He was present officially as assistant to Ludwig and Willy, but kept quiet about his reason for wanting to go. If he were there himself, he could raise the issue of Jelly d’Arányi and her moral right to play the piece first, in case the Streckers could not or would not. During the long train journey to Berlin, the brothers had talked little and smoked a great deal. Ulli didn’t like to smoke, but today, beset with nerves worse than any he had experienced since he last gave a concert, he accepted a cigarette from Ludwig.
‘It’s all right, Ulli,’ said his boss. ‘It will soon be over. Nothing to worry about.’
The most alarming moment so far had been just before they were shown up to the meeting room. At that point Ulli would have given several teeth for the good sense never to have involved himself in this crazy project.
It was a comfort, in some ways, to discover that Goebbels was considerably shorter than he was. He, too, had to visit the toilet and brush his teeth and probably woke up his wife snoring. He had a club foot, and one leg an inch or two longer than the other. His polished shoe squealed against the wooden floor as he made his way to the table, cutting a figure that was no prototype of the Aryan master race. Pure fiction, Ulli remembered. There was no such thing. How could anybody look at this man and believe there was?
The Schott’s representatives were outnumbered, with four officials opposite the three of them: Goebbels, Raabe, a clerk to take minutes, and one extra backstop whose purpose was not clear to them – perhaps for numbers, perhaps to scrutinise the publishers’ every word. While Willy Strecker made his initial presentation, Ulli took a swig of water from a glass that Goebbels’s secretary had brought, but had to cough when some of it went down the wrong way.
‘So, your artistic view is that this concerto is not actually good enough to perform in its current state?’ Goebbels said, responding to Raabe’s assessment. The assistant scribbled minutes in black ink. Ulli took notes for their side.
‘Schumann’s state of mind when he wrote it was very uncertain,’ Raabe said, glancing to the Streckers. ‘That is why the work was hushed up for such a long time and why the old lesbian in Switzerland is in such a huff over its unearthing. The fact is, her mother had a point. It’s not top-quality Schumann. This matters, gentlemen. Let me explain. The Jew Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is no longer to be heard in our concert halls, but unfortunately it’s the most popular violin concerto in the country. Something needs to take its place and so, if there is to be a concerto we can be proud of and that will fulfil its purpose here, then elements of it need to be reworked.’
Ulli listened and kept very quiet. So that was the idea? Mendelssohn’s parents had converted to Lutheranism and the composer had been a devout Christian, more so than Brahms and probably more than Schumann himself. Clearly that well-known fact cut no ice with this team.
‘I believe my brother is the right man to nominate an appropriate composer for the job,’ Ludwig said. ‘I understand your projected choice of Breitkopf, Dr Raabe, since they publish the complete Schumann edition. But I would respectfully suggest that Schott’s could add value that nobody else could match. We have an exceptional level of commitment to this work – not least because it is our firm, and not Breitkopf, that has received permission to put it into print, from its original custodian, who deposited it in the library. I believe that that permission is exclusive and cannot be extended to the other company.’
‘I see… We will look into that.’ Raabe made a note.
‘And how would you propose to take the matter forward, given our colleague’s view of the piece?’ Goebbels, his eyes oddly opaque, was said to be irresistible to women. Ulli couldn’t imagine why.
‘For a start,’ Ludwig said, ‘I know of nobody whose musical judgement I trust as much as my brother’s, family issues aside. We would be honoured if you were to decide to award the concerto to Schott’s, on the basis of a reworking by an appropriate composer of my brother’s choice – one who is able to imagine himself into the head of a bygone genius. It would be a task for the finest craftsman, and we have many under our auspices.’
‘Professor Kulenkampff wishes to adapt the piece to make his own playing edition,’ said Raabe, ‘and desires it to remain exclusively his, hence unpublished.’
‘Professor Kulenkampff must of course do as he wishes. As for the performing edition that we will print, I have some ideas,’ said Willy Strecker.
Ulli noticed Ludwig kicking his brother’s ankle under the table – perhaps a glimpse of family dinners, when they were boys together in another century.
