Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  For the benefit of the C&W contingent on hand, composed of Harry and Lolly Cubbage and Mitch and Clara Emery as well as the hosts, Anna Hayes was retelling the traditional version of the maestro’s death late in the afternoon of March 26, 1827. According to bedside witnesses, she said, the Viennese sky darkened suddenly a bit after five o’clock and filled with thunder and lightning, which caused the comatose composer to open his eyes a final time. “He looked about him, so the legend goes, clenched his right hand, raised it threateningly—perhaps in anger at the Divinity for calling him away with so many tasks undone—and breathed his last.” Hayes’s capacious bosom rose and sank perceptibly. “And here we are, all these years later, considering perhaps the most ambitious of those undone tasks.”

  “Unless, dear Anna,” cautioned Emil Reinsdorf, “it wasn’t his.”

  “Not that it matters,” Mitch asked diffidently after a moment’s pause, respectful of the composer’s demise, “but I’m a little curious about that death scene, moving though it is. I’ve read your book, and I know you call the description hearsay, but what troubles me is how the thunder and lightning could have caused him to open his eyes.”

  Anna looked puzzled. “Patients have been known to awaken from comas.”

  “But if his eyes were closed,” Mitch persisted, “he wouldn’t have seen the lightning—and since he’d been stone deaf for about fifteen years, he couldn’t have heard the thunder.”

  “Felt it vibrate, perhaps,” Anna suggested tolerantly, “or perhaps it just seemed that way to those present. I’m not vouching for it.”

  Clara leaned toward Mitch, seated beside her in the gloaming, and whispered, “Give it a rest, sweetie—it’s a legend, for God’s sake. Stop being such a literalist.”

  Over dinner, Mac Quarles laid out the panel’s modus operandi to begin the next morning. The ground rules for their proceedings were simple. Only the five panelists were to be allowed in the C&W library; all officers and employees of the auction house were barred in order to preserve an arm’s-length relationship between the experts and those paying them for their services.

  The first three days were to be devoted to formal remarks by each panel member, going in alphabetical order, except for Mac, who as chairman would go last and could break a tie if the opinion of the others were divided equally. Panelists were at liberty to interrupt their colleagues’ remarks at any time to ask for clarification or challenge an arguable premise. The fourth day was to be reserved for private contemplation and informal exchanges among the participants before the final vote was taken on Friday morning. For historical purposes and the creation of an archive on the authentication procedure, a tape recording was to be made of the discussions, which Mac could consult and quote from as liberally as he chose while writing the final report for the panel to review. Ideally, their judgment would be unanimous, but each panelist was free to file a separate concurrence or dissent.

  Mindful of the potential record-breaking revenue from a single item offered to bidders under C&W’s gavel, everyone on the auction house staff grew increasingly edgy as the week of deliberations wore on. To track the panelists’ progress—or dissension—excerpts from each day’s tapes were played in Harry’s office that same evening for the firm’s high command.

  The first panelist to speak was Anna Hayes, assigned the task of framing the central issue. She began by reminding them how radically Beethoven had taken Viennese classicism beyond Haydn and Mozart, “whose work we so admire for its brilliance, subtlety, and masterful technique, yet was emotionally wanting.” By contrast, she noted, Beethoven’s music was nearly visceral in the way it seemed to convey, by use of disruptive and even disintegrative sound, real-life experience. And, starting with his third symphony, the Eroica, he created works that were inherently dramatic “through their melodic and harmonic progressions, hurtling movement, and interplay of moods.”

  So it was by no means implausible, in Hayes’s view, that the maestro could have been moved to compose a “dramatic symphony” around the saga of the Swiss national hero, incorporating narrative through song. “The real challenge for him,” as she saw it, “would have been to integrate the vocal pieces within the instrumental passages yet keep them simple enough to be sung—always a problem for him.” Here, the panel’s redoubtable German scholar pounced.

  reinsdorf: But Beethoven didn’t compose stories—the drama was all in the unexpectedness of the music itself. And he didn’t compose songs—it was beneath his dignity. So how likely is it that he would undertake to do both in the form of this Tell? And if so, how can we call it a symphony?

  hayes: Well, it’s a symphony if you’re willing to be flexible in defining a symphony. Beethoven, after all, had pioneered it by extending the sonata form. But here he had to defer to the vocal pieces, which carry the theatrical burden, without letting the instrumental sections degenerate into mere interludes. So he had to miniaturize the sonata form here in the Tell—an innovative departure, to be sure, but innovation is what Beethoven was all about.

  reinsdorf: But if you define an apple by saying it can also be an orange, then you might as well discard all classifications as meaningless.

  hayes: Please, let’s not turn this into a game of semantics, Emil. Within these Tell sketchbooks, we find the composer employing Beethoven’s same basic work tools—the succession of developmental increments, the different harmonic progressions, the suddenly shifting keys, et cetera, that are chief signatures of his genius.

  reinsdorf: Yes, without a doubt, the Tell has the ring of echt Beethoven. But is the ring enough? Sustaining all his elements is the real test of his genius, not mere snippets, as if we’re at a banquet table offering only hors d’oeuvres.

