The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  When she left the dark, smoky tavern to reemerge into the twisting and sometimes precipitous streets, she felt flush with freedom. The breeze was warming and fresh. The savory smell of a bakery drew her inside to buy a cheese sandwich, hermelín with tomato, on a roll still warm from the oven. As she ate, she wandered through alleys, filled with resolve about her purpose here. How impossible it seemed, as she walked the path along the top of Petřín Hill overlooking Prague, that such a magical, benign, and beautiful city should ever have experienced the repeated griefs of war, occupation, and oppression.

  That evening, footsore in her tight, tidy room, having eaten dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Old Town after making her way all afternoon across bridges and through squares, Meta played the sonata movement slowly in her head. The excitement of the day had faded now, replaced by weariness and a germ of fear that unsettled her. What she feared hadn’t gathered itself into any comprehensible image or idea. She wasn’t afraid of failure. She wasn’t frightened of being alone in this foreign place. What she felt was that simplest of fears. Not knowing what lay ahead on the other side of night.

  PROFESSOR KOHOUT TAUGHT IN THE DEPARTMENT of music at Charles University. Meta showed up for her appointment half an hour early, having miscalculated the length of time it would take to walk from Malá Strana to his office overlooking the river. Just as Mandelbaum had promised he would be, Karel Kohout was a brusque, forbidding man. When Meta knocked on the open door of his office, he was sitting in a walnut swivel chair with his broad back turned, surrounded by a clutter of books and scores rising toward the high ceiling. His walls were hung with framed portraits of composers, university degrees, and playbills inscribed to him by various singers and musicians. Intent upon a monograph that he held close to his face, Kohout made no acknowledgment of her presence.

  She knocked again. Again nothing. A long wooden bench stood beneath a bank of filmy windows across the hall, so she took a seat and waited until the exact time of her appointment. When it was ten thirty on her watch, she rose and quietly knocked once more.

  “He’s like what his name means,” Mandelbaum had warned. “A rooster. My take on him is that he’s very aware of the metaphysical ramifications of this. So watch yourself and don’t get trapped in his henhouse.”

  “Lech?”

  “No, I mean he’s more like a seducer of ideas. A little headstrong, he has a way of ruling his roost. Let him weigh in with an attribution, if he can, and then thank him and go.”

  “Who is this guy anyway?” she asked, wondering why Mandelbaum would send her to someone he didn’t fully trust.

  “Besides being a player in more ways than one? Mozart man, mostly. The main thing is he’s an expert on the minor composers of the period. Your largely forgotten Ignaz Pleyels and Joseph Gelineks of the world.”

  “This isn’t minor music, though. At least not to my ear.”

  “Mine either. But he may surprise us by linking it to some lesser composer who might earn himself an upgrade in the canon. Besides, Karel’s been in Prague forever, might know somebody who can tell you about its past. I wouldn’t bring him into the dialogue if I didn’t think there was more upside potential than down.”

  Now Kohout swung around in his chair. “Come, please,” he said, motioning her in with a gesture so slow it made him seem as if he were underwater. His soft lips, heavy eyes, and plump pink cheeks did not lend themselves to the rooster image Meta had formed in her imagination. And if his comb was once rooster red it had long since faded. In his charcoal suit, rumpled white shirt, and polka-dot bow tie, Kohout appeared distracted, maybe a little annoyed at being interrupted.

  She handed him the letter of recommendation Mandelbaum had given her, which he scrutinized unnecessarily, as she knew he’d already agreed to this meeting and had expressed interest, at least to Mandelbaum, in the manuscript.

  “Your first visit to Czech Republic?” He smiled, sort of.

  “Yes, I was scheduled to perform here many years ago but I had an accident and it prevented me from coming.”

  “Dr. Mandelbaum said something to this effect. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it was half a lifetime ago.”

  Kohout cleared his throat, then continued in his accented but accurate English. “Let me see what you have brought.”

  “May I—I’d like to play it for you?”

