‘How did he die?’
‘Fell downstairs, apparently. Literally broke his neck, according to the British Consul in Florence, though he was only passing on what the police said. No dubious circumstances, amazingly enough. I suppose the poor old thing was pissed as usual. To be honest, I think you ought to leave at once. Today, if you possibly can. There’s a complication. Gillian already knows.’
‘Ah.’ Gillian Bewley was Frank’s elder sister, an unmarried lady of some fifty-five winters with not, to judge from her manner, a single summer among them. She was Frank’s greatest champion. She knew he was a genius; disbelieved any version of her little brother which painted him dissolute; saw only conspiracy to deny him the various bays and laurels rightfully his. Gillian was not at all unlikeable, merely unlenient. One felt that from now on and for her benefit nil nisi bonum ought to be spoken of Frank’s life and loves if humanly possible. It would be a tall order. Charlie Stedall had no need to explain to me how vastly preferable it would be if I could reach Frank’s house before Gillian and remove the sort of things which might cruelly dent her image of him.
So I groaned, made lightning arrangements, flew to Pisa that same afternoon and – it turned out – had two days to myself before the grieving Gillian arrived. I did some hasty culling in Frank’s library before pursuing my searches further afield, such as under the bed and in a galvanised steamer trunk. It was as well I did so. As far as Gillian was concerned her brother had simply been ‘not the marrying kind’ just as she herself was, and presumably full of her same fierce virtuousness. I, who considered I’d known Frank Bewley rather better than she, was quite prepared for what I found, even relieved that it was yielded up in such quantity. He seemed to have made few efforts at concealment and so, I reasoned, with any luck nothing too horrendous would surface later. The odd photograph dropping out of a book could always be explained away as having been left by a guest.
I soon sent up into a flawless Tuscan sky oily billows of burning rubber, film cassettes and glossy pictures, fuelled by quantities of amyl nitrite I had found in the fridge. While this awesome pyre of Frank’s libido flared and spat and its smoke thinned to nothing towards the Apuan Alps, I gathered up over two hundred bottles (there was even an empty half of Martell inside the grand piano) and dumped them out behind the garage. In doing so I nearly fell down the very flight of steep kitchen steps which had just done for Frank, and could now see it wasn’t the ideal choice of house for a heavy drinker living on his own.
Only when all was clear could I settle down to my friend’s literary relics. And here I was in for a surprise. I began to wonder whether any of us had actually known him as well as we liked to imagine, whether we hadn’t too cheerfully connived at his own rueful self-description as a hopeless bohemian whose professional life partook of the same chaos as his private life – that the two were, in fact, inseparable. What I found, admittedly beneath a top-dressing of dust, fallen plaster and general litter, were fairly neat files of correspondence, labelled exercise books, manuscripts tied up with string. In short, an unexpected orderliness of a kind which looked to have been a habit rather than a recent access of zeal. I couldn’t think how we’d none of us noticed.
I could soon see Charlie Stedall wasn’t likely to make his fortune with a bonanza of posthumous Bewley masterpieces. As far as I could tell there was virtually nothing which hadn’t already been published. Naturally enough most things – including the vast majority of the letters – tended to cluster around dear old Frank’s one huge success, Feathers. In the current jargon Feathers had been a runaway bestseller and had made Frank (and Charlie too) a great deal of loot in its day, money which in Frank’s case was long gone. It had been a book of its time, a heart-warming tale about a boy and an owl which – but I can’t bear to go on. ‘Absolutely nauseating,’ Frank used to say of his famous story. ‘Complete shlock. Though sadly I have to admit it’s the shlock of a master shlockster.’ If he revelled in the book’s success it was only in the irony of it all. ‘You’ve got to laugh. I sweat my guts out trying to write the litty stuffy I’d actually love to do and it vanishes without trace. Then in a kind of satirical rage I write the most ghastly story I can invent, somewhere between Richard Adams and Ernest Thompson Seton with a plagiaristic nod at Kes, and the thing takes off. The joke is, the bugger’s been translated into more languages than there are literate nations. You don’t suppose they know what a bloody barn owl is in Bangladesh, do you?’
