The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  It was powerful, inspired work. Now joyous. Now chancy and tense. Mortifying, heartbreaking. Finally, uplifting and confounding.

  Mandelbaum couldn’t arrive fast enough. He might, she suspected, be able to identify the composer instantly. Might even recognize it as a work already known to the rarefied world of specialists. He was, after all, something of a walking, talking New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a living, breathing Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Sure, his identification might come as an anticlimax, even a letdown, her mentor wiping away the great mystery with a mortal name. But he would no doubt burst her bubble with a mentor’s dose of charity.

  Maybe not, though. Maybe the manuscript she had come to think of as the Prague Sonata would prove to be a significant musical discovery. Either way, she decided, she would be able to travel back to Queens with Mandelbaum’s opinion in place and inform her benefactor what she’d been protecting all these decades.

  THE PALI WORD FOR unconditional loving-kindness is pronounced meta, but is spelled metta. The word maitri is its Sanskrit equivalent. Meta, whose parents had been young sixties idealists, named their only child with this high in mind. From the Greek μϵτά, her name also means with, or after, or beyond, something Meta had found curious when she looked it up, since how could a single word mean both with and beyond at the same time? In English usage, meta is a prefix signifying a concept that is an abstraction of another concept. In epistemology the prefix gets a little more complicated. Here it modifies words in such a way that they become about what they are about. Language as a mirror in which the letters are reflected not backward, but inside out. Metacognition, for instance, is thinking about thinking.

  In the days since the score had come into her hands, Meta had been trying to think about how she was thinking, but with mixed results. She felt deep loving-kindness toward Jonathan, and yet it seemed to her that something she had no words for was amiss. Curiously both with and beyond him, she had to wonder, as well, if her remoteness, an inward-gazing reverie, was because of her birthday. The Big Three Oh-oh she’d called it, when planning her party. She, who always loved holding soirées and making elaborate dinners for friends, had even wondered out loud whether thirty wasn’t too old for a birthday celebration.

  “Maybe I’m a little long in the tooth for tooth fairies anymore,” she had told Jonathan, mixing vanilla into her cupcake batter the night before the bash.

  And hadn’t Jonathan himself been inordinately wrapped up in this trial? It had been pretty heady for him to see his picture in the newspapers, walking into and out of the columned courthouse downtown. Granted, his face was not at the center of these photos, any more than he himself was at the center of the case. But his job certainly was at the center of his life these days, much as the manuscript was at the center of hers. They were just going through a phase, she told herself, not altogether convinced.

  The morning of Mandelbaum’s trip into New York to see her, Meta got up with Jonathan and made him breakfast.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked, leaning against the wall of the galley kitchen with a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet from the shower.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a ruling today on your motion to dismiss?”

  He clearly hadn’t realized she’d been tracking the case that closely. “So we’re hoping.”

  “Then you need to go into battle with a decent meal under your belt, right?”

  “I appreciate it,” he said, waiting for her to tell him the real reason she was up early.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Pouring two cups of coffee, she continued, “I also wanted to show you something before you took off.”

  Jonathan dressed, and while they ate Meta finally filled him in about the manuscript, quickly sketching its background. Wrapped up as he was, she knew he wouldn’t be any more able to listen to her next week or the week thereafter. May as well be now.

  He leafed through a few pages while at the same time guiltily glancing at his wristwatch. “I was wondering what had you so distracted,” he said with a relieved smile.

  “More possessed than distracted. This manuscript and music are unlike anything I’ve ever encountered,” Meta said, an anxious edge in her voice. “It may sound a little nuts but this feels like destiny that it’s come into my hands.”

  “Extreme, maybe. Not nuts. I remember when I turned thirty I felt discombobulated for a while.”

  She shook her head. Discombobulated was not how she felt. The opposite. Very focused, very much alive.

  “I have zero knowledge about these things, but it looks authentic.”

  “Oh, it’s authentic all right. But authentically what and by whom I don’t know.”

