The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2

by Orlando Pearson

  The long hours that I had to dedicate to my practice meant that I was not able to spend as much time with Haydn as I would have liked. Thus it was Holmes who took the lead in comforting the grieving musician, showing a side of his personality which I had not seen before as he normally had little time for human emotions. He urged the composer to dedicate himself to his work - the same advice as he was to give to me after the loss of my first wife a few years later - and perhaps the increased intellectual rigour and emotional depth which music critics detect in the works that Haydn wrote after the death of Mozart are the direct result of my friend’s advice.

  Maybe as a way to channel the Austrian’s thoughts away from the death of his friend, Holmes introduced a wide range of topics to our discussions. Haydn and Holmes talked about violin making, politics and field sports - all subjects in which Haydn was an expert and in which Holmes either had an interest himself, or of which he was keen to increase his knowledge. For my own part, I engaged the composer in conversation on medical matters. Haydn suffered from nose polyps - a remnant from an attack of smallpox suffered as a child - and was interested in what I had to say about the latest medical advances in dealing with these. But, inevitably, it was Holmes who led the conversations. He was particularly eager to learn about what the next developments in music might be and Haydn was only too happy to let him know his thoughts.

  “I follow events all over Europe,” he told us. “I look at the works of young composers, examine radical possibilities in structures and forms, and try out untested musical instruments to obtain previously untried sonorities. This is my first journey outside Austria and I have taken advantage of it to broaden my understanding of the latest developments. To this end I broke my journey to London in the Rhineside town of Bonn. There, at the court of the Elector of Cologne, I renewed my acquaintance with a swarthy young viola player called Beethoven. I had met him previously when he came to Vienna though he was not yet twenty at the time and I was curious to see how he had developed as even at such a young age it had been clear he had an extraordinary talent. My recent encounter with him has reinforced my opinion that he will be the next great European composer. He is a true Titan. His music has a drive and a vitality ... and ... and ... and!”

  When early in 1892 it was finally time for Holmes and me to travel to Vienna, Herr Haydn came to see us off on our journey. “I shall be busy here in London for several more months,” he said, “so I hope to see you on your return - or maybe in Vienna if your stay there becomes protracted.”

  Like Haydn on his way to London, we planned to break our journey and the Austrian master had kindly written to Beethoven, the second remarkable musician whose acquaintance we were to make before our encounter with Frau Mozart. Haydn asked the young and still largely unknown Beethoven to make arrangements for us to stay in Bonn. When we met him, the twenty-one-year-old German proved to be as dark in complexion as Haydn had told us, fully meriting the nickname “The Italian” that his associates had bestowed on him. To us personally, the young man was extremely helpful, but he was also self-assured to the point of arrogance. Where Haydn had been full of the charm the Austrians are famous for, Beethoven was blunt, abrupt and moody. To our surprise, he had a much lower opinion of Haydn’s music than we had formed. He told us quite openly that he regarded it as being insufficiently challenging.

  “Charming, but lacking in true force,” was his blunt verdict. “The old man has spent far too much time working as a court composer, where he has to provide one piece after another to meet the petty whims of princelings who owe their position to their birth and not to their ability. I can assure you, Mr Holmes, there will be hundreds of princes, but there will only be one Beethoven.”

  The German confessed that he too had been grief-stricken at the news of Mozart’s death, especially as he had hoped to go to Vienna to have lessons with him.

  “I had already met Herr Mozart and some of his students when I was in Vienna in 1887. He was following the musical path that I want to follow in that he produced his own works as he pleased, rather than writing at the behest of some nobleman. He organised his own subscription concert series, where he presented works that had a true originality. I had already learnt much about music from studying Mozart’s pieces and would have learnt a lot from him in person - and not just about his music, but also about how to be a successful impresario of my own pieces. And I know that I would have outshone his somewhat mediocre pupils.”

  Soon afterwards we arrived in Vienna and I have already recounted the dramatic arrival of Frau Mozart at our hotel on our first evening there. When Frau Mozart had taken her leave, Holmes tucked the envelope she had entrusted to him under his arm and we returned to the dining room to complete our meal. We did not discuss the contents of our meeting with her while we ate, but afterwards, as we sat over brandy and cigars, I asked: “What can you deduce about the commissioner of this music from an incomplete manuscript which neither he nor his intermediary has ever seen?”

  “My dear Watson,” answered Holmes impatiently, “how many people would commission a great composer to write a requiem mass and make an advance payment for it? And, given that they make such a commission, they will also have had to give Mozart some indication of the forces to be used. And given the anonymity which cloaks the commission, it must have been a private individual who made it. I have told you before that if you can say definitely a murder has been carried out by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it narrows your field of search. Similarly, if only an organist is required to accompany this piece, or even more so if it is a cappella, its commissioner must be a person of relatively modest means. If it calls for larger forces, then that would imply someone wealthier. The grander the forces for which this piece is written, the easier its commissioner will be to identify.”