I sat at Frank’s desk and in the house’s unbroken silence felt for the first time a melancholy shape itself around his absence. What a talented old thing he’d been! Behind the booze and debauchery and the ludicrous windfall of Feathers was a remarkable sensibility, some of whose manifestations I was unqualified to judge. In the piano stool I’d come on nineteen manuscript songs of his which I carefully tied up with the resolution that I would get someone serious to look at them. The piano writing seemed difficult. Approximately half were to his own lyrics. On the walls were a few of his watercolours – ‘daubettes’ as he used to dismiss them. I was fond enough of one of his landscapes to make a mental note to ask Gillian if I might keep it. Just that one picture; nothing else.
Before she finally did arrive, tall and stately with woe, I found in the bathroom a piece Frank had obviously written recently. He used often to type out a first draft and then correct it on the lavatory with a red felt-tip pen. It had slipped down behind the cupboard which housed toilet paper, mouse shit, and – thank God I looked – a half empty bottle of grappa. I took it back to his desk and read it. It was an essay, presumably designed for a magazine, reflecting Frank’s scholarly side and the one subject he ever took seriously. ‘What it all comes down to,’ I could remember him saying, ‘is music. Old Pater was spot-on. “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” he said, and so do I. If I thought I could compose a single halfway decent bar I’d chuck this scribbling tomorrow. I’d starve in a garret. I’d cheerfully swap Feathers for a fugue. But I can’t, that’s the long and the short of it. All I can ever do, in music or writing or daubing, is sodding pastiche. Talent: five out of ten. Originality: zero out of ten. End of term report.’
So I sat there in the silence and read what was surely my late friend’s last finished piece of work.
*
FRANK’S FATE
by
Frank Bewley
Writing from country to country we are inclined to feel a natural affinity for other journeyman artists who have always been led about by their noses, by their muses, by shifting patronage and chance. It is not always easy, though, to maintain that casual, workaday, drifting pose. To live and write in a foreign place, especially one which already has its polyglot artistic community, is to feel that community’s unconscious sense of its own brilliance and, by extension, its conviction that anybody else coming to set up shop must be making some sort of claim about themselves. We intercept sharp sideways glances from those we know to be obsessed by questions of their own originality. Might we be stealing a march on them? (Do we care if we are? And we are.)
In my present home in Italy I sit in my isolated eyrie and gaze out across a seasonally sodden Tuscany. The woods on all sides are thick with maniacs in full paramilitary fig on wild boar search-and-destroy missions with rifles and dogs, their massed sweeps co-ordinated by walkie-talkie radios. Beyond this immense battlefield, among the hills and villages, lives the closely scattered foreign arts community. Serious artists all, keeping office hours and amassing work. It is all going on … While at night (so gossip runs) certain of the richer and more frivolous exiles gather and hold the most curious parties, really quite louche, some of them. Closer to my own house a penniless Hungarian concert pianist is trying to lay his hands on a decent piano.
The idea of a musician in a strange land urgently needing a piano, together with rumours of peculiar goings-on in shuttered villas behind high walls, suggests something I can’t quite clarify: a nexus of knowledge which goes on skulking un
til one day a violent coincidence sets it free. I call on a friend who plays the viola; he wants to run through a sonata by Kocžwara he has just acquired. We do so. Competent, unexceptionable eighteenth-century music; Haydnish in the early 1760s manner. I think little more of it until that same evening when I reach up to a high shelf for a book. It is not the Talmud and the entire bookcase does not topple over on me (as it did on poor Alkan, squashing dead Liszt’s only real pianistic rival before he could even draw the moral). Instead, a copy of Vathek falls and hits me on top of the head to release in a flash that mewed-up bit of memory.
