The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2

by Orlando Pearson

  I expected Holmes to continue elaborating his theory, but instead he said: “But for now I can do nothing more on this case and tomorrow we must dedicate ourselves to the delicate matters of government business for which we are supposed to be here.” Holmes then started adumbrating how we would spend the next few days.

  I was baffled in Holmes’s apparent lack of interest in the further pursuit of the commissioner of the requiem when he apparently had such a clear idea that it was Count von Walsegg, although I remained unable to follow the reasoning for his assuredness on this matter. Nevertheless I knew better than to ask my friend for further explanations and eventually left him seated on his own while I went to bed.

  Several days passed. The diplomatic and political intrigues we were being paid to watch and report on occupied our time fully. Holmes himself would never allow one case to distract him from another and hence never discussed the anonymous commission we had been investigating. It was as though Frau Mozart’s visit and the events that followed it had never happened.

  Thus, when I came down to breakfast one morning a few days later, I was fully expecting to spend another busy day shuttling between the British embassy, the Austrian Parliament and other locations which I am not at liberty to disclose. I was astonished, therefore, to see the saturnine Beethoven standing in the foyer. “Is Mr Holmes here, Dr Watson?” he asked. “I had an urgent summons from him.”

  At this point Holmes came down the stairs and the three of us went into breakfast.

  Over the food, Holmes elucidated the problem to Beethoven. Could Beethoven, he asked, complete the requiem so that it could plausibly be presented to its commissioner as Mozart’s own work although derived from his sketches? The completion, Holmes stressed, would have to be in Mozart’s style and would have to be ready very quickly if the commissioner of the requiem was not to get suspicious about the long delay after Mozart’s death in producing it.

  Beethoven was unusually thoughtful. “I am already planning a work modelled on Mozart’s quintet for piano and four wind instruments. When he wrote it, Mozart regarded it as the best piece he had ever written. I would like to produce a companion piece to it as my work will then be assured of a performance whenever the Mozart piece is performed, as there are no other compositions for this combination of instruments. It would be an honour if I was also able to complete what is, alas, Mozart’s final work, although I would not want to have my name associated with the completion. I intend to make my own way in this world and do not want the public to know me merely as someone who completes other peoples’ works, however authentically I think I may be able to do so. But I cannot stay in Vienna for more than a week as I have commitments to complete for the Elector in Bonn.”

  “You will be afforded every help we can provide to help you with finishing the task in that time frame. One of Mozart’s pupils, Süβmayr,” - I saw Beethoven’s face drop at the mention of this name - “will help you with the routine parts of the composition: the base lines and filling in the parts where instruments double each other, but you must use your skill and judgement to make the most Mozartean version possible of the ideas that Mozart left behind for the rest.”

  The next week saw a period of frenzied working. Beethoven laboured into the night to realise the sketches, passing as much as he could onto Süβmayr, who did his best to carry out his work to Beethoven’s satisfaction, but who was nevertheless often the victim of the latter’s acerbic tongue. Fortunately, the benefits of the composition lessons Holmes had taken from Haydn now came into their own. It was not long before Beethoven had acquired a healthy respect for my friend’s compositional and technical skills, and he often preferred to involve Holmes in the work rather than the over-tasked Süβmayr. I was amused to note that Holmes took good care not to disclose who his most recent composition teacher had been. For my part I spent my time making sure that the manuscript pages were kept in the right order as the collaboration frequently threatened to disintegrate into chaos, with sheets of paper in two, three and sometimes even four different hands in various stages of completeness strewn all over the room we were working in.

  In less than a week, the piece was complete in all details and Beethoven expressed himself entirely satisfied with the results of his labours. Süβmayr was told that he could tell Frau Mozart that the Requiem was complete but was under strict instructions not to tell her how. He left us with the look of a man relieved of a weighty burden. Then Beethoven, rewarded handsomely by Holmes himself for his efforts, departed bound for Bonn. I half expected Holmes to revert once more to resolving the diplomatic issues for which had originally been sent out to Vienna but instead, declaring himself content that the work that had now been worthily completed, he finally expressed the desire to go to Gloggnitz.

  The small town of Gloggnitz lies on the main route from Vienna to Trieste and our journey there was a relatively easy one. Count von Walsegg lived in the grand Stuppach Palace just outside the town and my friend’s visiting card rapidly secured us an audience with him. The Count was short and pudgy in stature and sat behind an enormous writing desk which looked imposing, but which made him look punier still by comparison. He was dressed from head to toe in black. It was clear he had a grasp of several languages although our conversation was predominantly in English.

  “Mr Holmes, to what do I owe this pleasure? I am used to reading of your adventures in London and elsewhere in England, but I little expected to have the honour of greeting you here in our perhaps somewhat unprepossessing town.”

  “I have come to ask you about your requiem mass, my Lord.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Mr Holmes, you intrude into a recent grief,” Walsegg finally replied. “My beloved wife Anna died at the tender age of twenty exactly a year ago today. I had planned for this afternoon to play with my orchestra and choir the requiem I was writing in her memory. Alas, circumstances have intervened and with one thing and another, I have not been able to complete it. I have had to postpone the performance sine die. We will have a concert of others of my works next week.”

