Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  The undersigned Village Clerk of Mittendrinnen-on-Danube wishes to advise the proper authorities of Zurich Switzerland that the drowned body of a young woman of twenty-five or so years of age was recently found on the shore of the Danube River within our village limits and identified by a local innkeeper as the remains of a lately departed guest at his lodgings—namely, Miss N. Hassler, who had said that she resided at Napfplatz, in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The deceased was laid to eternal rest without a grave marker in a corner of our local churchyard reserved for those who did not dwell among us. The keeper of the inn has asked me to include a letter to her family that he says Fraulein Hassler paid him to have posted.

  The signature, with rococo swashes and flourishes, read “Karl Olgeschlagger.”

  “But then how,” Clara asked, looking up after she’d finished reading it aloud, “could she have been buried in the cemetery outside Zurich in—what year was it Johnny said?”

  “I think 1876,” Mitch said with a shrug. “Hell, so as long as we’re resurrecting a Beethoven symphony, why not a corpse in the bargain? Read on, sweetheart.”

  “And here’s the letter Nina left with the innkeeper—it’s dynamite,” Jake said, sliding two folded and yellowed sheets, with a broken wax seal on the outside of the second page, toward them across the conference table, “a real eye-opener. It kinda answers a lot of what’s been buggin’ Mitch about the whole story.”

  Clara scanned the letter for a few moments and then, eyebrows arching, began to translate. It was dated 7 May 1818, addressed to the Hasslers from the Hidden Oaks Inn, which the writer said was located at the edge of a Danubeside village not far from Vienna, and “entrusted with the last coins in my purse to the innkeeper who promises me in all earnestness he will post it.” She had set out for the Austrian capital, she explained, a month earlier with Marie,

  …my dear little one, whose existence caused our family such heartache and me much anguish. I came to seek her father, who, unknown to you until now, was our distinguished visitor of four summers ago. With the greatest shame, I must confess that he and I grew intimate over the weeks when the maestro remained in our midst and I served as housekeeper for his quarters. Our bonding brought much happiness to us both and eased his grief over the failed medical treatments he was enduring and the difficulties he was having with his musical composition.

  Upon the maestro’s departure, he entrusted me with the musical notebooks in which he had been laboring, saying it was too risky to take them back with him to Vienna just then—the reasons were too complicated for him to explain, he said and asked that I watch over them until he sent for the composition books, hinting that he would perhaps ask me to bring them to him myself at his expense when the time was ripe. For safekeeping, I placed his notebooks in the trunk in our attic, where they remain. He left behind, in addition to his composing books and my heavy heart, yet another package, one he did not know of at the time—and the very reason I came hither without his invitation.

  Despite the nature of their friendship, Clara read on, translating more freely now, the maestro never wrote to her about the return of his compositions or to ask after her health—or anything whatever—which greatly saddened Nina and left her fearful, upon learning she was to bear his child, that he would not acknowledge its paternity. She nevertheless wrote to advise him of the fact, but he never replied. Thinking that perhaps her letter to him had gone astray, she wrote a second and then a third time, with no happier results. It was then, out of pique, that she wrote the note, dating it just after the composer left Zurich, explaining how he had instructed her to destroy the composition he had been working on during his stay in Switzerland. But believing the maestro was acting rashly and would later regret his command, she kept his workbooks in her own bed chamber. “But in my growing anger,” Clara translated more literally now, “I chose, in revenge for his cruel indifference toward me, to keep possession of his composing books as my own property unless he asked me to bring them to him, which I vowed to myself that I would do only if he agreed as well to accept as his own the child I was carrying.” Clara paused, moved by the lines she was reciting, and then continued more haltingly:

  More than three years have now passed since you sent me in penance from our family’s loving embrace, to drift with my little Marie, two forsaken souls, and I have grown so weary with this lonely burden that I knew no other solution than to set out for Vienna in quest of the great composer, hoping to renew our acquaintance and presenting him with our precious love child and the fond wish that he would embrace her as well as me.

