Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  Ansel’s drumbeat soon reverberated across the ocean, and editorial writers in the US picked up on it with a sympathetic ear. Typical among the comments was the cutting appraisal in the Washington Post, which editorialized:

  Every schoolchild knows—or used to know before rap became the rage—the heroic tale of William Tell, his devotion to liberty, and his son’s bravery. The story remains a vital part of the Swiss national identity, and it deserves to be celebrated by that country in words and song. If the newfound symphonic work glorifying the fortitude of Switzerland’s leading patriot and attributed to the immortal Beethoven proves to be authentic, it should rightfully be returned there and not snatched away for private profit by an American whose family has long since emigrated to the New World. Such gross exploitation ought to be discouraged even if the perpetrator is found to be acting within the letter of the law. Otherwise the spirit of international comity is threatened.

  Such carping did not escape the attention of Tell’s putative owner. “Hey, they’re busting my balls, like I’m a rotten no-good crook,” Jake Hassler moaned over the phone to Mitch. “Can’t you guys do anything about it? Maybe a press release telling them to fuck off or something?”

  “Try thinking about it the way Harry does,” Mitch bucked him up. “The more attention we draw—of whatever kind—the higher the price the manuscript will probably go for.”

  “Oh, yeah? I didn’t think of that. Daisy’ll be thrilled—she’s about ready for us to chuck the whole thing and give it to the Goodwill.”

  “I’d wait a little on that,” Mitch advised. “It could still earn you quite a nice nest egg. Maybe a dozen nest eggs.”

  “Hoo-boy,” said Jake.

  .

  the song has it right, Clara thought; New York is an autumnal town. That’s when it’s fully churning with energy and adventure, its muted colors a sophisticated complement to the city’s exuberant yet bittersweet mood. She was glad to be caught up in the whirligig with Hilde Reinsdorf, a stranger appreciative of Clara’s attentions as they toured the city’s museums and art galleries while their husbands puzzled over the authorship of the William Tell Symphony.

  It was Emil’s assigned week to closet himself with the manuscript, a security guard, and a piano, for whatever use he chose to make of it, while he and his wife stayed as transient guests in the top-floor apartment at C&W’s townhouse offices. With time on her hands, Hilde gratefully accepted Clara’s offer to show her the town. By tacit agreement, the two women did not speak about the symphony—somehow it seemed off-limits, a sort of military secret, best left to their spouses to cultivate—and concentrated instead on the graphic arts, since Hilde was an accomplished floral painter.

  The Berliner, in her millefleur-on-black print dress, belted khaki raincoat, black beret, and high-laced shoes (suited, she said, for walking endless miles), may not have been a fashion-plate, but she knew her art, Clara saw, bustling her all over the city from The Cloisters to the Brooklyn Museum. No place pleased her more than the Morgan Library, where she passed half a day enthralled by the old books, prints, and manuscripts stored there.

  For all Hilde’s keen aesthetic sensibility, Clara wondered what the woman would wear to the Cubbages’ for the dinner party Harry was hosting Thursday night in tribute to their eminent German guest of honor. By way of warning, Clara mentioned the likely problem to Lolly: “I’m afraid the frau is not into haute couture. She’s an academic’s wife, and their town was the drab front line for the Cold War all those years.”

  “What’ll we do?” Lolly asked with alarm. “I’ve got Freddie and Weezie Engelking coming—they’re Lincoln Center Gold Circle patrons—and they’re down on my Tell bidders’ list for at least fifty thou. Not a good fit with a pair from Germany’s Hundred Neediest Cases. Damn!”

  “Could you disinvite the Engelkings? Tell them Emil’s got to work instead, so no party?”

  “Weezie’s the kind who checks out your garbage in the morning to see what you ate last night—she’d find out I lied, and then I’d be toast.” Lolly’s head worked best under stress. “It sounds as if either we buy Hilde a little something off the rack at Bendel’s, or we all show up in dirndls to make her feel at home.”

  In any event, neither solution seemed to have been necessary. Hilde arrived wearing a smart Escada jacket in grayed lavender with a pale pink silk blouse and black pants—an ensemble scarcely less stylish than Lolly’s. Clara could only shrug when her hostess questioned her with arched brows.