  With that he opened the envelope. He first of all extracted the manuscript and spread it out on the table in front of him. As soon as he looked at the opening staves, I saw an expression of excitement come over Holmes’s face.

  “Ah, this is most fortunate. Do you see the scoring of this? Strings and organ, I would expect, and their presence does not tell us much. But look! There are parts for bassoons, trumpets, basset horns and trombones too. This means that this piece must be written for a man of significant means. There is much to ponder here.”

  “But Holmes, we are in the heart of an Empire with a centuries-old music tradition and which stretches from here to Bohemia, Galicia, Hungary and Trieste. Every village has its own member of the moneyed aristocracy, its own choir and its own band of musicians. You may limit your field of search by looking for someone who could afford to employ a large orchestra, but even then there are innumerable members of the Austro-Hungarian nobility who might have commissioned this piece!”

  But answer came there not as Holmes was already far away in a world of his own. He sat at a large table in a pool of lamplight, slowly turning over the pages of Mozart’s manuscript. Looking over his shoulder, I could see how the opening pages were scored in full, but that as the manuscript progressed, the handwriting became weaker and weaker, and the amount of detail written on the paper scantier and scantier. At the end of the Offertory it broke off altogether. I heard Holmes mutter things like “Fugue here ... Back to the beginning there ...”

  “What do you make of the scraps of paper?” I finally asked.

  Holmes came to, reached into the envelope, carefully extracted the scraps from it, and laid them out in front of him. I could see staves with some dashes of notes, words and numbers scattered across them but even with my untrained eye I could see that the material was far from making up a complete work. Holmes’s face lengthened as he picked over the fragments.

  “Constructing a finished work from the incomplete manuscript and these scraps will be no easy matter. I hope that Mozart was able to give his student at least some additional information orally before he finally expired.” Finally he got up
to stretch himself. “I am really supposed to dedicate tomorrow to the service of the Government,” he said thoughtfully, “but I feel I have a much more important responsibility to Frau Mozart and her family, not to mention a duty to posterity.”

  With that he sat down again and bent over the papers while I retired to my room as I was weary after our long journey.

  The next morning after breakfast, we waited in the foyer for Frau Mozart, but she did not appear. Instead, at the appointed time, a man rushed in through the door. He looked rather sweaty and flustered as he approached the hotel concierge. We heard him ask to speak to us and the concierge immediately brought him over.

  He introduced himself as Franz Süβmayr and we retired to a separate room to talk. Süβmayr spoke only German so the version of the conversation which I set out below is to a considerable extent based on what Holmes told me afterwards. While this might suggest to the reader that my reconstruction of the dialogue below is somewhat conjectural, Süβmayr’s gestures and expression betrayed much of what he said without any need for an advanced level of knowledge of the language.

  “I was Herr Mozart’s best pupil,” he said. “Frau Mozart asked me to come here and speak to you. One of her sons is very unwell this morning, so I agreed to come to discuss completion of the requiem mass of which she gave you the incomplete manuscript and Herr Mozart’s notes on how the work should finish.”

  Holmes laid out the manuscript and the scraps of paper which Frau Mozart had left with us the previous night. Süβmayr pecked at the scraps like a sparrow. He took first one in his hand, shook his head, then put it down and then did the same with another. He then laid them all out on the table in front of him, re-ordered them twice and then leant back in his seat with a look of complete gloom on his face. It was evident he was waiting for Holmes to speak as he himself had nothing to say.

  “So Herr Süβmayr,” asked Holmes finally, “do you think you can complete the requiem based on these pieces of paper and what Herr Mozart told you before he died?”

  “I had planned to do so,” he said, not meeting Holmes’s eye. “But when I see how much there is to do, I quaver at the task.”

  “Have you told Frau Mozart this?”

  “I have not been able to bring myself to do so. She is understandably desperate to have this commission completed and I do not wish to disappoint her. Although I am a composer of some experience, none of the works I have written up till now are of anything like the complexity and ambition of this one.”

  “Very well,” said Holmes. “There is no need to tell Frau Mozart of your concerns for the moment. Let me see if I can find a solution to this problem.”

  Süβmayr left us after this brief exchange and his face bore a look of infinite relief at Holmes’s proposal.

  “I shall have to leave you to your own devices for the rest of the day, my dear Watson,” Holmes said when we were alone. “But when I need you, I shall send a message to this hotel.”

  I spent the next few hours visiting the sights. Vienna is a city of many delights and, even in the chilly February weather, it was a pleasure to walk around the Ringstraβe and look at the grand buildings, and to visit the Stephansdom with its steeple perched on one side, which gives the cathedral its engagingly lop-sided look. Frau Mozart had told us that her husband was buried in the St Marx cemetery, but when I went there the attendant told me that the burial had been in an unmarked grave. I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon and found a note from Holmes waiting for me in the pigeon hole.

  “Come to the Hofoper on the Ringstraβe at half past seven. There is a performance of Mozart’s penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito, tonight.”

