Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “What is it, then? You think I’m not objective enough for you to rely on—that I’m succumbing to my flighty feminine nature?”

  Mitch tried to calm her. “This isn’t anything personal, hon—it’s not about you and me. We’re not in competition here.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Clara turned away from him. “I think maybe you’re trying to prove something to me—and there’s no need to. Go with the flow, mister.”

  “Maybe I’m an upstream swimmer by nature,” Mitch said with a shrug, “so let’s just drop it for now.”

  The ground rules for the auction provided that potential Tell bidders with carefully vetted credentials could examine the manuscript at C&W’s offices under tightly monitored conditions during the month preceding the sale date: a ninety-minute observation period per would-be bidder, arranged by appointment; no notes to be taken, no cameras, no electronic recording devices allowed. The strict rules were designed to discourage piracy even by someone with a bionic memory. Still under consideration was Lolly’s brainstorm to hold a private recital of Tell’s first movement, with attendance limited to several hundred individuals or organizational representatives seriously considering a bid at the auction. All media would be barred from the audition and all recording devices scrupulously excluded by means of electronic screening. The exclusive recital, Harry thought, might best be held two weeks before the auction, but he fretted over how to keep hermetically tight security and prevent possible theft of the score when dozens of musicians would be required to perform it. Every rehearsal could degenerate into a police action. Bad vibes.

  “But you have to let folks hear a representative samplin’ of the music,” warned Mac Quarles, still on retainer to C&W after finishing up his panel’s report, “if you’re expectin’ them to make bodacious bids for this big fella—no disrespect intended.”

  “Mac’s right,” said Clara, who knew more than a little about the inner workings of the music-recording industry, in which she had worked for five years. “But you might think about scaling down. You could probably shrink the orchestra by two-thirds and still have enough of the tutti sound to give potential bidders a faithful rendition. And instead of staging it at Lincoln Center, use a much more intimate hall, like the Mannes School of Music—it’s only ten blocks from here—which might minimize the logistical and security headaches.”

  Harry, impressed, asked her and Mac to explore the possibility and then ordered the preparation of a press kit to reveal the results of the auction house’s authentication effort. At its core was the forty-eight-page pamphlet Mac had drawn up to report his panel’s conclusions, accompanied by a detailed technical description of the symphony, a full account of its discovery (with a generous acknowledgment of Ansel Erpf’s role), a summary of the forensic evidence, a photocopy of two facing pages from the original sketchbook, and a statement by C&W’s outside law firm on the nature and extent of copyright protection that would likely be accorded to whoever bought title to the Tell manuscript.

  The obvious care that had gone into these preparations was rewarded with blowout coverage in the news media. “Scholars Say ‘Tell’ Symphony More Than Likely Composed by Beethoven,” The New York Times reported on page one below the fold, and half the newspapers in the world paid comparable attention. Sixty Minutes devoted a segment to the newly certified Beethoven’s Tenth, Jake Hassler was allotted his fifteen minutes of fame on the Today Show, Mac Quarles did star-turn interviews on PBS and National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and every other Tell panelist was trotted before microphones and cameras. Emil Reinsdorf in particular was hailed all over Germany for his rumored resistance to getting steamrollered into acquiescence during the vetting process. No word, though, was whispered about his collusion with his government’s thwarted effort to help German interests purchase the manuscript and prevent it from being desecrated by philistines. The media coverage that excited the keenest satisfaction at C&W’s offices was The Wall Street Journal’s page-one story, headed “Beethoven Bonanza in the Offing?” which began:

  NEW YORK—The world of longhair music has not been as frenetic since maestro Leonard Bernstein was jitterbugging on the podium at Philharmonic Hall here a generation or more ago.

  News that a scholarly imprimatur of authenticity has recently been affixed to a manuscript allegedly composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1814 and lost in a Zurich attic until last spring has attracted hundreds of inquiries at the offices of Cubbage & Wakeham, the venerable Anglo-American auction house. The firm hopes to receive bids next March for the work, which purports to be the tenth symphony (but ninth chronologically) by the German-born master.

