Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

I’m afraid I’m engaged for the rest of the day,” Hilde said cordially when Clara phoned to request an appointment within the hour. “But I’d love a visit with you and Mitchell—perhaps later in the week?”

  “I’m here alone,” Clara said, “and rather badly pressed for time, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Oh, I see.” A moment’s strained silence. “Well, perhaps on your next visit, then?”

  “I hate to inconvenience you, Hilde,” said Clara, “but it’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “I’m sorry, Clara, am I not making myself clear?” Hilde asked. “I have other commitments—all day.”

  Aching from Mitch’s indelicate seizure and abrupt transfer to the Swiss authorities, Clara was anxious but determined to step in as his understudy and deal with Hilde Reinsdorf—sternly. The woman had betrayed Clara’s trust and now had to be held to account. “You can see me now, Hilde, or I can come with the polizei. Which do you prefer?”

  A longer silence ensued. “I see,” Hilde said at last in a now brittle voice. “I…I’ll rearrange my appointments, then, if that would suit you.”

  Scherzo, perhaps sixth-sensing the dread behind his mistress’s fretful mood, was even throatier in his unwelcome than on Clara’s prior arrival at the Reinsdorf threshold. Hilde had to use visible force to keep the agitated bulldog from catapulting himself at the visitor. “He’s very irritable today,” she apologized. “That was to be one of my engagements just now—at the veterinarian’s. I think Scherzie has an infected tooth—probably because I’m spoiling the poor old fellow with too many sweets.”

  As soon as they were seated, Clara explained without elaborating that Mitch had been unexpectedly detained, “so he asked me to meet with you again—in the hope that you’ll be more forthcoming this time.”

  Hilde looked perplexed.

  “I don’t think I’m following you, dear. What is it that—”

  “For your own sake,” Clara broke in, “let me suggest that you be as candid as you know how. If you are, Mitchell will do his best to prevail upon the principals at his firm not to go to your law-enforcement officials.”

  “Oh, my,” Hilde said coyly. “What horrid thing is it I’ve done?”

  “This won’t be any easier for me than for you,” Clara said, then reached into her canvas bag, drew out the compromising materials Mitch had prepared for their visit, spread them over the coffee table beside her, and clicked on the pocket tape player.

  Hilde appeared startled at the sound of her own voice, imploring Jake Hassler to acknowledge his agreement with her husband regarding the Tell manuscript. Scherzie barked sharply as Hilde’s eyes reflected what her discerning intellect now fully grasped.

  “Tapping someone’s phone is quite a serious crime here, you know,” she said bitterly after the tape ended, trying to downplay the more serious transgression disclosed by her exchange with Jake. “We don’t have the SS here anymore, you know.”

  “You’re free, of course, to notify the authorities,” Clara chided her back, “but I’m confident they’ll be more interested in learning the truth about Dr. Reinsdorf’s scandalous behavior in the discovery and disposition of the William Tell Symphony.”

  Hilde, studying the worn Persian carpet at her feet while collecting her wits, leaned down to stroke Scherzo, who had positioned himself at the side of her chair. She began fussing with one of his crumpled ears, as if to summon the departed spirit of the man who had been master to them both. With her free hand she picked up the forensics report about the paper on which her edelweiss painting had been rendered, soon grasped its finding, and then moved on to Mitch’s write-up of his recent extended conversation with the late Margot Lenz. The disclosures in the final document seemed to drain Hilde of all pretense and fully alert her to the peril she was now facing.

  “I suppose,” she said haltingly, “all of this—all of these things—they leave you thinking the very worst of Emil and me—”

  “Shall we just say that they’re highly suggestive of unacceptable behavior by people who surely should have known better?”

  “Oh, yes—yes, I suppose. I can see that.” Her posture stiffened. She cast aside Mitch’s account of his interview with Margot. “And you no doubt infer from Mrs. Lenz’s disclosures that the Tell manuscript itself—not only the documents found with it in Zurich—is an invention, and that Emil may have been its perpetrator, and, because of the paper I used for the edelweiss painting, that I was his forger-accomplice. Is that it?”