  “It is a pleasure indeed to meet a composer, my Lord. Your reputation as a composer has spread to Vienna, from where I have just come, and where you are the talk of the musicians.”

  Walsegg looked far from pleased with this remark.

  “My fame has spread to Vienna? I had no idea that my works were discussed so far afield.” He flushed a deep red to the roots of his dark brown hair and took a long draft of water from a glass at his right hand. There was another long pause.

  “Although there are many musicians in Vienna, the elite are actually quite few in number and in my time in Vienna I have made the acquaintance of several of them,” said Holmes calmly. “Musicians often talk quite openly about what music they have played, what they have written and sometimes for which patrons. I have often heard your name mentioned by both composers and performers.”

  Walsegg sat back in his chair looking aghast.

  “It is often said, my Lord,” continued Holmes in his most unconcerned tone, although the longer he spoke, the profounder the expression of horror that spread over Walsegg’s face, “that a musician should never mock a musical work by an aristocrat as one never knows who really wrote it. Frederick the Great surrounded himself with a coterie of the best composers of his day and the works that he is claimed to have written bear a striking similarity to theirs.”

  Walsegg stood up and reached out towards the bell, perhaps with the intention of calling an attendant to escort us out, but then thought better of it. His mouth opened and closed two or three times and then he finally sat down. He said nothing as he looked intently into the distance.

  “My dear Count von Walsegg,” continued Holmes, leaning back in his chair. “It is really too transparent and a very bad compliment to my investigative skills for you not to speak. Why should you be so anxious to commission a requiem mass from He
rr Mozart anonymously? And why, when the death of the composer of the requiem mass was announced, were you so anxious not to find out what had happened to your commission? Surely no other explanation fits the facts than that you intended to pass the requiem mass off as your own. But you could not pretend that an incomplete requiem was by you immediately after the death of one of the very few composers who could have done justice to such a momentous commission.”

  Walsegg went quite white before he stammered. “My behaviour is not ... is not ...” and he paused as he sought the right word, “is not ... actionable, I trust?”

  “I very much fear it is not,” said Holmes looking Walsegg straight in the eye, “but between you and me, you might find it rather embarrassing if the facts were to come out. People are so inclined to ridicule fakers, and faking appears particularly absurd when it is clear that its sole motive is personal vanity. It is rather like men who colour their hair.”

  Walsegg’s face switched back from white to red and there was another long silence.

  “To whom have you spoken about this matter?” he asked at length.

  “The only people who know about this are in this room.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Fortunately, Count von Walsegg, although the great Mozart died before he able to complete the work in its last detail, his sketches were sufficiently clear for a full and authentic version of the requiem mass to be made from them. I have the manuscript here with me now. It would resolve matters fully if you made a final payment to Frau Mozart of the amount due to her in complete and final settlement of the commission. Your attempt to pass off this work as your own and your passing off of other works as your own need then never come out.”

  “It shall be done, it shall be done!” whimpered the Count.

  Shortly afterwards Frau Mozart received the balance due of the commission, and Holmes and I were able to dedicate ourselves fully to the diplomatic mission that was the original purpose of our journey to Vienna.

  Now, several years after the events described above, it is time to provide a brief synopsis of some of the events that followed.

  Mozart’s Requiem was first performed in its entirety in January 1893 at a benefit concert for Constanza Mozart. She later proved highly astute as a businesswoman and raised both her sons on the money she was able to make by selling Mozart’s remaining manuscripts to publishers over a long period. Her sons became composers though, it need hardly be said, they were of much more modest talents than their father and she eventually remarried.

  In December 1893, a performance of the requiem was finally given in memory of Count Walsegg’s late wife.

  Rumours continued to circulate about the precise provenance of the work as the long delay between the death of the composer and the Requiem’s premiere caused suspicions as to its authenticity, but it remained known as Mozart’s Requiem. In 1909, it was played at a memorial service to Joseph Haydn when he passed away at the grand age of seventy-seven.

  Beethoven had moved to Vienna in late 1892 and took lessons from Haydn, though their relationship did not improve. Afterwards, the German declared he had learnt nothing from the Austrian and instead took lessons from Albrechtsberger and Salieri. For all the low opinion Beethoven was known to hold of the work of many of his contemporaries, he was nevertheless occasionally asked by lovers of music for his views. Not a man normally given to making cryptic remarks, Beethoven caused much puzzlement in musical circles by his comment on Mozart’s Requiem. “If this work is not all by Mozart,” Beethoven said, “then whoever wrote it is a Mozart.”

  I am happy that this story, which like all the Sherlock Holmes stories about music, is being withheld at my friend’s specific request until long after his own death, decodes the true meaning behind Beethoven’s remark.