  “We’ve had an unprecedented number of parties contact us about the ‘William Tell’ Symphony,” reported Harrison E. Cubbage III, the auction house’s president, “but we haven’t wanted to say much until we were comfortable about the identity of the composer. We are now. This is almost certainly the most spectacular work of art we’ve ever had the privilege to offer for sale.”

  Entertainment industry observers think Mr. Cubbage’s estimate is not blue-sky wishfulness. With reports circulating that international alliances, made up of major cultural institutions, recording companies, and corporate sponsors with an elite customer base, are now forming to enter bids for the Tell, the winning offer could run as high as nine figures. “It’s an intellectual property unlike any other ever brought to the marketplace,” commented Brooks Bates, arts editor of The Economist…

  “If this baby is going to be such a huge cash cow, maybe we should just forget the auction,” Harry said, casting the newspaper aside, “and go in fifty-fifty with Jake Hassler.”

  “Not unless,” said Gordy, “you first put out a contract on Ansel Erpf—which, being an upstanding member of the bar, is not an option I can actually recommend to you.”

  “Tempting thought, though,” Harry said, reaching for a fresh pencil to gnaw on.

  .

  no sooner had word of the C&W expert panel’s authentication of the Tell manuscript made its bona fide existence a worldwide sensation than fresh complications arose overseas. The disturbing news began with a phone call to Mitch from Johnny Winks, the auction house’s undercover troubleshooter.

  Richard Grieder, the conductor and music director of the Swiss Philharmonic, was having a hissy fit over Cubbage & Wakeham’s decision to play hardball with the Swiss government and the Erpf family in negotiating with them over the rights to Tell. Now that it was apparent the auction house would cut neither of them in for a generous portion of the proceeds from the commercial exploitation of the newly found Beethoven work and would not require the winning bidder at the Tell auction to hold the symphony’s premiere in Zurich, with all the attendant hoopla and prestige accruing to the conductor, Grieder was letting out his unhappiness on Erpf’s family by publicly rescinding his offer to restore their gifted problem-child to membership in his philharmonic orchestra. Nor would Ansel’s former close friend Felix Utley be designated first violinist and concertmaster, as Margot Lenz had urged Grieder to do. And C&W’s latest legal action, filed on Jake Hassler’s behalf, to force the Swiss courts to probate Otto Hassler’s will was being denounced throughout Alpine country as an egregious affront to Switzerland, its people, and their cultural institutions by denying them any say in the Tell’s fate.

  These contentious developments so upset Margot Lenz that she telephoned Mitch shortly after he had heard from Winks and asked if any possibility remained of striking a deal with the auction house.

  “What sort of a deal do you have in mind?” Mitch asked.

  “Perhaps my family would forgo its claim to the manuscript,” Margot proposed, “if a substantial cash grant could be made directly to our philharmonic—it’s far more needy than our family is. And it might make a great difference to our people’s frame of mind if we were promised the right to stage the Tell premiere—the symbolism is important to us.” Her tone said she was too
proud to plead but too distressed to avoid sounding desperate. “I’m afraid for Ansel—he’s enlisted a bunch of wild-eyed supporters and—well, he’s quite beside himself—and even angrier with me for trying to work out some sort of arrangement with your firm. He says the family is selling out Switzerland’s honor and unmanning him in the process. And now this new slap at him by Grieder. It’s all a dreadful mess.”

  After a word with Harry and Gordy, Mitch phoned her back to say that because the cost for the authentication process had proven so heavy, C&W was not in a position to make more than a token gift to the Swiss Philharmonic as a compensatory gesture. “Besides, anything more would look like conscience money. I’m really very sorry.”

  “I see,” Margot said grimly. “Look, I’m frightened about what could happen—Ansel is not a stable person. But I see you have your marching orders.”

