“Where to start,” she said, although she’d covered this terrain in her head many times. “How much do you know about Beethoven?”
“Layman’s knowledge. No more or less than most, I’d imagine.”
She steepled her fingers under her chin, then braided them in her lap. “So his early life was a kaleidoscope of highs and lows. The highs, like giving his first performance in Cologne when he was seven, publishing his first work at eleven—the Dressler Variations it’s called, and then heading off to Vienna to meet Mozart when he was sixteen. All very heady stuff. Mozart was the biggest rock star of the day and Beethoven wanted to move up the charts. But death had a way of trying to cut him down to size every time he was starting to get somewhere. His grandparents died when he was young, and he lost a sister when he was eight or nine, and a baby brother when he’d just got into his teens. When he was fifteen, composing away, working steadily as a court musician, his mother gave birth to another girl, Maria Margaretha. That would be around 1786. A year later, in the spring of 1787, he’s off to Vienna and Mozart, and it looks to him, aside from the setbacks, like the world’s a pearl in his palm. But after just a few weeks in Vienna, you know what happens?”
Gerrit shook his head.
“He gets a message telling him to return to Bonn immediately, that his mother’s dying of consumption.”
“No lessons with Mozart?”
“Doubtful. There’s a story that after Mozart heard Beethoven play, he told others to keep an eye on this young man, he’s going places. Possibly apocryphal, but it’s a mainstay in the lore. So his mother, whom he considered his best and dearest friend in the world, dies that summer, his one-year-old sister, Maria, dies that fall, his father becomes an even worse drunk than he was before. And in 1791, Beethoven’s dream of studying with the greatest living composer in the greatest musical city in all of Europe goes up in smoke when Mozart dies too. What I find most interesting, just in terms of Otylie’s sonata, is that during the period between 1787, when all this tragedy comes thundering down on him, and 1789, his composing grinds almost completely to a halt. Or, that is, we have almost no evidence he was writing.”
“Maybe he was just too depressed.”
“Could well be. In his earliest known personal letter he says as much. I’ve read it so many times I practically know it by heart. It was written around the middle of September 1787, to a lawyer named von Schaden, who Beethoven stayed with on his way back home from Vienna to be with his mother in Bonn. After she died in July, he wrote von Schaden that he was suffering from melancholia and asthma, and feared he himself might die of consumption like his mother. So, yeah, he moves into a dark, barren period—one of his biographers calls it a ‘moratorium.’ Plus, his father couldn’t stay sober enough to earn a decent living, so Beethoven was forced to act as a kind of surrogate father and mother for his family. He had to grow up fast,” she said, glancing down at the manuscript. “He fought a lot of demons over the course of his life, not just death. Ill health. His failure to find any kind of real relationship with women he loved. His own struggle with the bottle. His deafness. Even his political idealism caused him grief from time to time.” Meta ticked them off on her fingers. “The list is long. But for all his frailties, he was really tough. The hardships he went through even while he was being furiously prolific make it difficult to believe—difficult for me, at least—that he just dropped composing, the one true love of his life, for such a long time even though he was only a teenager.”
Gerrit himself now glanced at the manuscript where it lay in a soft trapezoid of sunlight, looking at the procession of notes and marveling at how this relatively primitive form of annotation could translate into such magnificence as music. “So, you’re suggesting the Prague Sonata could be autobiographical—Irena’s movement that goes from joy to grief—and maybe was written in this period when he was supposedly blocked?”
“I’m hardly alone in thinking he couldn’t go completely dormant, no matter what the circumstances. He was young, a virtuoso, passionately committed to his work. It’s known that he wanted to write a symphony in honor of his mother, in C minor, but all we have of it is a very unfinished draft written out on a couple of staves in his hand, almost definitely from this period I’m talking about.” She suddenly interrupted herself and asked, “Bored yet? I’m throwing a lot at you.”
Gerrit didn’t try to hide his admiration. “Whatever’s the opposite of bored, that’s what I am, all right?”
“Okay,” she said. “Just stop me if that changes. So Beethoven, as you probably know, wrote thirty-two sonatas for the pianoforte, and those sonatas made a profound impact on music history.”
“That I do know.”
