The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  Mandelbaum hummed three random descending notes and asked, “So do they have a decent hotel in—where are you again?”

  “Heartland America,” she said. “Prague, Nebraska.”

  “Nearest city being?”

  “Lincoln. You coming?”

  “Immediately. And as far as dealing with this bad reporting coming out of Europe, don’t complain and don’t explain. It’s all bee stings, and we’re neither one of us allergic to bees. The truth will take care of everything.”

  He was right, of course. “One more thing,” she said. “Have you ever heard of a girl named Maria Anna von Westerwold?”

  “Can’t say as I have. Why?”

  She told him what Otylie had said, adding, “I obviously don’t have access to any reference books—”

  “Got it,” said Mandelbaum. “I have the principal biographies here. If there’s time before I head to the airport, I’ll see if she turns up anywhere.” Before hanging up, he said sternly, “Please assure me that Prague, Nebraska, has a bank with safe-deposit boxes?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Otylie agreed to everything Meta and, through her, Mandelbaum proposed. “I never had need for a deposit box. But Danek was friends with the man down at the Bank of Prague. I’m sure he will help.”

  “I know it’s cold out, but if you could see your way clear to coming with me to the bank—where is it?”

  “Across the street from the café and post office.”

  While Meta and Otylie drove to the hamlet’s tiny business district, where the bank did have a vault and a scanner—and to pay a visit to the local photographer to arrange a spur-of-the-moment shoot—Gerrit telephoned New York to give Margery an update.

  “How quickly can you get corroboration, airtight authentication?” were her first words, and, in the same breath, “And how fast can you get me the story?”

  “Story’s essentially written. I just need to sit down at the keyboard—”

  “Keyboard? Listen to you. You’ve obviously been hanging around with musicians too much.”

  “Laptop,” he said with a laugh. “As to authentication, the musicologist Paul Mandelbaum is flying out here immediately to examine it.”

  “What about one of the Czech musicologists who saw it?”

  “Wittmann is a lost cause, but there was another man named Kohout, who, though he had initial reservations, might be a possibility.”

  “Find him, ask him. Meantime, Mandelbaum and Taverner may be enough to go with preliminarily, worded gingerly. My bottom line? Bring it back to New York, where a group of experts can evaluate it and make as absolute an adjudication as possible. And—”

  “And?”

  “You’re not going to want to hear this, but you’re in the middle of this story now, and I’m not sure it should have your byline. Certainly not exclusively.”

  “I’ve been in the middle of stories before and reported on them without problem.”

  “True,” she agreed. “But when you were covering the Velvet Revolution, if Václav Havel were Václava and you’d fallen in love with her, we would have had a serious problem on our hands. You know memoir isn’t journalism.”

  “And we both know history is subjective. Just ask Herodotus.”

  “Herodotus, thank God, is not one of my reporters. File your draft and let me get one of our classical-music people from Arts to work on it.”

  “Understood,” Gerrit said, a little deflated by her words even as he recognized the ethics and propriety that prompted them.

  “Meantime let’s pursue redundant authentication. Anybody who’s wedded to there being only a certain number of Beethoven sonatas is going to push back, look for holes, all the usual contrarian activity. I believe in this story, but prove it to me again.”

  After looking up Kohout’s phone number in his notes, he glanced at his watch. It wasn’t that late in Prague, he thought, so why not? At worst he’d get through and Kohout would hang up on him. This was known as “declined to comment” among many in the journalism world. In that event, Gerrit would simply leave the man out of his story.

  “Ano,” a voice answered, to Gerrit’s surprise.

  Is this Professor Karel Kohout? he said in Czech.

  Who is asking?

  Now was not the moment to mince words, to hedge in any way. Gerrit identified who he was, including his relationship to Meta Taverner, and why he was calling. When the line didn’t go dead, he proceeded to tell Kohout about what had been discovered in Prague, Nebraska, and confirmed that the sonata’s original owner was alive and her property had been restored to her. He then stated that the first movement appeared to include a brief autograph sketch by Beethoven, and that it seemed increasingly likely the work was by this composer, a sonata not part of the known canon.