  “I want to hear more but I’ve got to get to work,” he said, then noticed the letter tucked into the back of the sheaf. “What’s this?”

  “A note from Irena. She wrote that the manuscript is temporarily mine until I find Otylie Bartošová, the original owner, and give it back to her.”

  “Temporarily yours?” he asked. “So it’s not clear who exactly owns this thing? You want me to have a look at the note, see if it’s legally binding? Check on proprietary issues?”

  The questions made her cringe. She couldn’t have predicted his precise words, but they were just as she had feared. “Proprietary issues? That’s not necessary, Jonathan. It’s music. The world owns it.”

  He took one last sip of coffee, straightened his tie. “I can’t wait to hear you play it, but I’ve got to run. If you want, I’ll talk to one of our deeds and rights people. Just let me know.” He kissed her goodbye and left.

  Meta carefully rewrapped the score in tissue paper that was left over from one of her birthday presents and slipped it back into its satchel, willing herself not to be angry. Law was Jonathan’s life, as music was hers. It was only natural he would see the manuscript through that lens.

  The balance of the morning she spent in seesawing emotions. Would Mandelbaum’s reaction be as uninterested as Jonathan’s? Had she simply been swept away by Irena’s story and the beauty of the work? Was it no more than a curiosity, a secondary scrap floating along on the clogged river of human ideas already overflowing with culture’s castoffs? She couldn’t help but feel a tinge of shame about the melodramatic thoughts chasing around in her head.

  Paul Mandelbaum was on time, as always. Over the intercom she told him to come upstairs. While he climbed the four flights, she found herself breathing quickly. She hadn’t felt this nervous since her first piano competition.

  They embraced warmly at the door and Mandelbaum kissed her on both cheeks. It was a habit from his years in Paris, Vienna, and Prague, where, as a young scholar with a burgeoning knowledge of music history, he had produced a well-received book and a cluster of articles before he reached Meta’s current age. His hair, once black as a clarinet, was now a silver mane, his face narrow as the Flatiron Building and just as craggy. As always, no matter what the weather, he was dressed in an oversize black cable-knit pullover and loose-fitting black corduroys. Had he been made to stand behind a Japanese screen and read a few names and numbers out of the phone book, anyone listening would have guessed his age to be as many as three decades younger than his seventy-one years.

  “I figured it out on the train,” he said. “You discovered that Mahler did in fact finish his Tenth Symphony and you’ve got the missing manuscript to prove it.”

  Crazy, she thought. Wrong era, right idea. Startled but smiling, she grabbed his hand and led him into the front room.

  There, alone on her desk, lay the manuscript. She had decided sometime in the middle of her latest sleepless night that the best way to introduce it to Mandelbaum was without offering a single cue beyond simply placing him in its presence. He was the one who had taught her that the musical term clef derives from clavis, the Latin term for key or clue. Let it speak for itself, be its own clue.

  Speak it did. So powerfully that it reduced him to a glance at the young w
oman who lingered at his side, more high-strung than he had ever seen her, then a look back at the page before him.

  “What museum did you steal this from?” he asked, putting on glasses—a prescription magnification that he used specifically for close scrutiny of similar musical artifacts—and examining it more closely.

  “Please.”

  He sat at her desk and journeyed through the manuscript from its first note to its last with a deft, delicate respect for the music he read. From the opening measures of the work he perfectly understood what his former student and amanuensis was so excited about. Every so often he hummed involuntarily, lightly groaned, crabbed his head to left or right. She saw his right heel lift rhythmically and his knee nudge up and down until he reached the abyss in the score, at which time he went as still as a seated statue. Reading over his shoulder, Meta noted that he took about as long to go through the music as she did. Though she was the rare one who possessed an all but perfect inner ear, could literally hear music right off the score—notational audiation was Mandelbaum’s technical term for it—he and she were always strangely in sync.