‘We have several excellent in-house editors who can begin the process,’ Ludwig said, ‘and there are fine musicians in Frankfurt we can consult, besides the composers of our catalogue. All we would ask is the freedom to do so at our discretion.’
‘Dr Strecker, you are more transparent than you realise, to the practised eye. I wonder exactly who you are planning to book, with these slippery words? You have some good composers in your catalogue. Mainly dead ones. But also, how many Jews, how many degenerates? I suggest you stop any such idea before you begin.’ Goebbels’s pinched voice grated on Ulli’s ears. Hitler’s bullying tone had spread among his subsidiaries like fungus on a bathroom wall. They wouldn’t argue. They would blunderbuss and pistol-whip. Their ideologies, Ulli considered, were so spurious that they could never win an honest argument, so they imposed their will by force; there was no other way to do it.
‘Your audacity has a certain appeal,’ Raabe remarked, sarcastic. ‘You’re a brave man, Dr Strecker.’
‘Or a very stupid one,’ added Goebbels. ‘We’re under no obligation to allow you to go home to beautiful Mainz, you realise.’
The publishers stayed silent, digesting what they had heard. None of them had uttered one name.
‘Perhaps you have a nomination of your own for a suitable composer?’ Ludwig said, keeping his head. ‘Or we might ask Professor Kulenkampff for his suggestion?’
Ulli, taking notes, felt sweat oozing up through his collar. How could he raise the issue of Jelly and the premiere in such an atmosphere? He had promised himself he would not leave without doing so.
He listened as Raabe and Ludwig batted names about. The key issue was that the violin as soloist must sound triumphant, representing a great leader – not a point that appeared ever to have occurred to Schumann himself. Hans Pfitzner? He’d put too much of his own stamp on it. Carl Orff? He’d probably leap at it, but the deadline could be a problem. He was a busy man, currently writing a massive new choral piece called Carmina Burana. Ulli hoped nobody would draw attention to that; he’d seen the Latin text and feared it would prove too explicitly erotic for the regime. The last thing Schott’s needed was yet another banning. Willy would have chosen Paul Hindemith, the finest craftsman they knew, a string player himself, and a ‘real’ German – but even he had fallen foul of Goebbels, having written an opera, Mathis der Maler, about a painter who turned against the idea of war. Mention of him was forbidden.
‘Whoever you ask will have to work fast,’ said Raabe eventually. ‘The premiere must take place as soon as possible.’
Ulli jolted towards hope: Raabe had said ‘will’ rather than ‘would’.
‘Speaking of the premiere… ’ Ulli recognised the moment to make his bid: now or never. ‘This concerto would not have come to light were it not for our efforts, acting on information from the eminent musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey and the violinist Miss Jelly d’Arányi. Miss d’Arányi is the great-niece of the violinist for whom the concerto was originally written. It is only right that she, as its discoverer and his close relation, should be the one to give its first performance.’
‘The great-uncle is Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian composer and famous violinist,’ muttered the hitherto silent backstop to Goebbels. ‘He was a Jew and we have taken down his statues. Miss d’Arányi is his great-niece, originally from Budapest, where she was born in the Jewish quarter. She is extremely celebrated and it’s rumour
ed that she was once Bartók’s lady friend.’
Ludwig and Willy both stared towards Ulli, stunned into silence. So did Goebbels, half rising from his chair as he turned that implacable gaze upon Ulli’s eyebrows.
‘Oh, my dear friends,’ Goebbels began. ‘You come into my headquarters, requesting my time to discuss a great German premiere for a great German concerto by a great German composer – and your employee sits in front of me saying that he, personally, wants a Jewess to play it? One more word, Dr Schultheiss, and I will pick up that telephone and call my friend in the Gestapo headquarters. I consider your views more naive than treasonous, but possibly he may not. In this case you wouldn’t see the beautiful pink cathedral of Mainz again for a long, long time. What must your employers here think of your judgement? Well, that’s for them to decide. Isn’t that so, my friends?’