  Instead, I was at first denied admission to his atelier, and when I sent word that I would not leave his doorstep until he had seen me, his manservant led us to the maestro. He was not delighted to see me, still less so our daughter, and when I wrote out the nature of my visit in a notebook he kept for that purpose—for his hearing had in no way improved—he angrily denied ever having been acquainted with me and said it was a foul lie to claim my little girl was his and, furthermore, that the very whisper of the idea would ruin his standing in the community, where he was admired as a highly moral person—and he doubted the same could be said for me. When I asked him whether he had resumed work on the musical composition he had left with me to destroy, he grew even more furious and said I must be mistaken since he had never been to Z. in his life and knew nothing of any music he might have mislaid or left behind somewhere. And then I was roughly shown the door, Marie rushing after me—a sad little discard.

  Clara shook her head, grieving over the pathetic scene she had narrated, then read the closing final part of the letter alternating between her own paraphrasing and the author’s more affecting words. Her soul could never be repaired, Nina wrote near the end, for just as she had lost the love and regard of her dear mother and father, who had cast her from their home, so too had she lost all illusions that the man she had so much adored from afar would ever mend her wounds and make her whole. “No, he is a vicious rogue, a most inhuman monster,” Nina wrote, “and I hereby forsake him forever.” The letter to her family ended:

  Today, knowing you have it not in your hearts to forgive me and accept my child as family, I arranged for Marie to be taken in as a foundling by the holy sisters. Had I begged you to give the innocent creature a place among you even while barring me from your door, I fear you would have punished her by repeating with regularity that her father is other than the one I have here named. It is not so. He wronged me, and my only wrongful act in return was to save his music manuscripts and sundry papers against his instruction. Perhaps, at least, since I am denied entry to my own parents’ home, you will place this note beside my earlier one telling of the maestro’s final hour in Zurich—it is with his composing books and other items he asked me to discard but remain, unless someone has disturbed them, in the cedar box stored in our attic trunk.

  Goodbye, may we reunite someday in Heaven, where forgiveness, I pray, shall be within your power and mine.

  Your daughter without hope, Nina

  Clara’s eyes glistened with unspilled tears, Mitch saw as she looked up. It was a heartbreaking, illuminating tale—and quite perfect. Here was the epiphany they had been awaiting to fill out the picture. However unflattering its disclosure of the immortal composer’s all too human carnal cravings, the new letter emitted the gleam of truth, as profoundly simple revelation often does. Mitch had before him now another, perhaps better reason besides Beethoven’s quarrel with the repressive Hapsburg regime to explain why the Tell manuscript had never seen the light of a Viennese dawn. “What an absolute pig he was,” said Clara, reading Mitch’s mind.

  “And so hung up on his righteousness, if we’re to believe Nina,” he added, “that he’d let a whole symphony go rather than own up to his lusty itch. Hard to believe—but here we are.”

  Clara moved the letter, which they instantly dubbed “Nina #2,” to one side. “This may help explain why the family lef
t the manuscript in the attic all those generations,” she offered—out of shame over Nina’s conduct and reluctance to muddy Beethoven’s glorious name. “I’d say they were a helluva lot more considerate of him than of her, their own flesh and blood. Imagine that poor girl, wandering homeless with a child. I hate to think what she had to do in order to survive.”

  For all its affecting nature, Mitch began almost at once to have second thoughts about the letter. It seemed to pluck at the reader’s heartstrings too adroitly, as if the writer had a literary bent well beyond any that a moderately schooled young woman of her time and place might have acquired. “And I still don’t get how all this ties in with the gravestone inscription—if Nina was the mother’s name, and Marie was her child’s—”

  “Oh, you’ll love this one, then,” said Jake, pushing forward several bound pages from the diary-album that had held the other two items. He passed it on to Clara, who began flipping through it. “Looks like a sort of scrapbook with dated entries—family news, business happenings—the weather—here’s a recipe—someone wrote in a joke. I guess any family member had the privilege of putting in whatever seemed memorable—the handwriting changes from item to item.” When she reached the long entry for 18 September 1876, she paused to digest the German text, a jumble of names and references that at first meant little to her. Mitch went back to the office kitchen to bring them coffee; by the time he returned, Clara had deciphered the diarist’s odd handwriting and allowed her to untangle the gist of the story.