  “Mrs. Lenz never told Mitchell she had any reason to doubt the authenticity of the symphony, based on what Mr. Utley told her about it,” Clara said. “But Dr. Reinsdorf’s role as the composer—and your own connivance at his request—both seem highly plausible—and that Mrs. Lenz and her family were being used to promote your grand deception.”

  Hilde managed a thin smile that soon faded.

  “I understand, of course, how you might reach such a conclusion—Emil recognized that unfortunate possibility from the beginning. But he felt, under the circumstances, there was no alternative—which was not true, of course. He might instead have been totally forthright when the manuscript came into his possession so providentially, as Felix explained to Mrs. Lenz.”

  The comment took Clara by surprise. “Forthright in what way?”

  “By coming forward with the manuscript immediately after purchasing it and submitting it to a jury of his scholarly peers. But he didn’t believe he had any peers in academia or anywhere else on the subject of Beethoven, so he had no desire to risk his judgment that the Tell manuscript was genuinely Beethoven’s work. Instead, he chose to make that judgment by himself and to arrange all the circumstances of its restoration and discovery—he wanted to be the impresario of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony without letting the world in on the secret—and, incidentally, to make some money for us in the bargain. Lord knows, his faculty salary and the income from his various writings hardly left us well off. He thought he deserved some sizable material reward for all his labors over the years.”

  Clara sat back in her chair, now thoroughly baffled. “Are you saying that Dr. Reinsdorf took this purported Beethoven manuscript that was dropped into his lap by fate, so to speak, and decided all by himself that it sufficiently resembled the maestro’s style—”

  “It didn’t drop into his lap at all,” Hilde cut in. “It was sold to him for a considerable sum—well, for us it was a good deal of money—too much, in my judgment.”

  “All right, but it sounds as if, after convincing himself the manuscript was actually composed by Beethoven—or might well have been—that your husband then undertook a series of carefully calculated measures, including revisions of the text, to remove as much doubt as possible about Beethoven’s being the composer, so that it would be more readily accepted as—”

  Hilde’s eyes narrowed to slits of resentment.

  “You think that Emil distorted the manuscript—took liberties he had no right to—that the symphony is—what—false Beethoven?”

  Clara couldn’t tell if the woman was made of pure brass or desperately putting up a brave front. Or perhaps her refusal to surrender the truth was less stubbornness than failure to recognize the depth of the obsession that had seized her husband. “Is it?” she asked Hilde.

  “Certainly not,” the widow replied without hesitation. “The Tell symphony materialized—it happened just as Mrs. Lenz told your husband, as described in this report on their recent meeting. Emil’s judgment may be called into question, but nothing either of us did was meant to be other than completely honorable—and a service to humanity, not to mention the maestro.”

  “In that case,” Clara said, “you’d better enlighten me—fully.”

  “Yes—I can see that.” Hilde raked a hand through her tightly coiffed iron-gray hair. Lost for a moment considering where to begin, she patted Scherzo’s slowly heaving flanks. “The fullest expla
nation, I think, stems from Emil’s deep conflict over having abandoned his native land for another one that he felt never duly regarded him.” Once underway, her story flowed in a rapid stream.

  Switzerland had always been too small a vessel to contain Emil Reinsdorf’s aspirations. The lad from Lucerne quickly excelled at the Zurich Conservatory and moved on to Vienna’s more demanding stage. But the Austrians and the Swiss were never fond of one another, and Emil, like Beethoven, always felt himself to be an auslander among the Viennese. After he began to publish and moved on to Berlin as a wunderkind musicologist, Hilde recounted, he found that his Swiss origin was often disparaged behind his back and his countrymen demeaned as soulless mercenaries bereft of national pride or any native aesthetic worthy of the name. In quest of laurels, Emil took on the coloration of his Aryan colleagues, choosing as his foreign-born role model Herbert von Karajan, who had overcome the disadvantages of Greco-Macedonian ancestry to bestride the German music world as director/conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Karajan had become a card-carrying Nazi in the Hitler era and afterward exhibited little more than lip-service remorse. For his own ascent, Emil Reinsdorf chose to become an adopted citizen of Germany and a vehement champion of its kultur.