  Style aside, the evening was all Emil Reinsdorf’s. The other guests, including the loaded Engelkings, Gordy and Sara Roth, and Mac and Katie Quarles, hung on the feisty musicologist’s every word, delivered with arresting verve. They were just into the cold pumpkin soup drizzled with chives when the table talk turned to an item on that evening’s newscast about an Arabic-speaking gay intelligence officer discharged while on duty in Iraq for violating the US armed forces’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

  “It’s idiotic,” said Harry the host. “We desperately need people over there who can talk the local lingo—and what difference does it make if they cohabit with the same sex—or even the same species. With camels, maybe, I’d draw the line…”

  The remark evoked nods and gentle laughter. But then Emil Reinsdorf startled the table by dryly commenting, “I’m sure our revered Beethoven would have agreed with you, Mr. Cubbage—he didn’t want anyone intruding on his sexual predilections.”

  “Which were—what?” Harry asked.

  “Well—to be blunt—I believe he was not very comfortable with the ladies.”

  “You’re outing Beethoven?” an incredulous Lolly asked. “Is nothing sacred?”

  “Emil,” Hilde said softly, “I don’t think that’s called for just now—“

  “I was only answering Mr. Cubbage, my dear.”

  Clara, seated across from Emil, found the revelation as gratuitous, and thus offensive, as his wife did, and could not restrain herself from questioning it. “I’ve never heard that before, Dr. Reinsdorf,” she said as politely as possible. “Is it simply your private opinion or an open secret in the upper reaches of musicology?”

  “Ah, well—I’ve piqued your interest. But there’s nothing more to it than the obvious.” Emil took a slow sip of Lolly’s best grand cru French chardonnay. “The documented record fails to reveal, or even strongly to suggest, that our esteemed maestro, in fifty-seven years of life, ever made love to a female—or a male, either, for that matter.”

  “A celibate, then,” Clara suggested, “in love only with his art?”

  “So say his usual apologists,” Emil replied, “but that’s hardly sufficient to cover the matter. I think his carnal instincts—and he no doubt had them—were clear enough.” True, the German conceded, scanning the table, there were many letters hinting at the opposite, addressed to women and expressing keen, even passionate, affection. “But these were always women far beyond his social class and safely unattainable.” And yes, he added, Beethoven was known to have prowled the demimonde on occasion, at a lusty companion’s goading, but such reports were cryptic and without disclosure of particular partners, places, or pleasures. While he was capable of both charming and disarming the opposite sex, he did so in the drawing room, not the boudoir. “In point of fact, nearly all his close companions and confidants were male—likewise, most of his household attendants—and his correspondence with certain men was affectionate and fulsome to a point beyond the conventions of the time.”

  Clara was confused. Emil Reinsdorf, of all people, she would have cast as the fiercest guardian of Beethoven’s reputation. Why was he posing as a detractor of the mainstay of his career? For shock value? To make his hetero self seem superior to the object of his adoration? Or perhaps it was she herself who should be faulted for finding Reinsdorf’s characterization almost spitefully defamatory. “But what of Beethoven’s famous letters to his ‘Immort
al Beloved’?” she asked, unable to disguise her level of distress. “Was she, too, a phantom?”

  The German scholar withdrew his glasses and began polishing them with his napkin, a gesture in seeming acknowledgment that his indelicacy had put her off.

  “Not a phantom, certainly, Madam Emery—those letters are rife with hints of liaisons and deep passion—but his beloved was not necessarily a she. I find neither Maynard Solomon’s nor Anna Hayes’s biographies conclusive as to the identity or gender of his celebrated sweetheart—and if not certifiably female, only one alternative leaps to mind.”

  Lolly did not hesitate to voice the table’s collective surprise. “But Beethoven’s music—it’s so…no one composed with more…you know…”

  Emil smiled. “Cojones?”

  “Those would be the ones.”