  Five days later, her foreboding seemed to be confirmed. The bombshell came in a FedEx envelope to Mitch from Zurich, containing a copy of a seven-page typed letter apparently from Ansel Erpf to his sister, who had included an English translation and a note that read,

  Mr. Emery: I think the attached should command your prompt attention. A. is in London, staying at our parents’ flat (they are in Provence) while he undergoes treatment for his depression—it is a periodic need, best met at a distance from here. At such times, he is capable of saying and doing things that can appear unbalanced. I fear this is the case here. Please call me if you wish to discuss your firm’s and my family’s best interests in this matter. —Sincerely, M.L.

  Mitch fell into his office chair and examined the letter. Ansel’s acidic voice came bitingly off its pages:

  My dearest sister (does such ardor stun you?),

  All is well in Charles St., though the loo is balky—the Brits still have a way to go with their medieval plumbing. Dr. Kohler feeds me the same old meds and warns as always how pointless it all is if I don’t stick slavishly to his rules. He makes me yearn for the dear old Zug Clinic, where at least they do not nag. But I prefer Mayfair; the difference is that in London there are ample distractions to dilute my rage—happily on the ebb, I can report, so far as the family goes.

  All the sad news of late, after glooming me no end, has served to focus my sometime fertile mind on how best to strike back at the Americans. I have a plan. You will at first surely consider it demented. Yet I am convinced it would cause them to cancel their auction and part with Tell, returning it to us for a modest payment. For my plan to work, I would have to be—or at least appear to be—willing to face defamation as an authentic basket case. Since the reigning consensus has already classified me as such (or nearly so), I suppose it is a small enough sacrifice, though I am sure the family would as soon avoid the scornful label.

  My idea is this: I will tell the auctioneers that if they do not abandon their plan to auction off Tell, I will reveal the truth about the symphony, namely, that I am not only its discoverer but its true composer! I will disclose the details of the ten-year project that I embarked upon after my own compositions had repeatedly been rejected for performance by the philharmonic and say that I thus hoped to display my virtuosity in a veiled manner—i.e., by creating a work accepted as recognizably the product of a universally acknowledged genius.

  My original intention, I will explain, had been to allow the symphony to be certified as genuine and performed for a number of years, winning acclaim of a magnitude I could never have earned in my own name, before revealing the truth. But now, as I will explain, being such a decent chap at heart, I have thought better of it—the “expert” authentication of the work as Beethoven’s, recently announced in New York, has served my purpose well enough. And so I am emerging from the shadows to confess my delicious little ruse and, having had my gifts amply validated, to apologize for pulling the wool so tightly over the eyes of the biggest blowhards in the music world. Think of the sensation my “confession” will cause!

  Mitch paused, his mind somersaulting. He might have known that Ansel, jaundiced weirdo that he was, would come up with such an outlandish stunt. But which was the stunt—was it the demented forgery he had ingeniously fabricated or was it this convoluted threat to paint the genuine Tell as a sham and anoint himself its creator? Either claim, though, could severely jeopardize the C&W auction by casting a pall over the legitimacy of the manuscript. Unless, of course, Ansel’s story was perceived as so preposterous that the firm could simply issue a brief statement dismissing his “admission” as sadly symptomatic of a profound mental derangement. In a thickening quandary, Mitch read on:

  It all began, I shall proclaim, when, following my weekly custom, I dropped by one evening to visit with our kindly neighbor, daft old Otto Hassler, and have a brandy with him in his foul, airless bedchamber. Even in his dotage, Otto was capable of lucid memories, one of which (I shall report) he shared with me that night—a family legend about one summer long ago when a famous musician, using a false name so his infirmity would not become known, came to Züri to seek a cure to his deafness, so fatal to his occupation, and resided in the Hasslers’ upper-story rooms. He departed within two months, frustrated by the failure of his medical treatments. Although he left no mementos of his stay, the suspicion grew that their tenant had in fact been the most celebrated composer of the age.