  “I thought Dr. High-and-Mighty Reinsdorf was lining up on the side of authenticating,” Harry said, halting the tape and turning to Mitch. “Didn’t he pretty much indicate that to Clara?”

  “He didn’t go that far. He told me at Gordy’s dinner party that he was impressed by the manuscript but not entirely convinced that it was beyond the powers of an inspired faker.”

  “Sounds like this could get damn ugly,” said Harry, restarting the tape.

  Anna Hayes did not allow herself to be stampeded by the generalissimo of German musicology. In turning to the rhythmic element in Tell, she found further cause for attributing the composition to Beethoven. “Remember,” she told the panel, raising her intensity quotient, “how he loved to pound you—as if to say, ‘Look here, friend, it’s my rhythm, not anyone else’s. I control it, and I’ll break it apart as, if, and when I like, and show you how it can be sped up, slowed down, inverted, doubled in length, hidden in the accompaniment—anything I bloody well choose and in ways you never expected.’”

  Hayes, in short, was willing to grant Beethoven poetic license if he indeed were Tell’s composer, but to Emil Reinsdorf’s way of thinking, that missed the larger point. “Dr. Hayes is quite right about detecting many of Beethoven’s principal stylistic elements here, but these are superficial similarities. I am far more struck by how the sketchbook shows the composer continually fine-tuning the first two movements to achieve greater orchestral texture, clearer registration, and richer figuration—he couldn’t let go of the thing, a very Beethovian trait.”

  “That’s more like it, Emil!” Harry cheered above the tape. His rooting interest, Mitch now sensed, might end up being a problem when the company’s objectivity was ultimately put to the test.

  A moment later, though, Reinsdorf was back at it. What was required of the panel, he instructed them, was a precise balancing test to weigh the composer’s established stylistic fingerprint—“the stuff that makes Beethoven Beethoven.”

  torben mundt: Excuse me, Emil, but you are preaching to the converted, so—

  reinsdorf: Excuse me, Torben, but I am making a basic point here—which is that for Beethoven his themes were not ends in themselves. The whole essence of
his art was the developmental process—how he elaborated on a very brief theme by extending it, bending it, branching it, modulating it, making it leap and arc and curl back on itself, then falter and seem to stumble, then right itself and—how to say it?—zigzag off to somewhere else—but never, ever meandering—

  mundt: Beautifully articulated—but your point being—?

  reinsdorf: Does the melodic development in this newfound manuscript of ours closely resemble the inimitable Beethoven norm? And I think the answer is—at best—a somewhat limp maybe, which cannot totally satisfy us.

  “This son of a gun’s trying to kill us!” Harry cried. “I knew he would.”

  “Relax,” Mitch urged. “It could be just a pose. Maybe he’s setting up a straw man for the others to push over.”

  Mundt, the gnarled old Dane, was no more inclined than Anna Hayes to be distracted by Reinsdorf’s sniping fire. Dwelling on Beethoven’s brilliant use of harmony and counterpoint, “layering his work with new forms of patterning and digressions his listeners had never encountered before,” Mundt detected countless such harmonic choices by the composer of the Tell Symphony. “Consider, for example, his use here of unsatisfied dissonances in instrumentally rendering the encounter between Tell and Gessler in the third movement.”

  It was too much for Reinsdorf. “Without a doubt some of the structural polyphony here is characteristic of Beethoven,” he condescended. “But let’s be honest—none of us can hear the work adequately inside our heads to justify the sort of permissive generosity you’re granting it.”

  “I’m duly chastened,” the Dane said dryly.

  When it was Reinsdorf’s turn to elaborate on his views, he chose to equivocate and repeat his reservations rather than shed any fresh light drawn from his own textual analysis of the sketchbooks.

  “Jumping to a rash conclusion serves nobody’s purpose,” he said, “except perhaps the eager holders of the manuscript who understandably wish to cash in on it.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” Harry shouted at the tape player.

  The final—and most junior—panelist, Rolfe Riker, had up to that point deferred in silence to his colleagues, but the young musicologist from Salzburg was not in the least intimidated when his inevitable collision with the overbearing Berliner occurred. Asked to discuss Tell’s timbre—how the instruments reacted to one another—Riker noted that Beethoven often favored “jarring combinations to arrest our attention, with a resulting sound sharper and more dissonant than any of his predecessors’. We find this tendency amply exhibited in the work at hand, for all its more conventional use of melody.” Citing Beethoven’s fondness for using trumpets to stand out above the orchestra, he urged his colleagues to “please witness the difficult intervals he gave the horns here with such telling effect—forgive my poor pun.”

  reinsdorf: Yes, Rolfe, but how does all of what you say serve to persuade us that Beethoven himself was the composer and not someone else employing what are without doubt his compositional techniques?

  riker: Well, for one thing there is all the forensic evidence—

  reinsdorf: Concluding only that Beethoven might possibly have been the—

  riker: With all due respect, Dr. Reinsdorf, you have been tenaciously arguing out of both sides of your mouth all week. When these undeniable stylistic similarities are pointed out, you say, “Oh, well, there’s not enough evidence for us to reach a firm conclusion.” And when the abundant circumstantial evidence is cited, you say, “Oh, well, someone highly knowledgeable could have cunningly mimicked all Beethoven’s composing techniques.” A cynic might conclude, sir, that you won’t allow facts to intrude upon your preconceived position.