  I am aware, Gerrit said, that you had an opportunity to examine the other two movements, and was wondering if you might be willing to state your impression for the record.

  Kohout audibly inhaled before saying, My impression was inconclusive when Meta Taverner first approached me. My impression will have to remain inconclusive until I have had a chance to examine the entire work. I know the controversy surrounding its ownership. I know the principals involved. I think there is a chance that great confusion has unnecessarily caused great problems.

  Do you think there is a possibility, sir, that this sonata might have been written by Ludwig van Beethoven?

  I think, despite all the odds against such a thing, that there is a possibility, yes.

  A strong possibility? Faint possibility?

  A good possibility, Kohout said.

  Thank you, sir.

  Oh, and I would very much like to scrutinize the original, should the opportunity ever be offered.

  I will convey that.

  Good night.

  After assuring Otylie that his newspaper would pay her phone bill, Gerrit began writing a full-length article. Knowing that some material would be cut, some added, he left himself out of the story except to stipulate, as disclosure, that the writer had traveled with Ms. Taverner from Prague to Prague. Nor did he have any qualms about discounting his participation in the quest, since he had committed early on to letting Meta follow her own instincts and intuitions. She was the prime mover, he the encouraging companion.

  When the two women returned from downtown Prague, hours later, Meta told him how cooperative and friendly everybody had been.

  “They were impressed by you and how serious you are,” Otylie ventured.

  “Thanks for saying so, but don’t listen to her, Gerrit. This woman is loved here, by one and all. I think if I asked them to repaint the bank in neon pink to make her happy, they’d go outside, snow and all, and do it.”

  Gerrit chuckled. “Pink bank? No doubt you’re right. Did you rent the safe-deposit box?”

  “The original and three CDs of the scans are there tonight,” Meta said, telling him how the manuscript had been carefully scanned at the bank and, afterward, shot from above leaf by leaf, in the home studio of a baffled but skilled local photographer who was used to taking baby, graduation, and wedding pictures.

  “Very nice lady,” said Otylie. “She promised to develop a set of prints by tomorrow morning.”

  “Sounds like everything’s safe.”

  “I doubt it’ll disappear this time, though I was tempted to get a box where we could hide the key to the other safe-deposit box,” Meta said, half serious.

  Gerrit told them about the conversation he’d had with his editor and the need to work swiftly. “Margery also suggested we consider flying with the manuscript to New York, where it can be analyzed by others as well.”

  “Would that be all right with you, Otylie?” asked Meta, knowing the weight of her request.

  “This must be done,” Otylie concurred.

  “Would you be able to come with us, do you think? I know this is all sudden. We’ve kind of blown into your life like a blizzard.”

  Otylie couldn’t help shaki
ng her head in wonder. “A welcome blizzard. I must admit to you that when my Danek died, I thought nothing would ever happen to me again. But I was wrong. You have given me back a part of my life that I believed was gone for good. So, yes, yes. This kind of travel won’t be easy for me but, yes, I would like to go.”

  “Wonderful,” said Meta, beaming.

  “Don’t forget, I was once a New Yorker. I can maybe stay with my old family there. I’ll call to let them know I am coming. They would love to meet you.”

  For the second time in a matter of weeks, Meta picked her mentor up at the airport, this time in snow-covered Lincoln, on a blindingly bright sunshiny day. “Short time no see,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks and adjusting his shoulder bag.

  “I should tell you,” she replied, leading him out to the parking lot, “we’re going to be right back here at the airport tomorrow on a flight to New York.”

  “In that case, I guess I need not adjust my watch to local time?”

  As they drove to downtown Lincoln, Meta caught him up on what had happened and why, using the last of their resources and with Otylie’s help, she had booked them all into the Cornhusker and reserved economy seats for the next day. The Prague Sonata original was with them as well—this was necessary for its authentication—and the negatives and photographs were stored safely in Otylie’s deposit box along with one of the CDs. Meta had another in her bag and had mailed the third to her mother for triple redundancy.

