“Very good, father,” Sister Maria said a bit uneasily, hesitant to reveal that she had opened it, found inside only the single letter from Cardinal Rudolph, and placed it at the front of the fourth box. “Whatever was in it must have been transferred somewhere. You might tell the professor—he’s due in shortly. I have other chores just now.”
Dr. Riker did not mind learning that there was no longer a fifth box for him to examine. Nor did he wonder, if it was empty, why it had been shelved with the other four and saved until being disposed of overnight. Instead he opened the fourth box, paused while trying to remember precisely where he had left off the day before, then remembered he had covered all but the back quarter or so of its contents. That remnant took him scarcely an hour to complete and yielded nothing of interest. He replaced the cover on the box, advised Father Rafael that he was finished, thanked him and his staff for their courtesy, and walked briskly to the railroad station. It had not been a fruitful visit.
The music professor made excellent train connections and arrived at home one full day ahead of schedule, surprising his wife and their next-door neighbor, a onetime member of the Austrian Olympic ski team, who were in bed together. Speechless, he left them there without rebuke and repaired to the nearest rathskeller for a stein of beer. And then another.
.
six weeks later in new york, Stanley Burke, longtime employee in charge of security and storage services at Cubbage & Wakeham, was clearing out abandoned items from the steel-encased bins in the auction house’s vault, known as the Safe Room—a chore he and his assistant Guido undertook every two or three years. Three of the bins, they were aware, held items left over from the cancelled auction of the William Tell Symphony. One bin contained the transcript that had been made of the sketchbooks, belonging to Jake Hassler, for inspection by the panel of Beethoven experts during the authentication process and for would-be bidders at the auction; the other two retained photocopies of the transcript and the sketchbook manuscripts—the original of the latter having been returned to its New Jersey owner when the auction was called off.
Burke phoned upstairs to Harry Cubbage and asked the co-proprietor if there was some reason to retain the Tell materials. Cubbage told him he couldn’t think of any but to wait until he consulted his partner in London. The next morning he reached Mitchell Emery, who professed no emotional attachment to the documents—quite the opposite—and also doubted that his wife, then teaching at the Royal Academy of Music (thanks in large part to her brilliant doctoral dissertation on Franz Schubert), would have any interest in holding onto the Tell papers for what he laughingly called “sentimental reasons.” Mitch suggested, though, that Harry put in a call to Macrae Quarles down in Philadelphia to see if the noted musicologist, who had presided over the panel of scholars invited to pass judgment on the authenticity of the “dramatic symphony” attributed to Beethoven, cared to store the transcript and photocopies of the sketchbooks in the reference library at the Curtis Institute, over which he presided.
Mac Quarles, as it happened, was just then delivering a series of three guest lectures at the Yale School of Music and did not catch up with Harry’s message until two weeks later. “Might just be something worth puttin’ in mothballs—you never know,” Mac told him. “Send it all down here—and you want to get a trackin’ number from the delivery people. My best to all.”
Harry, belatedly attending to Stan Burke’s inquiry, instructed him to pack up the Tell material and ship it off to Mac’s office. A moment later, Stan called him back to advise, a bit hesitantly, that his assistant Guido had assumed—having heard no more about the matter—that the abandoned material was no longer of interest to anyone and had fed it to the office shredder.
Author’s Note
No composer has been researched and written about as extensively as Ludwig van Beethoven. All aspects of his life touched upon here, including his whereabouts, activities, acquaintances, health, finances, social habits and attitudes, artistry, and writing, are well established historically—except those dealing with the William Tell Symphony, which are revealed on the preceding pages for the first time. Readers incapable of suspending their disbelief are reassured that, in particular, the maestro’s meeting and exchange with Rossini, his relationship with Archduke (later Cardinal) Rudolph, his 1814 correspondence, and his invitation to compose incidental music for a Viennese production of Friedrich Schiller’s play, Wilhelm Tell, in 1807 are fully documented.
Beethoven's Tenth Page 53