“Not so many people are aware that he wrote three earlier piano sonatas, the ‘Kurfürstensonaten,’ published in 1783, when he was about twelve or thirteen, and dedicated to Maximilian Friedrich.”
“Who was Friedrich?”
“The elector of Cologne and a powerful early supporter.”
“Twelve or thirteen? I’ll say he was an early supporter.”
“I hear you. But they’re almost never included in the boxed sets or featured in concerts. Beethoven himself essentially excluded those sonatas from his official canon by not assigning them opus numbers. Catalogers later gave them what’s called a WoO designation, Werk ohne Opuszahl—”
“Work without an opus number.”
“Right.”
“This is all new to me.”
“You’re not the only one. Fact is, many Beethoven commentators generally don’t waste time on these ‘Electoral’ sonatas, WoO 47, because—unlike Irena’s central movement of the Prague Sonata, which is highly original, to say the least—they don’t show much evidence of superbright burning genius. They’re wonderful pieces for one so young, but at the end of the day they’re well-crafted and mostly derivative.”
There were exceptions to the “Electoral” sonata naysayers, naturally, of which Meta was aware. She knew, for instance, that Ludwig Schiedermair, in his 1925 Der junge Beethoven, had proposed that in Sonata in F Minor, WoO 47, no. 2, one could hear faint intimations of the “Pathétique,” one of the master’s later triumphs. She’d read of J.-G. Prod’homme’s important 1937 study, Les Sonates pour piano de Beethoven, claiming that the third of these sonatas advanced a motif revived in the opening passage of the Seventh Symphony. There were other such suggested echoes; some of these resonated with her, others didn’t.
As it happened, Meta knew these three earliest sonatas well. She had found herself after the accident playing them from time to time before audiences of schoolchildren. It never failed to give her young listeners a shock when she told them that the composer was hardly older than they were when he wrote them. That wasn’t all, either, when it came to the adolescent Ludwig’s early attempts at sonata writing. He left behind two movements of an incomplete sonata in F, WoO 50, dedicated to his friend Franz Wegeler. It dated from 1790–1792, just before he left his birthplace, Bonn, to head back to Vienna, where he studied with Haydn, whom he considered the next best thing to Mozart. The piece, an allegretto, wasn’t published until after Beethoven died some thirty-five years later.
As for the Prague Sonata, if it proved to be Beethoven’s composition, it would bridge aspects of his earliest piano works, which relied considerably on the received ideas of his contemporaries, to the vigorously original sonatas that were part of his cherished canon. “Even when he was most influenced by Mozart, Beethoven had his own sound and dynamic rigor, both of which are present in Irena’s movement. The more I play it, the more I hear Beethoven.”
“You said this is in a copyist’s hand, right?” Gerrit asked. “That none of what’s on these pages is written down by him?”
Nodding, Meta said, “Copyists made more legible and uniform versions of composers’ original scores so they could be shared or preserved. If this were in Beethoven’s hand—which I can assure you is far messier, bristling with more visual energy than
what you see here—it would be an open-and-shut case. A find nobody could contest.”
“Okay, so pardon me if I’m way off, but what would a teenager be doing hiring a copyist? Wouldn’t that have been something more established, older, and, I have to think, richer composers would have done?”
“Yes and no, mostly yes. There are other manuscripts of his from before this that exist only in a copyist’s hand. I’m thinking of the surviving score of the piano part from his earliest known piano concerto, in E-flat, when he was just twelve. That one does have corrections as well, in his own hand. My point is, he had access to copyists through his father, not to mention the musicians he played with and knew at court. I might add that there’s a decent chance Beethoven himself did some transcriptions for the court orchestra when he was young. In other words, he was probably, at times, a copyist himself in his early career.”
“You think that’s what this is?” asked Gerrit, taking a sip of his coffee, which had gone lukewarm.
Meta paused. Had she gone too far? But no, she’d read on microfilm—a dissertation by Douglas Johnson—that the adolescent Beethoven’s hand from this period sometimes resembled that of a copyist. Granted, there was a great paucity of manuscripts from the “moratorium” years, but a side-by-side analysis of what did survive might bear fruit.