  When he reached the end, he set the pages back down exactly where they had been. He folded his hands, said nothing. Sat for a time thinking. Meta stood next to him, not daring to move, listening to a baleful distant siren somewhere out there in the city.

  “All right,” Mandelbaum said finally. Removing his glasses, he pushed the chair away from the table before standing with the kind of rich slowness that follows a lavish holiday meal. “In all seriousness. At the end of what rainbow, pray tell, did you find this marvel?”

  For the second time that day, Meta recounted her stunning, brief encounter with Irena Svobodová Dorfman. “Do you recognize the hand?”

  “I don’t make any immediate connection with the bigger players, but anyway I’m pretty sure this is a copyist’s script. Not the most polished or professional I’ve ever seen. Legible, relatively neat, meant for performance reading.”

  “That’s what I thought too. None of the hurried notations that usually characterize a composition score. What about the music itself? Ready for me to play it?”

  “More than ready,” he said. “Please.”

  As Meta performed the movement once, then a second time, Mandelbaum strayed over to a window that faced buildings across the street. Hard white sunlight poured into the room.

  When she finished, Meta asked, “Do you recognize it?”

  Absentmindedly, he traced with his forefinger on the window-pane the zigzag of one of the adjacent fire escapes. “Off the top of my head, no. A-flat major modulating to C minor doesn’t tell me much, but it seems to be the slow movement, or slow movement substitute, of the sonata. Could be a middle movement if it’s a three-part sonata.”

  “That corroborates what Irena remembered. Three movements, not four.”

  “All right, good. I’d venture to agree with you that it’s late eighteenth century.”

  “Are you hearing a touch of Haydn?”

  Mandelbaum turned away from the window, walked back to the piano. “Maybe, the second movement of his E-flat Major, come to think of it—that abrupt transition, the darkness of the central section. But Haydn’s too polite for a lot of this. And that flurry of demisemiquavers, if you’ll pardon my Latin—not that Haydn didn’t use them, just that there’s a bit of the barbaric yawp going on through a few of those initial measures. Could you run through those measures again where the transition happens?”

  She did, and seeing that Mandelbaum was searching for a response, she asked, “What about Dussek?”

  “Jan Ladislav Dussek. That’s a plausible idea,” he said, brightening. “For one, like your benefactor, he’s Czech. Plus, he did favor juxtaposing passages of lyricism with sudden shifts toward the dramatic. There’s definitely some Romanticism here, nothing genteel or galant, more in the Sturm und Drang spirit, I’d say. Spohr’s another possibility from the era, but I think of him more in terms of violin than piano. Probably not Wölfl, though I couldn’t tell you why off the top of my head. Another Czech possibility could be Beethoven’s friend Anton Reicha, but I think there’s something stirring in the depths of this piece that’s more original than anything Reicha wrote.”

  “You mention Sturm und Drang. What about C. P. E. Bach?”

  Mandelbaum crossed his arms as he exhaled, “C. P. E. Isn’t that a tantalizing idea.” Meta knew that Johann Sebastian Bach’s second son was, in the eighteenth century, a far more famous and influential composer than his father, whom he affectionately referred to as “the old wig.” Closely studied by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, among others, his treatise Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen—Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments—was widely considered the foundation of modern keyboard technique, and he was an ardent pioneer in the development of the classical sonata. Mozart himself said of Emanuel Bach: He is the father and we are the children.

  “No question his Empfindsamkeit style is here in spades,” her mentor continued. “There’s a rhetorical quality to it—”

  “‘Redendes Prinzip.’”

  “Very good, Meta.” Glancing at her, he hoped his comment didn’t sound too avuncular. “But, yes. Passionate, agitated, dramatic.”

  “You might even say impetuous, what with that abrupt shift.”

  Squinting, her mentor concluded, “Problem is, I kind of feel this is later than C. P. E. Bach, probably just before or at the turn of the century, I’m guessing.”

