasions long after Beethoven’s death (two of them known to Thayer at the time he wrote his massive biography), Rossini told others of his meeting with the supreme maestro. In one account, he recalled,

  I had Carpani, the Italian poet with whom I had already called upon Salieri, introduce me, and he received me at once and very politely. True, the visit did not last very long, for conversation with Beethoven was nothing less than painful. His hearing was particularly bad that day and in spite of my loudest shouting [he] could not understand me…

  In a second account, Rossini remembered that “between his deafness and my ignorance of German, conversation was impossible. But I am glad that I saw him, at least.”

  So they had met and tried to converse, but little of real substance had apparently passed between them. That left Clara with not a soupçon of evidence to support her Rossini-stole-the-Tell-theme theory. Finally, having nearly lost heart that there was in fact something more to discover, she made yet another run through the stacks and came upon a slender volume, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries, which she had earlier ignored as a worthless miscellany. Now she leafed through it methodically. Midway through it, to her astonished delight, was a third and far more expansive account by Rossini of his meeting with Beethoven. This version, related to Richard Wagner in Paris in 1860 when the German composer called upon the Italian master of their shared musical form, was recorded by a third party who was on hand but did not bother to publish his notes about the meeting until forty-six years later, long after Thayer’s encyclopedic biography had been completed. Wagner’s exchange with Rossini suggested to Clara, who devoured every word of the account, why the Italian might have been less than forthright in the two earlier disclosures of his interview with Beethoven.

  “When I mounted the stairs leading to the poor lodgings of the great man,” he recount
ed to Wagner, “I barely mastered my emotions.” Admitted to Beethoven’s attic studio, Rossini was struck by “how terribly disordered and dirty” it was and the distressing cracks in the ceiling. Beethoven was bent over correcting printer’s proofs when Rossini and the poet Carpani entered unnoticed, and as they waited for him to finish, the younger composer observed “the indefinable sadness spread across his features” while from under heavy brows “his eyes shone as from out of caverns and, though small, seemed to pierce one.” When Beethoven raised his head, his greeting was enthusiastic enough: “Ah! Rossini, you, the composer of Il Barbiere di Seviglia?” he asked rhetorically in fairly comprehensible Italian. “My congratulations—that is an excellent opera buffa. I have read it with pleasure… It will be played so long as Italian opera shall exist. Do never try your hand at anything but opera buffa—you would be doing violence to your destiny by wanting to succeed in a different genre.”

  Carpani, taking offense at the backhanded compliment to his young countryman, interrupted to say—by writing in German in the “conversation book” that Beethoven kept about him for such purposes when visitors arrived—that Rossini had composed numerous serious operas, among them Otello, Tancredi, and Mosè, several of which Carpani had sent to Beethoven for his examination. To which Beethoven devastatingly replied:

  Indeed, I did go through them, but, you see, serious opera does not lie in the nature of the Italians. For the true drama, they know not enough of the science of music—and how could they acquire that in Italy? In opera buffa, none can equal Italians. Your language and your temperament predestine you for it. Look at Cimarosa; how much superior the comic parts of his operas are to the rest. The same with Pergolesi…

  Apparently unfazed by this gratuitous insult, Rossini confined himself to conveying “all my admiration for his genius, all my gratitude for having given me the opportunity to express it. He [Beethoven] answered with a deep sigh: ‘Oh, un infelice!’” (which Clara took to mean, from her rusty Italian, “What an unhappy soul am I!”) There followed an exchange about conditions in the theaters of Italy, whether Mozart’s operas were performed much there, and what Rossini thought of the Italian opera company in Vienna. “Then, wishing me a good performance and success with Zelmira, he rose and conducted us back to the door with the remark, ‘Above all, do more of The Barber.’”