She told Gerrit as much, concluding, “Again, no way to know yet what this is exactly, but it’s actually unlikely. One thing I do know is that his dealings with copyists weren’t always rosy. He had a famously confrontational relationship with a copyist named Ferdinand Wolanek, who was born right here in Prague. When Wolanek wrote Beethoven a letter in 1825, basically quitting as his copyist for the Ninth Symphony—if you can imagine quitting that particular gig, no matter how bad-tempered your employer was—Beethoven x’d out the letter and wrote nasty retorts all over it, things like ‘Stupid, conceited, asinine Churl,’ and complained about the idiotic transcription mistakes Wolanek was making, calling him a lousy, arrogant scribbler, and telling him that he’d already decided to fire Wolanek before receiving this letter of resignation, and so on. Beethoven didn’t suffer fools lightly.”
“Could this be Wolanek’s hand then?”
“No, no. Poor Wolanek was probably a baby fast asleep in his crib when this sonata was composed,” she said. “It’s someone much earlier and in Bonn most likely. Researching the detailed history of Beethoven’s earliest copyists is a task that lies ahead for me—talk about recherché, no?—but it’s something I’m looking forward to. It’ll be key to confirming this harebrained theory of mine, assuming I can actually prove it.”
“‘Harebrained’ is not the word that comes to mind, Meta.”
She smiled. “Well, you can see why I’m so desperate to find that first movement and sit in a quiet room to try to solve this puzzle.”
“We’ll find it. You’ll solve it.”
“From your lips to some kindly god’s ear.”
2
WHEN SOBER, JAROMIR LÁSKA was a quiet, thoughtful man. He was a docile dreamer known to all as an exacting music teacher, a loving husband to his wife, Jana, and father to sweet Otylie, his only child. When in his cups—he was fond of mulled wine, often after his working day was done—he tended to lecture, invent, chase ideas across curious landscapes until both the ideas and he himself went off philosophical cliffs. He managed to balance these extremes for the most part and was generally well regarded, even admired, in the small city of Olomouc, where, as he liked to repeat, the first treatise on music written in Czech was published back in the sixteenth century and the great Dvořák composed for the city choir.
But there was a third man—a man both drunk and sober at the same time, one might say—who lived inside Jaromir’s skin and spirit. This man was an obsessive collector of music manuscripts from earlier eras who made extravagant purchases when the mood struck, wise and foolish acquisitions from antiquarian dealers in several corners of Europe. This Jaromir was never averse to risking money he didn’t have in order to obtain an autograph concerto by Rameau, a Bach keyboard fragment, a work for harpsichord by an unknown composer from the sixteenth century.
Some of these manuscripts were authentic. Many were not. He was assured by his suppliers that everything was bona fide, and they provided him with elaborate documentation to support the legitimacy of their materials. Some of these documents of provenance were authentic. Many were not. Most were not.
When he encountered what would nearly a century later become known as the Prague Sonata manuscript, he was neither sober nor drunk. Instead, he was unusually suspicious, certainly at first. One of the reasons he loved to collect music manuscripts was that he felt as if through the mystical medium of the score itself—its holy pages covered with notes and ligatures, tablatures and trills, progressions of chords and flights of arpeggios—he could almost touch the soul of the composer. So why, on that overcast afternoon in Vienna, did he have such doubts?
For one, he was never much drawn to acquiring works in a copyist’s hand. The composer’s original autograph score was what he prized. Such documents let him place his own mortal fingers on the very paper that had been touched by one whose genius was, he believed, immortal. A copyist, he scoffed, was no more a composer than a typesetter was a poet, or a bricklayer an architect. Copyists were as necessary as bricklayers, just as piano teachers such as he were necessary to society and the continuance of civilization. But the composer, the poet, the visionary architect?—they were blessed with a higher calling.
And what was being offered today, although with an abundance of ballyhoo, was a work for piano in the hand of a copyist. How easy it would be, he thought, to fake a copyist’s hand. He had a decent working knowledge of what any number of composers’ scoring styles looked like, what their particular calligraphic eccentricities and telltale approaches to musical annotation were. The dense muscularity of Bach. The chromatic delicacy of Chopin. To look at original manuscripts by them or others opened a window, for a romantic collector like Otylie’s father, onto the cauldron of composition itself. But the copyist had no connection to heroic volcanism, aesthetic passion. The copyist’s job was to be legible and accurate.