  “Don’t forget that he published that big collection of sonatas and other keyboard works during the 1780s, a lot of it pretty experimental for the day.”

  It never failed to impress him how far Meta had come after her crash and burn as a concert pianist hopeful. Not that many manage to make the crossover from musician to musicologist, as the disciplines are more different than one might imagine. She had a way to go, but she was nothing if not persistent.

  “Right when Mozart was flying high and Beethoven was just getting started.”

  “What about Beethoven?” Meta said, the idea coming out of her mouth before she’d given it much forethought.

  “Beethoven?”

  “More Bonn than early-Vienna Beethoven. Plus, at the same time, don’t you hear some of Opus 81a here, that first passage? The adagio allegro’s reversed to allegro adagio—”

  “I’m sorry, but that sonata is much later than this, whatever it is.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just saying it may possibly prefigure 81a. It’s not like he wasn’t constantly revisiting and reshaping early ideas.”

  “Sorry again, Meta, but Beethoven’s Vienna stuff from the Opus 2 Sonata on is all well documented.”

  “Another WoO, maybe?”

  Beethoven had written three sonatas that preceded the first of his famous others, works he hadn’t deemed worthy of assigning opus numbers. Meta offered the idea, though she knew it was impossible she had stumbled on another Beethoven Werke ohne Opuszahl in deepest, darkest Queens.

  “Oh, come on,” Mandelbaum said.

  Undeterred, she took one last shot.

  “Listen. It’s probably too sophisticated for the early teen Beethoven but it has some of his personality, some of that unpredictability, like a wildfire in a crosswind. But I suppose this might be a little too revolutionary even for the teenage Ludwig.”

  “We agree.” His mood grew more serious now. “People don’t realize just how rough, how derivative some of his early stuff can be. Nobody would guess some of that work was by the genius who’d eventually write the Ninth Symphony or those final string quartets. I don’t know, Meta. I do think I recognize similarities to C. P. E. Bach. Stray hints of Mozart and Haydn. Steibelt, Weber. Dussek, as you said. But bottom line? Have I ever heard it before? No way. I’m no final authority, at least not without doing some serious research, but I’d bet you a boatload of bullion this piece is not in the literature. The question is, dear girl, what are you going to do about it?”

&
nbsp; Gillian’s question. Buying a moment to collect her thoughts, she said, “This snippet from the next movement’s really intriguing too.”

  After looking at the orphaned measures again, Mandelbaum nodded and said, “To my mind it’s clearly the beginning of a rondo, and as such might well be the opening measures of a finale. But there’s just not quite enough of it here to make any definitive pronouncements. Still, that doesn’t answer my question.”

  Her eyes darted around her apartment. They rested fleetingly on the portrait on the wall she had made of her mother, an abstract in gouache done when she was much younger and fancied the idea she might become a painter rather than stick with this grand obsession about music. “I’m going to try to find the other movements. I’m going to do what that poor woman, both those women who lost their husbands, their whole existence in Prague, what they hoped somebody would do one day. Otylie Bartošová broke it up to save it.”

  “And you think it’s your job to unbreak it to save it again.”

  “Isn’t that what you’d do if you were in my shoes?”

  “I’m not, though. May I?” he asked, carefully lifting the manuscript from the piano stand and turning its pages slowly, silently.

  “Look,” Meta said quietly. “We can go round and round the mulberry bush chasing attributions, but finding the other movements will not only help with that, it’ll right a wrong.”

  “Admirably idealistic, my dear.”

  “It’s come into my life for a reason and I think I have to honor that.”

  Mandelbaum couldn’t help smiling, though he didn’t glance away from the score. “I never knew you to be religious.”

  “It’s not about religion. It’s about devotion and responsibility.”

  “Well,” he said, now turning to look her in the eye. “That’s the very definition of religion, isn’t it?”

  She knew him far too well to take his proffered bait. Instead, without blinking or avoiding his kindly stare, she asked, “Will you help me?”