  Ansel would then claim that Otto’s story had fired his imagination. Was there any substance whatever to it? And perchance, had their ailing visitor—who could have been none other than that composer—pursued his craft while in Zurich and produced a work thematically inspired by his host nation? Ansel would say he decided to look into the possibilities at his own leisurely pace just to amuse himself, gathering up every book on Beethoven’s life and work that he could find. Diligent reading over several years, however, yielded no evidence whatever that the composer had ever been to Switzerland. But it did reveal Beethoven’s infatuation with the German Romantic movement, his familiarity with Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and that in the summer of 1814 he might very well have made a clandestine trip to Zurich in frantic hope of reversing his deafness. There were also ample historical grounds, Ansel found, to explain why Beethoven might have set aside his symphonic denunciation of Austrian oppression that Tell and his countrymen had rebelled against. “Thus satisfied with the plausibility of all these circumstances, I determined—or so I will assert in my apologia—that I myself would create the symphony about Tell that Beethoven himself lacked the courage to give the world,” Ansel wrote Margot. “And I would arrange for its discovery in a place that would appear altogether natural.”

  To compose Tell and render it on paper in a manner faithfully simulating Beethoven’s, Ansel would say he’d visited seven archives where the maestro’s manuscripts, correspondence, and incidental documents were stored and had used copying machines where possible and his mini-camera behind curators’ backs when copying was forbidden. The growing number of publications on Beethoven’s compositional techniques added to the abundance of sources he could tap—“and so I passed many a sleepless night utterly enthralled, anatomizing the man’s genius at the molecular level, parsing every measure of the Eroica and a dozen of his other works of sublime artistry.” Then, slowly at first but steadily gaining momentum, he spun out the William Tell Symphony as he imagined the immortal maestro might have. “I am perhaps unduly proud of the daring leap my imagination took at this point”—the idea of a hybrid “dramatic symphony” he had hit upon as a manageable format for musically conveying Schiller’s drama.

  Throughout the years he spent composing Tell, according to Ansel’s fanciful account, he was also busy researching the art and craft of forgery. Did she know, Ansel’s letter asked his sister, that forgeries had been detected going as far back as the Greeks—works attributed to Euripides, Socrates, and Themistocles among others? In recent times, the imaginary diaries of Adolf Hitler had been paraded across the pages of Der Spiegel and accepted for a while as authentic. “By far the
most common failing among forgers, I discovered, was the tendency by even the most practiced to try too hard, to write too slowly and deliberately, with a resulting quiver of the hand that is detectable under magnification by the trained eye,” Ansel disclosed. “Thus, I needed to find a co-conspirator whom I could train and totally trust, someone who had the artistic gift to imitate with great fidelity—and who would share my joy in this rarefied game-playing. I found her in your least favorite of our cousins, dear ‘Tub of Lard’ (as you nastily called her in our youth) Sofie Ries, whose precise penwork lent such distinction to her books and drawings for children. She relished the scandalous deception I proposed.”

  To carry off their ruse, only precisely correct materials could be used. Thus, Ansel would explain how, while haunting the archives at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, he also made side visits to the antiquarian bookshops in the city, where he found and purchased several quatrofolios dating from about 1800, with their pages empty save for the musical staves ruled across them. In addition, he bought other books of bound blank pages from the same time period to be used for creating the non-musical documents his plot required. His surplus of antique paper, Ansel would say, he burned and then used its carbon residue as the base for the batches of ink that he carefully mixed in various colors and gave to his adored Cousin Sofie, along with a dozen antique quill pens that she practiced with to achieve Beethovenesque writing fluency.

  Once he’d completed Tell using his own modern composition sheets, Ansel would further confess, it was easy for him to work backward in simulating a sequence of thematic starts and stops and twists and turns and interruptions and resumptions, all flecked with cryptic markings, that typified Beethoven’s sketchbooks, by now so familiar to him. For a full year, while Ansel was thus engaged, Sofie would be said to have practiced imitating Beethoven’s musical and everyday penmanship with her generous supply of quill pens until she had become adept enough to attempt the forgery without hesitancy in the old blank books Ansel had brought back from Vienna. And to replicate the maestro’s habitual messiness, some newly written sketchbook pages would be closed before the ink had dried, creating blots in the corresponding place on the left-hand page opposite. “We didn’t miss a trick,” Ansel said he would boast, “and had such a grand time of it. And then my Sofie, the dear dirigible, went and died on me.”