  The note gave me no clue as to where in the huge opera house I should meet Holmes, but I nevertheless went around the Ringstraβe to the theatre and bought a ticket in the dress circle. As the auditorium filled up, I scanned it for my friend but was unable to see him. It was only when the conductor mounted the podium and I looked down into the orchestra pit that, to my complete astonishment, I finally caught sight of Holmes. He was sitting with his instrument to his chin in the third row of the second violins. His face bore an expression of the utmost poise and when the music started, it was clear that he was taking a full part in the performance.

  There was no way to communicate with him so I concentrated on the music. The evening passed with one memorable melody after another. I was particularly struck by an aria accompanied by an instrument I had never heard before, but which sounded like a deeper version of the clarinet. My ears were captivated by the way the singer’s voice melded with the mellifluous sounds of this new and mysterious wind instrument.

  At the end of the evening, I went around to the stage door and found Holmes engaged in a conversation in a mixture of English and German with one of the other musicians.

  “Ah Watson,” he said when he saw me, “this is Herr Anton Stadler. He was the man who gave the first performance of Mozart’s final concerto - a work written expressly for a version of the clarinet with an extended deeper range requiring a longer instrument and an additional finger-key of which Herr Stadler is the principal exponent. He also played the marvellous basset clarinet solo tonight, which may have caught your attention.”

  Stadler was a tall, thin man and his stature exaggerated the stagger with which, to my surprise, he swayed towards me. As he stood weaving to and fro in front of me, there was an over-powering smell of brandy on his breath. I could not work out why Holmes would have chosen to have singled this Scottish musician out as his conversation partner, but I nevertheless offered my hand to Herr Stadler. He shook it uncertainly before he fell back against the wall next to the stage door, as though the effort of shaking hands had been all too much for him.

  While Stadler recovered his composure, Holmes whispered to me: “There are very few basset horn players in Austria and it is likely that one of the basset horn parts in the requiem was written for this man. We must take him to a tavern and see if we can persuade him to speak.”

  We set off and on the way Holmes explained to me how he had come to be playing in the opera house that night. “There was a public rehearsal of the opera this morning,” he explained, “and I fell into conversation with one of the violinists. He was anxious to get out of playing in the opera house tonight as he had another engagement that was paying him better, but he had been unable to find anyone with the requisite skills to replace him. I was able to demonstrate to him my abilities on the violin and he lent me his spare instrument. I am bound to say I have found this evening most stimulating - not just because of the music making but also because of the musical connections I have made.”

  By this time we had arrived at an ancient wine cellar called the Zwölf Apostelkeller. We sat down and Holmes ordered wine for all of us. He turned to the clarinettist and said “It is a pleasure to have made your acquaintance, Herr Stadler.”

  There was a silence before Stadler mumbled something incoherent, but wine soon loosened all our tongues. The conversation continued in a stumbling mixture of German and English.

  “Do you confine your talents to the orchestras of Vienna, Herr Stadler,” asked Holmes, with the easy charm he could adopt so readily when he wanted to, “or do your skills with the different instruments of the clarinet family take you further afield?”

  “I play everywhere ... everywhere,” mumbled Stadler and sat bolt upright in his chair before pausing to take a deep draft from his glass. “I play everywhere I can get paid well, or at all. Last year I played in La Clemenza di Tito at its premiere in Prague. Now I play in it here in Vienna. I love playing the music of Mozart. I owe that man so much!” Stadler broke off and slumped in his seat. He put his head in his arms and appeared to have gone to sleep, but then raised himself again and continued. “Next week I play somewhere,” Stadler broke off to raise his glass unsteadily to his lips, “where a Count pays me better than I get paid he
re whenever I play for him. After that, who knows where I will play? If I have to, I will play on the street.”

  With numerous circumlocutions and irrelevances, Holmes managed to extract from Stadler that his high-paying engagements were at Gloggnitz, a small town sixty miles southwest of Vienna, in the private orchestra of a Count Franz von Walsegg. “The count conducts the music himself” explained Stadler, “and, most importantly, he pays the musicians well.” The last comment that we were able to make out from the drunken musician before the effect of his alcoholic consumption overcame him completely was: “And the count composes all the pieces we play himself. But they each have a distinct style of their own.” After this, Stadler collapsed once again into his arms at the table and was unable to say anything more.

  Holmes looked very pleased at the turn of events and called for the Viennese equivalent of a hansom cab - a Droschke - to get Stadler to his home.

  We made our way the short distance back to the Imperial. Sitting over our cigars, I asked Holmes “I take it that this Count von Walsegg figures large in your theory about this case?”

  “Oh,” said Holmes, “it is far more than a theory! The commissioner of the requiem was a private individual, and this individual can afford to pay for an orchestra with a full wind section including unusual instruments. And this Count sets before this orchestra his own works, though each work has its own individual fingerprint. And yet the Count has apparently lost interest in the requiem he commissioned from Mozart. Why would the Count make no attempt to follow up a commission for which he had paid an advance? This behaviour can really only mean one thing.”