  “There is no piano here,” he said, eyebrows rising toward the white thatch of coxcomb hair on his wide head, as if to verify that a piano was not even to be found there.

  “Are there practice rooms in the building we could use?”

  “I don’t know what to suggest,” glancing at his wristwatch, his curious smile now gone tight. “If you want my thoughts on the score Dr. Mandelbaum called me about, I must necessarily see it before you or anyone else plays it, slečna, Miss—”

  “Taverner.”

  He was right, of course. Meta unzipped her pack and removed a manila envelope. She passed it to him, leaning over his crowded desk. Because the professor hadn’t invited her to sit, she stood, shifting from foot to foot. He withdrew the pages, held the first one inches before his restless eyes, then lowered it, saying, “I don’t understand. This is not an eighteenth-century manuscript. It was written two weeks ago, not two centuries.”

  “No, I apologize,” Meta said. She had left in the envelope, along with the professional digital reproduction, her personal handwritten copy, which she’d brought along as a kind of security blanket. “My mistake. That’s a transcript, my transcript of the original.”

  “Why would you waste time making a transcript in this day and age?”

  Meta began to explain how the process of copying it brought her closer to the work. Then, reaching over and removing the transcript to reveal the scan beneath, she continued, “I’m sorry, I forgot that was in there. This is what I wanted to show you.”

  Eyebrows almost imperceptibly raised, Kohout studied the scanned pages in flat silence, offering her no critique one way or the other. She watched his eyes traveling back and forth, and waited. After an uncomfortably long minute, Meta decided to speak.

  “What are your initial thoughts?”

  Kohout ignored her for another wearisome half minute before saying, suddenly more animated, even courteous, “What are my thoughts. Well, my thoughts are that I cannot say I recognize the hand. If it’s a copyist who wrote this out, his hand leaves much to be desired. I don’t identify an obvious composer.”

  Meta opened her mouth to speak, wanting to offer again to perform it for him, but Kohout continued.

  “’Either way, the chances are, as I’m sure you must be aware, it’s most likely a nineteenth-century pasticcio, the work of some earnest amateur imitating some earlier masters. How should one put it, joining very different styles?” he pondered, knitting his fingers together.

  “Grafting, splicing?”

  “Yes, it seems too schizophrenic otherwise. That’s why I think pasticcio. Withal, quite an intriguing oddity. Where did you say you bought it again?”

  “I didn’t buy it. It was given to me.”

  “Ah, that’s right. Dr. Mandelbaum explained. May I keep it for a while?” he asked, his head cocked to one side, that skewed smile on his lips again. “I haven’t time now, but I need to look through it carefully, even play it, when I’m not so distracted by a busy schedule. Only then might I be able to advise you.”

  His own oddly pastiched reaction to both his visitor and her manuscript, now haughty, now ingratiating, at once dismissive and involved, threw Meta off. She wasn’t altogether sure she wanted his advice. With a cough, she said, “Of course. That copy is for you.”

  “Thank you.” He placed the printout on a stack of paper on his desk, then picked up the monograph he’d been reading when Meta arrived. Seeing that their meeting had come to an end, she thanked Kohout, and found her way out of the building. She walked beside the Vltava, watching the swans bob calmly, indifferently, in the wake of a passing riverboat, and wond
ered if there was any way she could have made a clumsier first sortie into the small world of Prague musicologists.

  That afternoon, nursing a residual awkwardness from her encounter with Kohout, she went to her second appointment. Not with another musicologist—her next such meetings came later in the week—but with one of Mandelbaum’s former students, someone he thought might be a good person for Meta to know while she was there.

  “He went to Prague on a concert tour at the beginning of what I thought was going to be a great career, fell in love, had a kid or two, never came back,” Mandelbaum had moaned, with grudging admiration. “Daft as hell, if you ask me. But a real musician, not some damn piano player. Knows that musical tonalities are produced with the ear, not the fingers. Knows that music couldn’t care less about fingers, that thinking your fingers produce music is pure lunacy.”