  Even after he had attained preeminence as a scholar, Hilde recalled, “Emil was never good enough—or German enough—to suit them.” He longed for the enhanced dignity, power, and income bestowed by the title of Herr Direktor of the National Institute of Music and twice presented himself as a candidate for the position, only to be twice rejected. “It infuriated Emil—he became a different person,” his widow lamented, with his crowning ambition thwarted.

  He had been in a deep funk for the better part of a year when Tell happened. “It was as if Emil had been put on earth to be there that night,” Hilde told Clara, “when this individual appeared at our door—without an appointment, mind you—and presented himself and his story about the Beethoven manuscript, which struck both of us on first hearing as wholly fanciful.”

  Their visitor, a lawyer named Osterweil—“if that was his true name”—was not at liberty, he said, to identify his client. Nor did he have documentation to support his anecdotal account of how the two sketchbooks had long been stored and later stolen from the ecclesiastical library at Olmütz in Moravia, where Cardinal (formerly Archduke) Rudolph had at one time presided, and sold and resold in the black market during the war-torn Third Reich on the strength of the Beethoven name on the title page. Although supremely skeptical of this hearsay testimony, Emil was of course aware of the maestro’s affinity for the works of Friedrich Schiller, so it was by no means inconceivable to him that Beethoven had embarked on such a Tell project in operatic form, grew frustrated, transformed it into an experimental symphonic work with vocal sections, and then set it aside for some unknown reason. Emil also knew that as Beethoven’s student, friend, protector, and chief patron, Archduke Rudolph had held some of the maestro’s manuscripts for safekeeping at the Schönbrun Palace in Vienna and might well have brought them to Olmütz with him when he became a prince of the Roman Church.

  Hilde went on: “And so Dr. Reinsdorf asked the lawyer if he could examine the sketchbooks for several days before deciding whether to make a purchase offer—and the gentleman was more than happy to oblige.” Emil was disheartened by what he found. The manuscript had been badly fingered over by careless hands for generations. The cover of the old sketchbook was taped together, and many of the sheets had come undone so that the pagination was jumbled. And many pages were a mess, some of them torn, wrinkled, or flaking, some smudged or blurred as if rained upon or otherwise assaulted by liquids, with wine stains and cigarette burns at irregular intervals.

  “It had been abused and neglected,” Hilde related, “to the point that it brought tears to Emil’s eyes.”

  Nevertheless, the longer he pored over the manuscript, the more Emil was struck by how closely its contents resembled Beethoven’s musical handwriting—the stemless notes, the staves without clefs, the curious symbols, all the smudges and drips, the urgent application of pen to paper.

  “Anyone else would have given up on it after a single day,” Hilde said with muted pride, “but Emil was not like anyone else.” By the second day, he had begun to make some sense out of the pagination. By the third day, he grasped that the work had been scored well into the second movement but thereafter it was impossible to decipher in its current form; it needed to be clean-copied, with what were evidently alternate versions of some passages inserted where they belonged. When Osterweil phoned him for a decision, Emil asked for and was given a few more days to complete his assessment. “I couldn’t say a word to him throughout that week—he survived on tea, crackers, nibbles of cheese, and his hateful Marlboros.”

  What kept him at it so feverishly, Hilde said, was not merely the miracle that he had happened on a tenth symphony by his venerated maestro but that the work was a celebration of Swiss gallantry and the love of liberty and independence by Emil’s native countrymen. “It was as if his whole life had suddenly come together. Preserving the symphony was his way, I think, of apologizing to the land of his birth for turning his back on it in order to advance his career—and like Faust’s bargain with the devil, it failed in the end.” Hilde’s eyes were brimming now.

  On the seventh day, Emil came out of his study and sat beside Hilde to review the matter.