‘The d’Arányis are not Jewish,’ Raabe intervened, to Ulli’s surprise. ‘One quarter, perhaps, but that’s all.’
‘You know perfectly well that’s enough,’ snapped the supposed backstop.
‘They are devout Christians and the descendants of Hungarian aristocracy,’ Willy Strecker managed to add.
‘And of a Jewish fiddler,’ said Goebbels.
Ulli stewed. To think that a man who held such power was so pig-ignorant, so poisoned with state-approved madness, that he would dismiss Joachim, the greatest violinist of the 19th century, best friend of Brahms and Schumann, as ‘a Jewish fiddler’? Worse, he could not stand up and punch the living daylights out of him. He’d be shot. He understood now that nothing he and the Streckers did or said could change one cog in the wheel of Goebbels’s gravy train. At least Raabe had inadvertently saved Ulli’s skin, for now.
‘Enough.’ Goebbels detached himself from the table and began to pace the length of the room. ‘She can’t do it in any case. Professor Kulenkampff wants exclusivity. A nice, long year of it.’
Ulli diverted his gaze to the wooden table. Better not risk staring at the minister and his club foot. This was a man whose party wanted to sterilise or euthanize those who were crippled. Imagine his inner landscape. How he must hate himself.
‘As we all agree, Professor Kulenkampff is a fine violinist,’ Willy said. ‘Nevertheless, that’s a long time for one musician alone to perform such an important work. After the premiere there’ll be soloists, orchestras and conductors queuing up to programme it, coming to us for the parts. What are we to tell them? That we can’t help them because of Professor Kulenkampff? It would cause a great deal of bad feeling and would ultimately risk rebounding against the concerto and Professor Kulenkampff himself. So it’s hardly in his interests.’
‘German artists overseas will want to play it as well. We can’t exclude performances abroad,’ Ludwig added.
‘There’s another point, too, if I may,’ Ulli ventured, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘If the concerto is to replace the Mendelssohn in concert life, it needs to become well known rapidly, and though that will certainly happen if Professor Kulenkampff plays it, still it must be performed more times in more places than one violinist can manage, to increase the public’s familiarity. Professor Kulenkampff has a teaching post here in Berlin and is highly sought after. I was a student at his college myself, actually, while Professor Schünemann was its director.’
Raabe gave a brief nod. Goebbels paused in his tracks.
‘My colleague means that Professor Kulenkampff isn’t free to tour and perform constantly, or he’d be neglecting his students, the next generation of great German musicians,’ Willy said. ‘We could usefully steer him away from exclusivity for the greater good of German music. He could keep exclusivity, of course, on his private adaptation. Subsequent performers could then make their individual arrangements.’
‘You mean, your Jewish woman friend can play it,’ said Goebbels.
‘If she does, it would be in England,’ Ulli pointed out. ‘At best, she will be spreading the supremacy of German art in the British capital. And at worst, it’s just a piece of music… ’
Goebbels sat down. He stayed still in his chair with his hands over his eyes, thinking hard – in exactly the pose Ulli had taken to adopting. Ulli made a mental note never to do that again.
‘My friends, my friends,’ Goebbels said, putting his hands flat against the table. ‘Your callow youth here has a lot to learn. Dr Schultheiss, you work for a music publisher that is in charge of some of the Reich’s finest composers – and you, of all people, dare to say that a newly rediscovered work by Robert Schumann is “just a piece of music”? Learn this, if you learn nothing else today: nothing is ever “just” a piece of music. And remember, we can close down your entire company at one stroke of a pen, whenever we like.’
*
‘Ulli,’ said Ludwig later, over much-needed schnapps in a Bierkeller a safe distance away, ‘have you gone quite mad?’
‘I apologise, Dr Strecker,’ Ulli said. His hands were still shaking. ‘I had no idea… I was just trying to do the right thing.’
‘We should sack you, and not just on their say-so. You put us all in mortal danger. The whole company! And for what? Why this sudden propensity for playing poker with the devil?’
‘We won, didn’t we?’ Ulli pointed out. At the very least, to ‘win’ meant getting out of the Ministry of Propaganda at all.