  “My dear lady, I am not suggesting Beethoven was a mincing pansy—far from it—or that his sexuality has anything at all to do with the nature or quality of his creative genius.” He looked to Mitch and then to Mac Quarles, the latter being his sole professional confederate at the party. “Nor do I find homosexuality an index of weak character—or even of a sadly degenerate love life. Besides, where would the arts be without our gifted gay brigade—Michaelangelo, Proust, Tchaikovsky, your Edward Albee, and Andy Warhol, to name a few recruits?” Emil turned back to Lolly. “And, by the way, Madam Cubbage, Tchaikovsky, too, wrote some thoroughly—may I say it in plain English?—ballsy music, and his sexual preference is not in doubt.”

  Mitch tried to shift the focus of the conversation. “But this matter has no real bearing, I take it,” he proposed to Emil, “on our Tell conundrum.”

  “Is that a question or a statement, Mr. Emery?” came the quick and barbed retort.

  “Well…I just…was wondering how it could—”

  “Fair enough. We might want to involve Dr. Quarles on that point—bearing in mind the remarkable letter allegedly sent by Archduke Rudolph to the maestro that was found with the Tell manuscript. I have long believed that Beethoven’s relationship with Rudolph was so extraordinary as to invite speculation about its true nature. Let’s be honest—you don’t dedicate a dozen inspiring pieces of your music to the same individual unless—well, something very special is involved. More, I should say, than meets the eye.”

  Mac looked uncomfortable, though less than appalled. “I kinda assumed, after checking into it,” he said, “that what was special was the fact that Rudolph was keepin’ him afloat financially in those years—and respectable because of that royal connection—so naturally, Mr. Beethoven was very deferential to him. But maybe I missed something—”

  “What you say is certainly true, Mac,” Emil replied with suddenly collegial familiarity, “but I think there had to be more to it than that.” The archduke was the younger man by seventeen years, he pointed out, and in his physical prime, though he suffered from the family curse of epilepsy, “which would likely have made Beethoven more than a little sympathetic toward him, given his own physical afflictions. Then factor in Rudolph’s very considerable skills as a musician—by all accounts, he played the piano and composed with genuine accomplishment.” Beethoven created an instruction book just for him—something the master composer never did for anyone else. He also entrusted many of his manuscripts to Rudolph for safekeeping in the Schönbrun Palace library. “Finally,” the German scholar added, “there is the surviving body of correspondence between the two, which music historians have long chosen to disregard—I believe due to squeamishness.”

  “I wouldn’t call what Rudolph sent to Zurich a love letter,” Mac objected mildly.

  “No, but it wasn’t Rudolph’s letters that gave the game away—it was Beethoven’s,” Emil said. “And I have no trouble, you see, when he writes to the archduke wishing him what he calls ‘all the good and beautiful things that can be conceived.’ The chap was, after all, his chief provider. But what are we to infer when Beethoven writes Rudolph things like ‘your imperial highness is to me one of the most precious objects in the whole world’ or assures him ‘it is no mere frigid interest that attaches me to you, but a true and deep affection which has always bound me to your highness’?”

  “Why can’t that be taken,” Clara asked, “for the language of platonic friendship? It’s a bit syrupy for our tastes nowadays, but might that not be fairer than assuming it’s a confession of gay love or, even more troubling, gross flattery that its object would have found transparent?”

  “Very well put,” the eminent musicologist told the aspiring one. “But you mistake my speculative remark for an accusation, Madam Emery. I was merely observing the biographical facts. The closeness of the two men, at any rate, lends credence to Dr. Quarles’s conclusion—based on the archduke’s letter to Zurich—that this Tell symphony was set aside largely out of deference to Rudolph’s special importance in Beethoven’s life. I was not dabbling idly in the scurrilous, you see.”

  “That’s a relief,” Clara responded with a smile that disarmed the intimidating German and sent a chorus of welcome laughter around the table.

  “You’re a most able champion of the maestro,” Emil remarked to her privately after dinner as the party moved into the living room for aperitifs and coffee. “May I also commend you heartily for the astonishing letter you invented to explain the connection with Rossini’s Tell—Dr. Quarles circulated it to our panel as a matter of speculative interest. Most creative of you and—but please don’t quote me—persuasive.”

  Surprised—because Mitch had said he wouldn’t attach her invention to the rest of the memo she had prepared on the Beethoven-Rossini connection for forwarding to Mac and his fellow panelists—and flattered by the distinguished scholar’s praise, she nodded her thanks.