  “He said to me, ‘Even if I were convinced of it—and I am not yet and may never be—who else will believe this story of a whole Beethoven symphony being stolen and dragged through the mud for so many years? Look at this heap of pages!’” For the unsightly pile ever to be accepted and gain respectability, he said, it would have to withstand intensive scrutiny by elite scholars who had the time and funding to hover over it endlessly—a process that could go on for decades, by which time Emil would long be in his grave. He could not bear to inflict that further ordeal on the fragile Tell manuscript, so, never short on hubris, Emil wanted to determine its fate himself. Salvaging the symphony would be his ultimate achievement, the one that would enshrine his name for the ages, forever linked to his exalted maestro’s.

  But even if he could manage to buy the manuscript for a modest price, Emil knew the undertaking could prove an egregious folly. To bring the Tell to life would require a brutal three-step regimen, but one that Emil Reinsdorf was uniquely qualified to attempt. “We’ll need to make the manuscript look presentable,” he told Hilde. It would have to be cleaned up and made legible enough, even if in Beethoven’s customarily messy way, for others to understand it and be able to complete the partial scoring. In other words, they needed to fabricate two new but old-looking sketchbooks to appear as if the original manuscript had been lovingly preserved for all those years. Otherwise, Emil reasoned, even if he were to devote all the time required to puzzle the thing out, transcribe it in his own hand, and then bring it forward for public scrutiny while insisting it was a faithful rendering of Beethoven’s intentions, he would become a laughingstock—“no reputable scholar would trust it,” Emil said.

  And that was only the beginning of the challenge. For after having secretly brought the manuscript to life, Emil would then have to invent a plausible scenario to explain the work’s creation, abandonment, and rediscovery and produce documents to support the whole story. Finally, a mechanism would have to be found so that Emil and Hilde could realize some material benefits from the ultimate disposition of the work. A greatly devoted husband, Emil fretted because he might leave Hilde little better off than a pauper; the pensions the Berlin Conservatory provided its faculty widows were far from generous. Hilde told him she could survive well enough on whatever was available—there was no need for him to commit a colossal forgery on her account.

  “But it will not be a forgery!” Emil shouted at her. There would be nothing false about it. She should think of the newly created sketchbooks as a meticulous restoration, if the term suited her better. The story t
hey would have to spin about the symphony’s unknown history would unavoidably be an invention, but only incidental to the thing itself, which he believed—with conviction deepening by the day—to be completely genuine.

  “And how will you ever find someone trustworthy enough to help you execute this ‘meticulous restoration’ of yours?” Hilde asked him.

  “But I already have the perfect collaborator, mein schatz,” he replied, pressing her hand.

  She feared that Emil might be turning senile, Hilde confessed to Clara. The whole venture seemed to her absurdly risky, costly, and time-consuming. “But he had made his mind up.”

  It took Emil more than a year to understand, transcribe, and, in a few places where the manuscript was stained or otherwise illegible, fill in the small holes. By the second year of his labors, Emil felt that he needed professional feedback of a sort Hilde could not offer, and he turned to his nephew in Zurich—“with misgivings on my part that I fully expressed,” she told Clara. But Emil, while he regarded Felix as a lazy sensualist, did not doubt his musical aptitude and discerning ear. He was, after all, an experienced violinist with a respectable philharmonic, who he felt, as his only surviving family member, could be counted upon for discretion. Still, mindful of Hilde’s concern, Emil hit upon a temporary subterfuge; he pretended to Felix that the Tell was his own work, his first serious attempt at composing, and that it seemed fitting for him to render it as a dual tribute—to his greatly beloved maestro, written in a manner intended to evoke with reverence Beethoven’s “heroic style,” and to his native Switzerland, Felix’s homeland, too.

  Felix swallowed the story enthusiastically and greatly encouraged his uncle. “I think he was grateful for being treated by Emil with respect, for a change,” Hilde reflected. With rising confidence, Emil took the further step, on his next semiannual visit to Zurich, of sharing his venture with his old friend, Richard Grieder, whose perspective as a conductor, even a lackluster one, would be of value. Grieder, too, was taken in by Emil’s story of the work as a twin tribute—charmed by it, even—and said after examining the first movement that he hoped someday Reinsdorf’s Beethovenesque William Tell Symphony might be premiered by the Swiss Philharmonic.