‘If we didn’t need you in the office so much… ’ Ludwig kept his voice low; there was no knowing who could overhear them, though it was a noisy place. The team had planned to stay another night in Berlin. Now, by unspoken mutual consent, they would take the next train home.
‘Are you going to dismiss me?’ Ulli asked.
‘We don’t give in to bullies. But Ulli, I advise you to play by the rules. It won’t hurt. One more false step… consider yourself duly warned.’
Ulli nodded, experiencing shuddery relief. He did not remark that as far as ‘playing by the rules’ went, he was not the person who had thought of approaching Yehudi Menuhin with the Schumann concerto. He downed his schnapps. Even if he did nothing else heroic, he had stood up to Goebbels and lived to tell the tale. Now, though, he had to find a way to explain to Jelly the hard-won yet unexpected outcome of this desperate adventure – and for that he was going to need courage of another kind altogether.
*
A letter from Mainz found its way to Netherton Grove for Jelly. First, the good news, Ulli wrote. Schott’s had won the right to publish the concerto, and Jelly to play it. He would send a photostat to her as soon it was available. It was to be prepared and, in places, altered editorially, by a fine composer and string player whose music she would know and admire, although the finished edition would not bear his name. For a few blessed seconds Jelly offered up prayers of thanks to her benign spirits as if they had sent gold cascading down from the heavens.
Then she read on. The liquid gold began to evaporate. Her performance would be the UK premiere. Kulenkampff must give the modern world premiere first, in Germany, on a directive from the highest echelons of the Third Reich. Nothing Ulli or the Streckers could say would change this. He hoped Jelly would understand. Had it been up to him…
‘Kulenkampff? That ghastly Nazi?’ The thought sliced through Jelly like cheesewire.
‘I’m sure that under any other circumstances, it would have been yours,’ Tovey said to her on the phone; she knew he meant to mollify her. ‘This situation is unprecedented. And remember, a UK premiere is not so bad, is it? Besides, I know for a fact that it will be broadcast on the BBC Home Service – I spoke to Adrian Boult about it the other day.’ Boult was now the BBC’s head of music. ‘He wishes to conduct it himself.’
How strange to think she had been playing unexpectedly with Boult the day before all this began. Bizarre, too, that one mysterious violin concerto could become such an emblem of territory and ownership; to her, Kulenkampff’s newly awarded supremacy felt like an invasion, a violation of her ground, though Alec would no doubt advise her to be less hypersensitive. On a more practi
cal level, she hoped that Schott’s unnamed composer–editor would finish his work quickly so that she could learn the piece – though it was far from clear why anybody should have to interfere with Schumann’s score. The edition would take most of the year, Ulli wrote, possibly longer, depending. On exactly what, he didn’t say.
Chapter 12
One fine April afternoon, Ulli returned from his lunch break to find a proof and two photostats in a brown-paper package on his desk. He had been walking by the Rhine, eating his sandwiches, feeding some of them to the ducks and swans, and enjoying the spring sunshine. He opened the parcel and ran a fingertip across the freshly printed staves. This was the culmination of a process so involved, so detailed, so potentially incendiary – should the fact of Hindemith’s involvement be revealed, or should the piece’s revision displease ‘them’ – that he could scarcely believe it had come to fruition at all. Strecker, though, knew what he was doing; he chose the best man for the job and had enough confidence to take the risk. He was also helping to support Hindemith, a dear friend and client for whom times were difficult and growing worse. At last, there it was: the piano reduction with violin part, spread out in front of Ulli, waiting for him to check, correct and place his tick of agreement before the Streckers gave the sign-off.
Hindemith – who had had to put his signature to a statement distancing himself from anything Jewish or left-wing – had done his job well enough, Ulli judged. The changes seemed reasonably respectful of Schumann. That pleased him, though the danger remained that it might not please Goebbels or the audience quite so much. Besides Hindemith, they had drafted in a local string quartet leader, Gustav Lenzewski, in nearby Frankfurt, to help with the violinistic editing. Kulenkampff was working separately on his own violin part.
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