  According to the unsigned diarist, writing on the day after Marie’s burial, the news of her mother’s suicide by drowning fifty-eight years earlier had released a cascade of conflicting emotions within the Hassler household over the family’s heartless expulsion of their wronged daughter. When guilt won out over good riddance, a volunteer party of Hasslers inquired at half the convents of Austria before locating Nina’s little Marie and bringing her back to the home she had never known. But her presence among the starchy Hasslers proved a ceaseless embarrassment, and the girl was never accepted as more than a marginal member of the family. When she grew up, they assigned her a niche just above housemaid, relegated to a bloodless spinsterhood. That she endured it spoke more to the narrowness of her options, according to the family diarist, than to her strength of character.

  Even her death at age sixty-one did not end Marie’s lifelong degradation. The heads of the family ruled that, being illegitimate and unbaptized, Marie was not entitled to a grave among them in hallowed ground. Others in the household, though, vexed by this ruling, argued that to heap this final indignity on her long-suffering soul might rain eternal damnation on the rest of the family—not her. “And so we settled upon an awkward compromise,” Clara quoted the unsigned diarist’s report. To atone for the family’s sins against both mother and daughter, they decided to bury Marie in the Hassler plot, but did so unobtrusively, with only a few caring relatives and kindly neighbors attending. No notice of Marie’s death was given at the cantonal registry or of her nocturnal interment to the church sexton, normally in charge of burial arrangements. The immediate neighbors, glad to have the long-running scandal laid to rest at last, averted their glance. The gravestone, in order not to attract notice, was made to appear weathered from the first, and it bore a less than strictly truthful inscription. Serving as a monument to both outcast mother and reviled daughter, it was incised with the year of the former’s birth and the latter’s death, with their names joined—Nina-Marie Hassler—as if their briefly overlapping lives represented a single continuum of heartbreak. Their composite epitaph, “Home Again,” was a gesture meant to soothe the family’s conscience and drive off its lingering ghosts.

  “The bloody hypocrites,” Clara said, closing the scrapbook with its damning contents.

  Mitch nodded, fingering the album’s tattered binding. “But at least all this seems to clear up one mystery—now we know why Winks couldn’t find any record of Nina’s death or burial.”

  “I told you there was hot stuff here,” Jake said proudly. “You missed one thing, though—there’s a family portrait in the back of the scrapbook with the other pictures. Take a gander.”

  The group picture, with its penned legend, “The Hassler Family of Zurich, 1873” on the reverse side, had been made when photography was still in its infancy and thus suffered from blurring head movements by several of the subjects during the extended exposure time that the old cameras demanded. Among those caught in sharp focus was a woman of forbidding mien in a black dress, standing on the far left of the back row. Mitch bent closer to the dusty album page on which the photo was mounted. “Well, well, well,” he said, “what have we here?” He invited Clara to join in the inspection.

  The likeness, once pointed out, seemed undeniable: the good cheek bones, the deep-set burning eyes, the broad brow, the strong jawline, the tangled gray hair of a mannish-looking harridan close to sixty. “My God,” Clara exclaimed. “Ludwig in drag!”

  “That’s what we thought, too.” Whittaker said. “Of course, there’s no caption, so we don’t know for sure if that’s Marie. But it’s certainly food for thought.”

  .

  as soon as jake and his counselor left, Mitch brought the new documents downstairs to C&W’s basement vault room, where the security guard unlocked the thick steel compartment holding the old cedar box still serving as the repository for the Tell manuscripts and related documents. Mitch carefully extracted the first Nina letter and examined it closely. To the naked eye, its handwriting looked identical to the style in the second Nina letter—an impression Clara shared a moment later. “I’ll have to fly this stuff over in person to the Veritas lab in Cambridge for their handwriting and paper specialists to screen it,” Mitch said, “and on the double.”