  Meta knew that idea backward and forward. Artur Schnabel, one of the towering pianists of the twentieth century. Modified in tone but not spirit from Schnabel’s interview remarks in Chicago the same year Germany surrendered to the Allies. She also knew this was about as high a compliment as Paul Mandelbaum was capable of making. Schnabel’s performances of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas were possibly the only thing her mentor was capable of carrying on about ad nauseam. You were never going to enter his pantheon of star pupils unless you gave yourself over, heart and soul, to Schnabel’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Klaviersonaten and the virtuoso’s idea that the greatest music was that which is “better than it can be performed.”

  Samuel Kettle was anything but a self-satisfied highbrow, which came as a great relief to Meta. Wearing an old lima bean–green sweater, baggy blue trousers, and nondescript lace-up shoes, he resembled one of those latter-day hippies she’d passed at the far end of the Charles Bridge, singing folk songs out of key and making up their own lyrics as they went along. His black hair was unruly and the puffy circles under his sharp blue eyes suggested to Meta that here was someone who had been burning his candle at both ends. His face was refined, as pale as vellum, and his thin shoulders were gently rounded. To her mind, he looked so Eastern European that it came as a surprise when he said hello in a northeastern seaboard accent thick enough to issue from the captain of a fishing boat. The only thing that gave him away as a musician, at least physically, was the graceful, delicate strength of his hand when they shook.

  “Welcome,” he said with a warm, eager smile as they sat opposite each other at a pub called Konvikt, across from the building where the Czech stooges of the Soviets had maintained their police headquarters in the Iron Curtain days, and a police compound had existed ever since. “Mandelbaum sang your praises to the point of—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Meta groaned. “Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy.”

  At which Sam Kettle, without drawing breath, burst out with the famous first lines of Beethoven’s finale in a strong tenor voice punctuated by rapping the table on the downbeats, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium—how’d you guess?” Meta looked at the ceiling and laughed. “It’s an old joke between us. He put you up to this, didn’t he.”

  “Sure did. He basically said you were a true daughter of Elysium and that I had to do anything I could to help you and, well, Mandelbaum’s wish is my command.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “But I haven’t done anything. Save your appreciation until I’ve done something. For instance, have you eaten lunch yet?” he asked, his face a lively, endearing riddle of tics—quick hard blinks and random nose scrunches.

  How different Kettle was from Kohout. He offered her a cigarette and she shook her head. She’d never smoked in her life but was, it seemed, glancing around, the only such virgin in this cloudy room. As Sam walked her through the menu, she realized that though she was no vegetarian, nothing could have prepared her for the meat-eating republic she had just entered. Pork necks, venison rumps, lamb knees, veal shins, beef-tail broth, blood sausages—the abattoir was fully represented. She told Sam she’d have whatever he thought was good. He ordered for them both in fluent Czech. Frothy pints soon appeared at the long table where others were also seated, engaged in conversations of their own, and the two Americans settled into an afternoon of such amicable discourse that a casual observer might have thought they were the oldest of friends.

  From Mandelbaum they moved easily into their next commonality—abandoned dreams of a concert career. “After what happened to my hand I wasn’t going to reach the far shore no matter how hard I swam, so I decided it was better not to drown” was how Meta explained herself to him, without further elaboration.

  Sam was deeply sorry to hear it. For his part, he had continued to perform in France, Italy, the Netherlands whenever asked through his agency back in New York, with whom he maintained a cordial if ever-dwindling relationship. He had fallen in love not only with the Czech girl he met backstage on the last of his legitimate tours half a dozen years ago but with Prague itself. When not on the road, he began accepting piano students, and, over time, private and conservatory teaching had become his mainstay.

