There was a brief silence while Antony-Ball recovered his composure. When he had done so, he informed us of proposals under consideration by the British Council of Physicians. Under these, all cases where practising certificates had been withdrawn would be subject to automatic review after three years. This proposal was likely to be accepted by the Board of the Council at its next meeting. “This is information that I am giving to you in the strictest confidence and I would not expect you to make any report of the discussions that the three of us have had in any outlet. You will also understand,” Antony-Ball continued, “that this development has been under discussion from a time long pre-dating your Paddington investigation, just as you should be aware that I have not been in any way swayed by any of your submissions.”
By the time my practising certificate was finally restored to me, I had already concluded that earning money as a writer of short stories was far more remunerative than life as a doctor. It was thus to be many years and after my second marriage before I was to go back into the profession. But shortly after the events described above, I chanced to meet Dr Barker on Baker Street. Although he still bore the thick, dark beard of our first encounter, his whole demeanour bespoke bonhomie as he told me he was shortly due to travel to Rome, where the Roman Catholic church had asked him to conduct an investigation into the correlation between undertaking pilgrimages and achieving medical outcomes beyond the normal range of expectations.
“After going to Rome, I will need to visit many of the sites associated with miracles,” he said. “I shall go to Assisi, Santiago de Compostela and Lourdes. I may even go to Walsingham at some point, even though that site is quite tarnished by the Anglican usurpation of the Roman church.”
I cautiously expressed my pleasure at his change of fortune and he added:
“It is high time that the church sought to prove a statistical link between visiting shrines and recovery from conditions untreatable even by the wonders of modern science.” He continued: “For me, it is an extraordinary opportunity. One minute I was unable to find a position of any sort, and the next minute I can apply my statistical skills to a matter of the greatest personal and public interest. As someone who is a devout adherent of my faith, it is hard indeed not to speculate that the hand of a higher power is behind this.”
The Red Priest’s Treasure Trove
After the adventure of 1903, which I have previously narrated under the title “The Priory School”, Holmes increasingly withdrew from active criminal detective work. This was not due to any want of demand for his services either from Scotland Yard or from private clients, but rather because Holmes’s investigative skills were sought in spheres other than crime - in particular those of science and music. As Holmes was an expert in both, it was not surprising that he often gave priority to commissions arising from these disciplines. My reader will be unsurprised to learn, if he has not guessed already, that many of the ground-breaking scientific and musical discoveries made in the first ten years of this twentieth century were the direct result of Holmes’s change of focus.
Towards the end of 1903, Holmes was approached by the scientist Albert Einstein, who was having difficulties with his work on the photo-electric effect. Holmes was able to clarify two points on the effect of gravity on light for the great scientist, ironically basing part of his own work on “The Dynamics of an Asteroid” by Professor Moriarty. This led directly to Einstein’s annus mirabilis in 1905 when he published four great papers which eventually resulted in him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.
Holmes’s connection with Albert Einstein had an unexpected side-effect. The great scientist recommended Holmes’s investigative skills to his cousin, the Mozart expert, Alfred Einstein. The latter had been trying without success to track down a score for an oboe concerto by Mozart, which the composer had referred to in a letter to his father, but for which no parts were known. Holmes was already a proud possessor of Breitkopf and Härtel’s Mozart Complete Edition and was rapidly able to direct Alfred Einstein’s attention to the score of Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D Major in which the violin part never got lower than the second-lowest tone of each string. To Holmes, this demonstrated that it had been transposed up one tone from an earlier piece in C major. Holmes suggested that the earlier piece may in fact have been the oboe concerto and that Mozart was looking for an easy way to complete a commission for a flute concerto which he found uncongenial. The parts of the original oboe concerto were subsequently found in Salzburg in 1921.
In 1907, the musicologist Lothar Percher approached Holmes. Percher was of the opinion that the work published as Mozart’s Symphony Number Thirty-Seven as part of the Complete Edition referred to above, was stylistically much closer to the music of Michael Haydn, the younger brother of the more famous Josef Haydn, than to that of Mozart. Percher was making a study of Michael Haydn’s music and consequently was intimately acquainted with the latter’s music of which he subsequently published a catalogue of works.
Holmes examined the score and concluded that while the slow introduction of the work was indeed by Mozart, it appeared to have been appended to a work of a different provenance. He suggested to Percher that he search for a work with the same incipit as the fast section of the first movement. A Michael Haydn’s Symphony in G Major was soon confirmed as the origin of all but the opening of Mozart’s so-called Symphony Number Thirty-Seven.
My friend’s discovery about Mozart’s Symphony Number Thirty-Seven naturally caused major embarrassment to Breitkopf and Härtel, the world’s oldest music publisher, who had already numbered four later symphonies as numbers Thirty-Eight to Forty-One. They declined to change the later numbers but Holmes’s discovery meant that Mozart’s so-called Symphony Number Thirty-Seven has become a rara avis or rare bird in our concert halls. Holmes declined to have his name associated with this discovery or any of the other musical or scientific discoveries that he had made, although he did quip in Newtonian fashion on his unmasking of the true writer of Mozart’s Symphony Number Thirty-Seven: “If I have seen further than Breitkopf and Härtel, maybe it is because I have taken the trouble to read the full score of the symphony before declaring it to be by Mozart.”