  Clara nodded. “And will this new batch of evidence clinch it for you, if Veritas doesn’t spot anything fishy?” Clara asked as they set out to walk home across Central Park.

  “I don’t know—maybe,” Mitch conceded. “It sure gives the story a lot more coherence—in strictly human terms. It also pretty much eliminates any pretense that Beethoven didn’t think his new symphony was up to his standards, so he was just chucking it.”

  Still, she detected hesitation in Mitch’s voice.

  “What’s the downside, then?”

  “Well, don’t you think it’s more than a little funny how this new corroborative information surfaces just now—in the nick of time and right after I let it be known to everyone involved with the Tell that I still wasn’t entirely happy with the Nina story? It’s as if there’s a workshop of Alpine elves turning out these greatly illuminating documents on demand.”

  “Aren’t you overdoing it, hon? Jake told you what happened—it’s a simple explanation.”

  “Maybe too simple.”

  He flew to England the following night and stayed in London to await the findings of the Veritas forensics team’s microscopic examination of Nina #2 and its accompanying items. Meanwhile, Johnny Winks and his shadowy corps were trying to locate official records to corroborate either the dispatch or the receipt of Nina’s death notice that Jake had—almost magically—just produced. Since his in-laws were traveling in the Far East, Mitch took a junior suite at a small hotel in Mayfair and tried to busy himself. Other than a dutiful appearance at Cubbage & Wakeham’s Portland Road offices near Regent’s Park and an interminable lunch with Sedge Wakeham at his fusty Berkeley Square club, he had time on his hands and Clara on his mind. London in midwinter without her companionship seemed especially dreary.

  The skies cleared on Friday morning, inviting him to kill a few hours circumnavigating Hyde Park and then reading the newspapers on a bench beside the Serpentine. While seated there, he noticed a fellow two benches away in a black pea coat and peaked Greek sailor’s cap, smoking a pipe and casting an occasional glance Mitch’s way. Half an hour later, resuming his walk and pausing to read a ground plaque explaining tha
t the adjacent forsythia beds were named in honor of the park’s onetime superintendent John Forsyth, Mitch spotted the same man, still puffing on his pipe, among a group of passersby. And then again several hundred feet behind him, matching his leisurely pace down Embassy Row at the western end of Kensington Gardens. It could not be a coincidence.

  Mitch quickened his stride heading back to Mayfair, but after being trailed for another ten or so minutes, he glanced back to find that his pursuer had quit the nerve-racking contest. Relieved, he hurried from the park, had a ham roll and a stout at a Knightsbridge pub, and pondered who had him under surveillance and why. An hour later, on entering his hotel lobby, he had his answer. Two plainclothesmen from HRH’s constabulary flashed their credentials and invited him to their waiting car for a trip to New Scotland Yard. “Just routine,” Mitch was assured.

  “It’s not part of my routine,” he objected at first. “What’s this about?”

  “They’ll explain at the Yard, Mr. Emery,” said the taller of his two attendants.

  Belted into the backseat of the unmarked police car next to the shorter but bulkier of his escorts, who was redolent of cigarette smoke, Mitch felt abstracted from the reality of his capture, almost as if it were a theatrical happening staged for his amusement to break the boredom of his stay.

  “Sure you have the right Mr. Emery?” he asked. “It’s a common enough name. And I’m not in town to bomb Parliament.”

  Levity was misplaced with these spear-carriers. “We know who you are,” the driver said. That was the end of the small talk.

  At the Yard, a modern monolith, he was bustled through the lobby and up the elevator to the fifth floor, then down a long, well-lit corridor to a small, windowless room bare except for a table and half a dozen scattered chairs. At one end of the table sat a round metal tray with a full water pitcher and three glasses; at the opposite end was a tape recorder. There was nothing on the gray walls, or any torture devices visible, although, Mitch noted, it seemed the perfect—and no doubt soundproof—setting for a third-degree grilling. “Someone will be along shortly,” the taller of his arresting officers said. Then they were gone, and he was left adrift in anxious indignation. So much for British civility.