  “Do you think, though,” she asked him, “that it was just the archduke’s appeal to him that caused the maestro to cast the Tell aside—for the politics and, well, his personal regard for Rudolph—or might there have been more to it?”

  A bemused expression came over Reinsdorf’s features. “Hard to say. We know Beethoven was uncomfortable with lighthearted subjects, so his almost playful experiment celebrating a brawny primitive like the hunter Tell may in the end have struck him as rather insipid, compared with, say, his evocation of a brooding tragic nobleman like Egmont.”

  Clara read a deeper meaning in his comment.

  “Then are you saying that you think in Tell we’re truly dealing with authentic Beethoven—even if it was misbegotten?”

  The German turned coy.

  “Well, I’ll not be rash again—having publicly dismissed this Tell piece sight unseen as an obvious hoax. I need to reflect carefully on what I’ve seen here this week. But I’ll say this much—as absurd as I thought the claim was when I first heard about it, now it seems at least as farfetched to me that somebody could perform such an excruciatingly difficult task of fabrication. The perpetrator would have needed a profound familiarity with sophisticated composing techniques. The internal intricacies must all converge—and they more or less seem to here. The alleged circumstances of both the manuscript’s disappearance and reemergence naturally invite our suspicion, but they have a kind of coherence not to be sneered at, as I rather did at first.”

  Clara listened closely, nodded, then confided, “My husband is bothered, though—almost perversely, if you will—by that very coherence you speak of. He marvels that everything seems to fit so well—almost seamlessly.”

  “But not musically, necessarily—and that’s the rub. When I join my august colleagues on your panel here in a few weeks, we’ll need to determine, first of all, whether this Tell composition is a genuine Beethoven symphony and, no less important, whether for all its deviance in form from the rest of his work, it is a triumph—or a monstrosity that he properly aborted.”

  Just before the party broke up, Hilde Reinsdorf took Clara aside and thanked her again for having served as such a com
panionable guide throughout the week.

  “And, if you’ll forgive me for intruding,” she added quietly, “I hope a baby comes for you and Mitchell.”

  The subject had not arisen between them before. “I—but what makes you—”

  Hilde saw Clara’s uneasiness. “It was the way you kept staring at the bambini in all the religious paintings—perhaps I misinterpreted.” She put a gentle hand on Clara’s wrist. “Emil and I waited—there were so many obstacles—and our country was so wounded and broken—and then it was too late for us. I hope not for you.” They kissed on parting.

  “There’s a sadness about her,” Clara told Mitch on the cab ride across town, “but I do like her. I even like Emil, as full of himself as he is.”

  “You liked Ansel Erpf, too—and you see where that’s got us.”

  “He’s a work in progress,” she said, “you’ll see. Anyway, he didn’t write Tell—”

  “Who did?”

  Clara took his hand and, by way of responding, asked him, “You gave Mac my Beethoven letter to Rossini after saying you wouldn’t. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I actually gave it to him not to support your theory but to show how all the letters found in the box with the Tell manuscript, starting with Nina’s, could have been skillfully concocted, like yours. And I didn’t want to tell you in case Mac found your letter to be silly. He didn’t—he told me just tonight and said he’d call you over the weekend to thank you for all the Rossini stuff. I need you to stay with this thing, babe.”

  She gave his hand a short, fierce squeeze.

  “I think you do, actually.”

  {11}

  The Somerset Hills were washed in coral by the approach of sunset, and the piney air stirred with a mid-October tang as drinks were passed among the guests gathered on Gordy and Sara Roth’s cantilevered deck to behold the fading vista. Everyone agreed the spectacle was all the more pleasurable thanks to a pair of large space heaters that neutralized the encroaching chill. The afternoon had been devoted to a microbus tour of New Jersey’s Revolutionary War battlefields, organized for the members of Cubbage & Wakeham’s panel of experts on the eve of their week-long meeting to decide Tell’s life-or-death fate. Also on hand for the outing and the buffet that followed were Jake and Daisy Hassler, the owners—well, claimants, at least—of the luminous, if worse for wear, manuscript that had drawn the group together.