Holmes’s success as a musical investigator should not, perhaps, be considered unexpected. Holmes was a rare performer indeed on the violin and a composer of no small merit. Already, in 1895, he had caused a stir in musical circles by publishing a monograph on the polyphonic motets of the Dutch composer Lassus, which had been declared by experts to be the last word on the subject. These musical accomplishments, allied to his unsurpassed forensic and investigative skills, equipped him better than a professional musician for solving the many mysteries of the world of Classical music.
Some of his musicological investigations, like some of his criminal cases, led nowhere. This was often because the passage of time had left no lasting trail of what had happened, or because a work he was searching for - the complete version of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is an obvious case in point - had never been written. These cases were often amongst the most interesting ones, but it is hard to present them without frustrating the reader with a story that has a beginning but no end. At the time, I thought Holmes’s 1907 investigation into the circumstances behind the writing of Bach’s Brandenburg concerti was going to fall into this incomplete category. Holmes had been commissioned by the Leipzig-based Bachgesellschaft or Bach Society to try to unravel a mystery which Holmes elucidated to me in his customarily succinct manner:
“It’s like this, Watson: The history of the Classical concerto is fairly well established. Antonio Vivaldi, a Venetian, who was often known as the Prete rosso or the ‘red priest’ because he was a priest with red hair, was the first person to popularise the genre of the virtuoso concerto. That is a piece where a solo instrument or sometimes more than one instrument is pitted against a whole orchestra. He published a set of twelve concerti under the title of L’estro
armonico or ‘Harmonic Inspiration’ in Amsterdam in about 1712. This collection included four such concerti for solo violin and four for two violins accompanied by a four-part string orchestra, although these and other concerti of his had circulated earlier in manuscript. The works are amongst the most influential pieces of music in European music history. Bach transcribed some of them for keyboard, Handel imitated their construction in his organ concerti, and there is a direct bloodline from them to the concerti of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, which continue to dominate the programmes of our concert halls. Allow me to play you some Vivaldi, whose music you will never have heard before.”
He placed his violin under his chin and started to play.
Under his fingers rose a sound world unlike any other I had heard.
I was used to Holmes playing Mendelsohn lieder and Sarasate show pieces, but the music of Vivaldi had a ferocious energy mingled with a melodic sweetness all of its own. I was utterly beguiled and when at length Holmes came to a halt, I was lost for breath - far more so than Holmes was. I had almost forgotten that the objective of the investigation was Bach.
I put this to Holmes, who said “Ah, my dear Watson, this is only the starting point of the mystery. In 1721, Bach sent a collection of six concerti of his own to the Margrave of Brandenburg, the ruler of a small city-state just outside Berlin. He attached a letter in French to the Margrave which makes it seem probable that he was seeking an appointment or a commission using the concerti as his calling card. He had met the Margrave face to face on a previous occasion. These six so-called Brandenburg concerti are magnificent in their own way,” and here Holmes broke off to play a jaunty gigue, which he told me was the opening of the last movement of the fifth concerto of the set. “But they are also magnificently different from any other concerti that had been written before and, I would posit, from any since.”
He paused to play a few more measures of the gigue.
“Before Vivaldi,” he continued, “there was really no such thing as a virtuoso concerto. Previously, ensemble works were described as concerti to distinguish them from pieces for voices, and were sequences of dance movements where groups of instrumentalists were put together without the objective of showing off the abilities of one or two performers. After Vivaldi, the style of an abstract three-movement piece showing off a soloist or soloists became more or less de rigeur. Bach’s Brandenburg concerti take Vivaldi’s concept and stretch both its form and virtuosic requirements far more than he or any of his contemporaries ever attempted, and far more than anyone else has done since.”
“But you have always said that the music of Bach is the closest thing there is to human perfection, so Bach was capable of doing whatever he wanted.”
“That is so, but let me outline to you how extreme this stretching of form and instrumentation is. The first concerto adopts the form of a three-movement concerto with a very large ensemble and then adds on a number of dance movements of no special distinction. The second concerto calls for a trumpet player of a skill far beyond that required by any trumpet music that Bach ever wrote before or afterwards - and he wrote many trumpet parts - and far beyond any other trumpet part written in the next hundred years. After that, the trumpet became subject to numerous technical modifications to make it easier to play. The third concerto is for nine-part strings. At this time, most ensembles could only stretch to four string players. This piece also calls upon the nine players to improvise a slow movement - a freedom composers do not give their performers for the obvious reason that it would be beyond the capability of even the most talented ensembles. The fourth concerto calls for a violinist of staggering brilliance while the fifth concerto requires a keyboard player of similarly preternatural virtuosity. The sixth concerto eschews violins entirely and is for violas and cellos.”
“Is this really such a mystery?” I asked. “Surely Bach was responding to a commission from the Margrave and was following his instructions?”