  “We only have photographs of several paintings by van Gogh to corroborate their existence and for art historians to study,” Gerrit had pointed out. “I’m not feeling fatalistic about this, though. This sonata, at least as a work of music, will never be lost again.”

  Mandelbaum was as emotional as Meta had ever seen him when, at the hotel, she introduced him to Otylie and Otylie presented him with the score.

  “In the life of someone devoted to music, as I understand you are as well, this is one of those moments never forgotten,” he said. “Do you mind if we pass over preliminaries and get straight to the manuscript?”

  “Of course. You’ve come for this purpose,” the old woman said.

  He put on his glasses, examined the top leaf, read Otylie’s father’s inscription to her from another era and commented, “‘Engelsmusik für mein Engelchen.’ Beautiful words. Your father loved you.”

  “Yes, it is true.”

  “ ‘Sonate’ in a later hand, but not your father’s.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Script is mid-nineteenth century or thereabouts. We’ll have to figure out who wrote that, if possible. Could be important.”

  “Maybe the seller that Otylie’s father bought it from, or even a Beethoven family member,” Meta suggested.

  “Could be. By the bye,” Mandelbaum went on, “I was able to look into your Maria Anna von Westerwold back in Lawrenceville. Meta mentioned to me that your father told you that at one point this may have belonged to her.”

  “Yes?” said Otylie and Meta at almost the same time.

  “As it happens, she turns up in Wegeler and Ries.”

  Puzzled, Otylie asked, “Wegeler?”

  “Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries,” Meta explained. “Close friends of Beethoven’s. They wrote one of the earliest memoirs about him.”

  “Do you have any written evidence about this?” Mandelbaum asked. “Did your father keep a receipt or have any documentation besides the manuscript itself?”

  The woman shook her head. “I’m afraid all I have are patchy memories.”

  “Not so patchy,” Meta interjected. “You remembered Maria Anna’s name and it turns up in early source material? That’s meaningful. This is potentially another piece of the puzzle we can put in place.”

  Gerrit jotted notes on this exchange, as grateful to hear its conjecture and knowledge as he was to be able to openly transcribe it in Meta’s presence.

  “She’s right,” Mandelbaum added. “And it would appear that our Maria Anna knew Beethoven more or less exactly when this piece seems to have been composed. There’s plenty of research ahead. But now, let’s look at this supposed Beethoven autograph sketch material at the end of the first movement,” gazing over his glasses at Meta, eyebrows gnarled.

  “Supposed? Owl, careful.” She took the manuscript from his hands, set it back down on the table in the concierge room where they had gathered, and turned to the folio leaf in question. “You tell me otherwise.”

  He pushed up his glasses from the bridge of his nose. “Please, Meta, could you get me one of those protective sheets from my briefcase.” Gently placing the clear plastic on the page, he told Otylie, “We don’t need an aging professor to drip sweat on this now, do we.”

  She nodded, but looked on in disbelief, thinking how often, many decades ago, she had handled the score as a child with hands unwashed after eating porridge or soft-boiled eggs. How many times her father had done so, drunk with his mulled wine, smoking and singing and speechifying. How many times in later years she had wept while leafing through the pages, ruing her fate as an orphan of the First World War, and then, in a most different but equally horrific way, of the Second. And now, here was this scholar, his face inches away from a chaos of ink that she’d always considered a child’s scrawl, an energetic but worthless doodle at the end of the first movement of her father’s—her—manuscript.

  “I’m damned if it’s not,” whispered Mandelbaum, so quietly none of them made out his words.

  “What,” said Meta.

  He craned his neck, looked her in the eye, and repeated more articulately, “I said, ‘I’m damned if it’s not.’”

  Meta’s eyes traveled from Mandelbaum’s to Gerrit’s to Otylie’s. She couldn’t speak.