  The German Interpreter

  In my collaborations with Sherlock Holmes we had many encounters with people who were wicked. In no other case, however, did we encounter organised evil of the kind that is described in the narrative that follows. It was these events that made me realise that even though the Great War was only a few years behind us, another war was becoming increasingly likely. They also confirmed to me an old political maxim about the nature of evil for which the events I describe might have been made. I would finally add that where my stories normally show the seemingly limitless powers of my friend, this story highlights the limits of what he was able to achieve. Even when, as here, he identified the perpetrator of a crime in the most unpromising of circumstances, he was rendered powerless to act in the face of forces that seemed to embody evil itself.

  By January 1930, I had been back in private practice at Queen Square in Bloomsbury for over twenty years, having moved out of Baker Street in 1907 when I remarried. Over the previous years I had heard from Holmes irregularly and infrequently from his bee-keeper’s retirement cottage on the South Downs. Although I have often pointed out the deficiencies of my friend as a correspondent, I confess here that I myself made very few attempts to contact him as my work as a doctor and my family life kept me at full stretch.

  On the thirtieth of January I received a telegram which stated that due to a major accident all doctors in the Bloomsbury area had to report to University College Hospital immediately.

  When I got to the hospital I was told I needed to go straight into an operating theatre as it was my surgical skills that were required, following a major incident. As it was many years since I had used my skills as a surgeon, I assumed that some military or industrial disaster had occurred, and so braced myself for a scene of horror even though all seemed quiet. A uniformed member of hospital staff accompanied me to the theatre allocated to me. When I opened the door, I was therefore astonished and somewhat perplexed to find its only occupant to be Sherlock Holmes.

  “It’s like this, Watson,” he said calmly as soon as I walked in. “I received a telegram from the Foreign Office this morning asking me to come to London at the earliest opportunity as my advice was needed on a matter of the utmost delicacy. The telegram made no reference to what the matter might be. As I live on my own, it was easy for them to be sure that no one else could become aware of the summons. The Foreign Office, however, also told me they require your involvement in this case and needed advice from me on how to contact you without running the risk of breaching the confidentiality of what we are to discuss. As a family man leading a busy medical practice, it was difficult to ensure any similar summons to you would remain secret - hence I suggested this stratagem with the accident, which I hope has not discommoded you too much.”

  When Holmes so chooses, he can have a very soothing manner, and my initial irritation at the subterfuge to get me to the hospital was soon forgotten in my eagerness to collaborate with him once again. Holmes continued:

  “The British ambassador to Berlin returned to London this morning with an official from the German Foreign Office. They have already spoken to the Foreign Secretary, who has asked them to speak to me about a matter to which I am not yet privy. I understand that the ambassador and the German official are waiting for us in the room next door so, now that you are here, I shall ask the police officer who brought you here and who is waiting outside if he will take us in to see them.”

  At this time the British ambassador to Berlin was the elegant sixty-three-year-old former Etonian, Sir Horace Rumbold. He was a career diplomat and a veteran of embassies in Tehran, Cairo and Vienna. He stood up when we came into the room, as did the fresh-faced figure next to him.

  I will be surprised if my readers recognise the name of Dr Paul-Otto Schmidt, who had accompanied Sir Horace to London. They may, however, find they know his face which is among those on the cover of this book. Schmidt was Germany’s leading interpreter until the end of the War. Before the events that I now describe, he had been Germany’s interpreter at the Locarno Conference in 1925, where Rumbold was also present. Then in 1938 he was to b
e the interpreter at the Munich conference that dismembered Czechoslovakia. Thus he appears in many newspaper photographs alongside figures such as Chamberlain, Hitler, Petain and Deladier but, as the interpreter, he was never named in the caption of the picture as it was only the political figures who were identified. He was short and stout but had a friendly expression on his face. Unsurprisingly, as Germany’s leading interpreter, he spoke English with barely an accent.

  After introductions, Sir Horace came straight to the point:

  “You will be aware, Mr Holmes, that the present German government consists of an unstable coalition in which the Social Democrats are the main party with Herr Herrmann Müller as Chancellor. The government limps from week to week through a succession of deals with small parties. There is also a growing political force called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or NSDAP. At the last national election a year and a half ago, this party attracted less than three per cent of the popular vote. Since then, it has grown significantly in strength as the German economy has weakened. The Communist Party, or KPD, is also a major force and picked up over ten per cent of the vote at the last poll to become the fourth-largest party in parliament. In truth the NSDAP and the Communists, although they take part in elections, have no real time for the democratic process.”

  “I follow political events in Germany closely through both British and local-language newspapers. I have increasing concern at developments,” said Holmes, “and I am grateful for your additional insights.”

  “The NSDAP, under its leader, Adolf Hitler, attempted a coup in Munich in 1923 while the Communist Party, under its leader, Ernst Thälmann, attempted something similar in Hamburg - also seven years ago. The NSDAP has a large and violent paramilitary section called the Sturmabteilung or the Stormtroopers. The unwieldy name of Sturmabteilung is often shortened to the SA and it holds rallies in cities across the country where its members parade in brown uniforms. The Communist Party has militias of its own which do much the same thing, so the two paramilitary groups often clash.”