“Your response is, of course, the logical explanation, but consider this: Because King Frederick William I of Prussia was not a significant patron of the arts, the Margrave lacked the musicians in his ensemble to perform the concertos. The parts of the music were sold for a pittance after the Margrave’s death and the autograph manuscript of the concerti was only rediscovered in the archives of the Brandenburg court in 1849. It was obvious that it had never been used and, given the peculiarities I have described, this is not very surprising.”
“Could Bach have been trying to show what he could do? Perhaps these concerti were written for the ensemble he was used to writing for, and his plan was to demonstrate his skills by playing the solo violin and keyboard parts of the fourth and fifth concerti himself?”
“That may be admissible,” conceded Holmes. “But that leaves so much unexplained. Why would he send a Margrave, who almost certainly could not read a score, a paper demonstration of his skills as a composer, including two pieces out of six which required Bach himself, who lived eighty miles away in Cöthen, in Saxony, to perform them? Why did he send the other four pieces? We know of no major musical figure working at the Margrave’s court who could have evaluated Bach’s music or performed the more difficult pieces. Equally, Bach cannot have taken the trouble to write out six elaborate concerti in manuscript, merely so that the Margrave could display them on his wall, or as a practical joke. There must have been some other motivation for Bach doing as he did. His motivation in writing the Brandenburg concerti in the way that he did is what the Bach Society is asking me to investigate.”
“So what are you proposing to do now?” I asked.
For answer, Holmes reached up to the shelf and started to take down a selection of volumes from the recently published Complete Edition of Bach’s music. “The Bach Society has given me all forty-six volumes of their publication as an advance payment for solving this mystery, and as a tool to enable me to study Bach’s music at its source. This is a reward far more munificent than any other I have ever received for my work, since Bach’s music is an inexhaustible treasury of glories. I would add,” he said with a slightly sly smile, “that the reward for completing the commission is on a similarly lavish scale.”
For the rest of the day he sat entirely absorbed over the music, interrupting his study of the scores only to get down more volumes. Occasionally he could be heard sighing with pleasure at some particular felicity in Bach’s work and sometimes he put his violin to his chin to play a strain or two of the notes in front of him.
At the end of the day he turned to me: “My examination of these scores merely increases the mystery. Many of the movements from the Brandenburg concerti appear in reworked form in other pieces by Bach. Yet in all cases they are reworked without the eccentricities to which I previously alluded, making them straightforward for an ordinary ensemble to perform. The more extreme oddities - such as the stratospheric trumpet part - do not appear at all, or, in the case of the coruscating cadenza for keyboard in the fifth concerto, appear only in a greatly simplified form. I am not clear whether these other versions of the music were written before or after 1721, but it is clear that Bach was aware both of the lasting value of his material and the performance difficulty of what he had produced. If there is one thing that can be relied on in a composer, it is his practical sense in producing versions of his music that can actually be performed. Yet, practical man though Bach undoubtedly was, he sent this manuscript to Brandenburg, although its technical difficulties rendered it unperformable there.”
Holmes subsequently travelled to both Brandenburg and Cöthen to investigate the mystery further, but his findings merely made matters still more inexplicable. He told me afterwards how he had searched through the court archives of Brandenburg to find payments to musicians and had found a few to string players, none to any wind players, and none to any composer he recognised. In Cöthen he found that the regular ensemble under Bach’s charge had seventeen players which correspo
nded approximately in number but not necessarily in instrumentation to the ensembles needed for the six concerti, apart from the first. As Holmes pointed out, however, this merely made matters stranger as why would Bach send a manuscript adapted to his Cöthen ensemble to Brandenburg and not retain a copy for use in Cöthen?
My last question to him about the Brandenburg concerti was not about Bach at all but about Vivaldi. Bach, I knew, had died in Leipzig in 1750. What had happened to Vivaldi, I asked Holmes.
“No one is quite sure,” said Holmes. “He is known to have died in poverty in Vienna in 1741 having composed music for a girls’ orphanage in Venice for many years. Aside from the works that were published in his lifetime and which lie gathering dust in specialist music libraries, there is no music of his available to the public, so today his music is known only to the ear of God. And, just as very little of Bach’s work was printed in his life time, so it is likely that most of Vivaldi’s music was left in manuscript form. But the location of his manuscripts, if indeed any are extant, is unknown. The pieces I have played to you are my own arrangements for violin of the works that Bach had arranged for keyboard and that is the only way to hear any of his music.”
Holmes picked up his violin and played some more violin music by Vivaldi transcribed by Bach for keyboard and re-transcribed for violin by Holmes himself.
And that was our last discussion on the topic, for other matters arose which meant that Holmes could not continue the investigation.
By early 1927, I had quite forgotten the whole mystery. I remarried in 1907 and from then on I was busy in practice and heard only very occasionally and very irregularly from Holmes from his retirement home on the South Downs. I had just completed a long round of patient visits and was writing up my notes when the maid knocked and said “There’s a visitor to see you, sir.”
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 3 Page 4