  Otylie did. “If I understand you, my father was not so crazy? This is important? I was right to listen to him and to Jakub, to Tomáš?”

  “You were more right than anybody knew, including yourself, Otylie,” said Meta, as she embraced the woman—a granddaughter’s embrace, as Otylie sensed it—then wrapped her arm around Gerrit’s waist.

  “Dinner tonight is on me, ladies and gent. A celebration is very much in order,” said Mandelbaum. “Meantime, you’ll excuse us, but Meta and I need to put our heads together about convening some musicologists to examine this marvel. Beethoven’s own hand on the score complicates matters in the most delicious way.”

  As Mandelbaum meticulously collated the manuscript and Gerrit excused himself to complete and file the article, Meta asked Otylie, “What would you like to do with the rest of the afternoon?”

  A moment of melancholy coursed through the woman as she remembered that the one person she would so wish to share the extraordinary news with, Jane Burke, had died a few years back, not long after Grace Sanders had called to share the news that her mother, Adele, was gone. Otylie sometimes wondered how she had outlasted everyone. Wasn’t her time to join the vast community of the dead soon to come? Perhaps, but not just yet.

  “A nice long nap before dinner,” she said. “This old lady will need all her courage tomorrow.”

  “Courage?”

  “Courage, yes, Meta. I’ve been on trains, boats, autobuses, even on a horse. But this is my first time up in the air,” she said, with a calm if furtive wink.

  TWO STORIES AS CONTRADICTORY as yes and no, each announcing the discovery of a hitherto unknown early piano composition purported to be by Ludwig van Beethoven, were published within days of each other. To the casual reader, these articles disagreed on all but two facts. The importance of the score and its miraculous survival.

  Those who had authored or informed each news narrative read the other and found fault, of course, in what had been reported. But for Petr Wittmann, who, in his hotel room, read Gerrit’s story, one detail in particular took the breath out of him. That Otylie Bartošová had been located, alive and hale, a widow living alone in a Czech immigrant community of three hundred or so townsfolk, was one thing. That Meta Taverne
r had assembled the complete score this widow had dispersed sixty years before—dismembered being one of the less savory but technically accurate terms used for what had occurred—was one thing more. That there was an original sketch probably in the hand of the composer himself, not yet fully confirmed or dated, was yet another tantalizing and devastating detail. One that, if proved to be authentic, Charles Castell would find irresistible.

  But when Wittmann saw another, more fatal discrepancy between his copy of the final movement and the one now in Otylie’s hands, he knew any pretext of disputing ownership on behalf of Johana Langová had evaporated like so much piss on a very hot stone. When Tomáš made his otherwise admirable transcription years ago—yes, personal animosities aside, he had to admit the job seemed precisely done—the pianist had omitted Otylie’s inscription to her husband, an inscription that Wittmann might consider an act of vandalism but that conclusively proved Otylie’s prior ownership.

  He needed to make calls, he thought, rubbing his furrowed forehead. But to whom? And what to say?

  Anxious as he was over what had just happened, his distress was countered by a sense of exhausted relief. It was as if he glimpsed, however vaguely, a course back toward the life he had been living before this obsession infected him. Perhaps there was a way to save face, to make things right. He went into the bathroom and poured himself a glass of tap water, drank it, poured another. Back at the desk, he looked up Charles Castell’s private number in his pocket address book. By then, he knew, Castell would have read the same article he had, and probably expected to hear from his contact. He tried and failed to picture Meta’s face as the phone rang.

  “Yes.” No intermediary, no private secretary; it was Castell himself on the other end of the line.

  “Charles, Petr. You’ve no doubt read the piece in today’s paper.”

  “Are you in touch with Ms. Taverner about the manuscript?”

  Never one to mince words, Wittmann mused. Castell’s tone didn’t project frustration, displeasure, chagrin, defeat, any of the feelings Wittmann had been suffering. If anything, he heard encouragement, even hope, like the last sprite to fly out of Pandora’s mythic box.