  “But my story’s just the same old expat tale. Boy leaves home. Boy falls in love. Boy rejects old life, makes new home away from home. Curtain falls. Scattered applause. Well, actually, you can scratch that applause part. Silence and sanity ensue. End of story. Deal is, with the dreaded monkey of ambition off my back I’m happier than I’ve been since I was, like, five. Before I ever banged on my first piano key or tried stretching my thumb and pinkie wide enough to make an octave. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “I do and don’t,” Meta admitted. When she was a girl her aspirations as a pianist were boundless and Carnegie Hall had been her promised land. But in the aftermath of the accident, and after all the operations and therapies, she’d found herself placing third or fourth in competitions, never first as she used to. The bows, bouquets of roses, curtain calls—now they added up to a moot point. She might wince at the rigors of the road, the shortcomings of the recording studio, the facile image-crafting, the dwindling sales of classical music recordings, but they weren’t her problems anymore.

  She had known all this for years. Yet how much more real it felt to review her path from this fresh vantage, away from home, sitting here with this man she didn’t know from Adam and yet understood very well.

  “But, look,” Kettle was saying. “Your project sounds way more interesting than my own little capitulation to domesticity, at least from what our friend Mandelbaum was willing to say about it. So tell me what we’re up to here.”

  Over the course of half an hour, sketching in the historical parts of the story that had taken place in Prague, Meta laid out what she knew about the unidentified manuscript. Sam listened closely, waiting until she’d finished before he began to speculate aloud.

  “Did Mandelbaum think there’s any chance that good old goldstandard Köchel made a mistake, for instance, if we want to say it’s Mozart just for the sake of argument? Even the most anally retentive miss something now and then, why not K?”—Ludwig Ritter von Köchel being the nineteenth-century musicologist who exhaustively cataloged Mozart’s works, hence the K system. “Maybe he left something out of the stew.”

  Meta liked Sam. Koch, cook. Punning away even as he pressed ahead toward a theory about what she might be dealing with. “He didn’t say one way or the other.”

  “That means he believes it’s possible.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right.”

  “ ‘He who knows does not say, he who says does not know.’ Perfect Mandelbaum Zen in action.”

  “Well,” she said. “Köchel’s possible failings aside, I think you’ll find it’s probably a little too weird for Mozart.”

  “The plot thickens. So when do I get to see it?”

  “You can hear it as soon as you can get us to a piano.”

  “Where’s the manuscript?”

  “Back at the pension. But also right here,” tapping her
forehead.

  “Let’s get the Taverner out of the tavern then, and head home. I hope you don’t mind playing before an audience of two noisy children who’ve made it their life’s mission to sound like a concert hall’s worth of coughers, sneezers, and snorters.”

  They split the bill and caught a tram to a nearby residential district, Vinohrady, where the Kettles lived in a modest apartment up several flights of worn marble stairs. Though clearly this had been an elegant building a hundred years ago, the plaster was cracking, the banister railing was wobbly, and more than one of the overhead lightbulbs needed to be changed. Most of the building’s original art nouveau details had been removed by the Communists, Sam explained. The wrought-iron door and once spectacular Juliet balconies had been carted away for scrap metal. “My guess is that if they’d stayed in power for another decade or two they would have turned the whole town into a big, drab citadel of cement. Evil as they were—and don’t misunderstand me, I know the Commies were choirboys by comparison—the Nazis at least had a modicum of appreciation for the art they plundered during their days here.”

  “It must be amazing to watch the Czechs reclaiming their country.”

  “Better than amazing. It’s a daily miracle.”

  Kettle’s wife, Sylvie, was so kind toward this stranger from America that Meta understood at once why he’d been persuaded to renounce his former frenetic life in favor of a settled one with her. And his boy and girl, David and Lucie, were anything but the little rowdies he’d jokingly mentioned. Open eyed and open mouthed, they sat cross-legged on the floor of a music studio lined with sagging shelves of books, albums, CD jewel cases, and unwieldy piles of sheet music. Along with their parents, they listened while Meta played the movement not once but, at Sam’s urging, several times. He hovered behind her as she performed, his eyes riveted on her fingers traversing the keyboard.