  By the end of Wednesday’s session, only Emil Reinsdorf appeared to be left on the fence. The following day, Chairman Quarles told the panelists, would be set aside for private contemplation and informal discussions among them. Mac confirmed that he would await the German musicologist’s decision at Friday’s vote before expressing his own, to be elaborated upon in written form as part of the final report he would be drafting the following week and submit to the participants for their review. The other main question before them, besides on which side Reinsdorf would finally choose to alight, was the precise phrasing of the panel’s conclusion: What degree of certitude ought it to express?

  Mac Quarles, who had chosen to intervene rarely in the give-and-take, now exercised a more active hand. Each panelist, he said, would be asked to choose from among four options for the group’s bottom-line consensus on authentication.

  Option No. 1 would state: “I have found insufficient evidence in the course of our examination to conclude that the William Tell Symphony was composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.” Option No. 2 would state the panelist found that the work “was likely”—or “may well have been”—written by Beethoven. Option No. 3 would say that Tell was “very likely” or “probably” written by Beethoven. Option No. 4 would say it was “almost certainly” the maestro’s handiwork. The vote was to be taken at ten on Friday morning, the panel’s last day together.

  .

  mitch was about to pick up the new Ruth Rendell mystery Clara had bought for them—they shared a fondness for her gallery of bizarre characters—when the phone rang in the Emerys’ apartment. It was just before ten Wednesday evening.

  “Mitchell, hello—please forgive me for troubling you at home—and so late—but I’m sitting around my hotel room and having a definite problem.” Emil Reinsdorf, his accent a trace more pronounced than usual, sounded too coherent to be drunk. Was it his heart?

  “Don’t worry about me,” Mitch told him. “Are you all right?”

  “Physically, yes. Mentally, not so well. May I speak freely?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to be cooperative,” Reinsdorf said, “I really do—but I’m having trouble. I have a much more demanding constituency than the others. They seem to think I’m being obstructive—to question a work of such evident quality on narrow technical grounds. But it’s far more than quibbling for me. Simple congruence of the elements here is not sufficient for me to justify a label of authenticity—the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

  What was the man driving at? Had the accumulated stress of the challenge overcome him? “Aren’t there options open to you?” Mitch asked, hoping to calm his agitated caller. “I understood that there are various wordings for the panel members to choose among—conveying different degrees of conviction about the authenticity—”

  “It shouldn’t be a question of options—this is a matter requiring precision,” Reinsdorf replied. “Some of us were put on this earth, Mitchell, for the purpose of preserving standards.”

  “I respect that, sir, but you have to be fair to yourself. I was once a public prosecutor, and we could ask no more of our jurors than to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt before voting to condemn the accused—”

  “But the question here isn’t condemnation, Mitchell—it’s whether to sanctify this highly suspect applicant as deserving our enduring certification. It can’t be decided by calculated guesswork or by some lax compromise between faith and rationality. There must be a wholeness here, a feeling of rightness about the totality.” There was a pause while Mitch heard him drag deeply on a cigarette. “My problem is less with the music, you see—there’s ample evidence that it was composed by Beethoven—than with the whole Zurich story. I fear it may be a concoction. Not that we have anything glaring that disproves it. But an absence of negative evidence—all this about our not being able to specify where the maestro was and what he was doing during this period—is a far cry from positive proof.”

  The man just needed bucking up, Mitch decided. He was being asked to risk his reputation over a narrative of high improbability—his caution on the brink was understandable. “I don’t think you’re being asked to testify to the circumstantial evidence—we’ve engaged different expert
s for that area. It’s only the music you need worry over, and there you seem to be—”

  “Only the music,” Reinsdorf repeated with a thick laugh. “I disagree—it is the totality of the evidence that each of us must consider. The problem for me is that my countrymen think it is only they who are entitled—by blood and history and cultural attainment—to judge such a thing as this Tell Symphony. If I cooperate with you and the others by going along, I will surely be alienated from our people and my professional standing jeopardized beyond—”

  Hadn’t they gone down this road before Emil signed on as a panelist? And hadn’t he extracted a pledge from C&W, as a special inducement, to recommend the simultaneous premiere for Tell, if authenticated, to be held in the three German-speaking countries? What more did he want? “Our President Truman used to say,” Mitch ventured, “that ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.’ I don’t mean to be impertinent, Dr. Reinsdorf, but I think that principle applies here.”

  “Too late for that,” Reinsdorf said almost curtly. “I’m already in the kitchen and can’t get out gracefully. But I’m wondering if it’s too late for something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I understand that when the German cultural attaché met with your firm’s officials, Mr. Cubbage invited him to make an offer of purchase.”