Another reason for his suspicions was, ironically, also the strong motivation for this special trip from Olomouc to Vienna, which was roughly equidistant from Prague. And that was because the composer in question, Ludwig van Beethoven, was one master his collection lacked and the one he desired above all. The Viennese antiquarian who had offered Jaromir the manuscript was generally esteemed in the trade. His family had been in the business for several generations back to the mid-nineteenth century and had occupied the same shop for all that time. To Jaromir’s mind, he had impeccable taste in both rarities and hand-tailored suits. Over the years, he had supplied Jaromir with handwritten scores by half a dozen important composers including Liszt, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff. Not the most valuable manuscripts available to collectors, but historically interesting artifacts.
The dealer explained that the sonata manuscript he’d come to inspect had been in the firm’s possession since the 1860s, but until now had not been offered for sale. Before he was shown the item itself, Jaromir was invited to examine the ledger in which the purchase, made from Karl van Beethoven’s only son, Ludwig, was noted. Jaromir knew that Karl, the master’s nephew, whom he regarded as a son—the composer never married nor had any children of his own—was declared his “sole and universal heir” in 1827. He was also told that nephew Ludwig inherited Karl’s estate in 1848, and the firm acquired this and several other rarities before Ludwig immigrated to the United States.
Between these two bequests and because Beethoven had always been generous with Karl during his lifetime, the dealer told Jaromir, he no doubt came into the possession of a considerable number of manuscript materials and memorabilia, some of which were passed on to Karl’s own son.
Without a doubt, Jaromir agreed.
And this, the antiquarian continued, setting the manuscript b
efore Otylie’s father on a mahogany table whose ornate legs were carved to resemble griffins, is one of those manuscripts.
Jaromir gingerly turned the first two pages, still suspicious despite the alleged provenance and the credibility of the firm’s ledger entry.
I don’t see a signature, Jaromir commented, realizing that in saying as much he was already entering into a negotiation.
As I’m sure you know, many of Beethoven’s manuscripts are not signed. And decidedly not those in copyists’ hands.
Well, then, how can you be at all certain this work is by Beethoven and not another composer? Just because the manuscript came into your possession—
Into my exacting grandfather’s possession.
—from a member of Beethoven’s family—
The last among Beethoven’s descendants to be baptized Ludwig.
—doesn’t guarantee it isn’t someone else’s composition, does it?
The manuscript merchant calmly palmed the pomaded hair on the side of his head and told his potential and slightly annoying customer, Just keep turning the pages. I think you’ll find something of paramount interest at the end of the first movement.
OTYLIE HAD NEVER SEEN SO MUCH SKY in her life. Its clouds were like roiling, mammoth castles drifting across the sun, casting shadows over the grasslands and limestone buttes below. The horizon was endless in every direction. Roads were broad as rivers. Fields wide as floods. Sage-green and pale brown rolling hills were oceanic. Even these Texan accents were broader than anything she had ever heard in London or Manhattan, let alone Prague. Jane told her the word for the way they drew out their vowels was drawl, a term she would remember because it rhymed with tall and sprawl.
All this sprawl tall drawl makes me feel small, she thought, pleased with her little joke in English. She added, y’all, another word she heard for the first time after stepping off the bus in Austin, handing her valise to Jim Burke, and sliding in next to Jane in the front seat of their Plymouth convertible. As the wind blew in her hair on the drive to her new home, Otylie remembered how frighteningly small she’d felt—a parentless, meaningless girl—on the train that carried her from Olomouc after her father’s death. She recalled the nauseating sense of insignificance that had pressed in on her when she’d been forced to leave Prague and Jakub for exile in England. And though she’d experienced happy turns of fate in New York, Otylie, as she’d sat flanked by other immigrant nannies on their shared Central Park bench, often felt less consequential than the least child playing on the grass. Yet in strange sky-draped Texas, the smallness she felt was of a different order. Here her anonymity, her insignificance, proposed a kind of freedom. She was no longer looking for anybody or anything. If her fate had so far made her, to use one of Jakub’s favorite words, a kind of Schwindelkopf—one with a spinning head and no constant view—the American West promised to still that motion. Here the spirit could stretch and steady, along with the eye.
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