The year is 1791, a good fateful year for music. London – and to some extent England generally – is a veritable Tuscany of foreign artists. František Kocžwara, or Francis Kotzwara as he has become, is only one of a floating population of Bohemian musicians. Another is Dussek, a far better composer and a friend of Mozart’s currently living in Brompton. On New Year’s Day Joseph Haydn lands at Dover on his first visit to England. Setting up amid the pastures of Lisson Grove, where huntsmen with their fowling pieces are to disturb his quiet, the celebrated composer casts about for a piano he can use. Dussek promptly lends him his in an act of true homage and friendship between exiles. Towards the end of May a great Handel commemorative festival is held over four days in Westminster Abbey. All musical London attends, including Dussek and Haydn, who is given a box of honour near the King’s. Haydn has never yet heard any but bowdlerized Handel, a Handel cut or re-orchestrated to Viennese taste by Mozart and others. The sudden blaze of a thousand performers in the meaty English tradition, complete with trumpets in altissimo and great banks of wind instruments, knocks the old man sideways with its grandeur. When George III and the entire congregation surge to their feet for the Hallelujah Chorus, Haydn bursts into tears and exclaims, ‘He is the master of us all.’ This experience is destined to have a critical influence on his own late choral works, the six great Masses, The Creation and The Seasons.
Unaware that this is a seminal moment for a genius, and for European music in general, and somewhere among all those performers fiddling and blowing and singing their lungs out, are at least five of London’s most raffish musicians. Haydn must already know one of them since she played at his benefit concert only a fortnight ago. This is Mme Krumpholz, the most celebrated harpist in town, whose reputation for virtuosity is in no way damaged by the public knowledge that her husband drowned himself in the Seine in the freezing February of the previous year – driven to it, they say, by her spectacular infidelities and tyrannous behaviour. Another participant is Francis Kotzwara himself, though it is not certain what he is playing since like Haydn he is a fair performer on every instrument in the orchestra. Kotzwara is by now forty or forty-one and a true vagabond. He probably arrived in England in the 1770s and thenceforth has shifted between London, Bath and Ireland, composing and playing and getting by.
At this moment in 1791 he is earning his daily bread playing the ’cello and double-bass at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket. But Kotzwara has two additional sources of income. The first comes from an astonishing success he enjoyed three years earlier with his programmatic piano sonata The Battle of Prague. This piece became vastly popular practically overnight and is destined to run through upwards of forty editions in all sorts of arrangements in England, America and on the Continent. No doubt to his surprise after years of scantily rewarded hack-work (like the viola sonata I’ve just been playing), it becomes the most celebrated battle sonata of the entire eighteenth century and accords Kotzwara a succès fou if not d’estime, for in reality it is a truly dreadful piece of music whose worthless banality its composer must in his heart recognise since his other source of income depends on a highly sophisticated musical sense. For he is a professional pasticheur. He imitates the styles of his more famous contemporaries like Pleyel and Mozart and Haydn well enough to deceive even quite competent musicians and keep himself and several unscrupulous publishers in funds. It is strange to think of him playing away in the Abbey beneath the enraptured gaze of the great man whose style he often forges for a living.
*
By why did the copy of Vathek fall on my head with the force of a reminder? What has its author, that brilliant voluptuary William Beckford, to do with all this? Unlike tramps such as Kotzwara he was immoderately rich and privileged, having inherited a fortune when he was nine. He studied painting under Alexander Cozens and music under Mozart, if one may thus describe the odd lesson he received at the age of five from a nine-year-old Austrian wunderkind on his visit to London. The two met again briefly in Italy in 1770 and from then on Beckford enjoyed plenty of wanderings and exiles culminating in the scandal of the boy William Courtenay in 1784 which called for a judicious departure with his wife to Switzerland. In the meantime he had written his Gothic novel Vathek, whose inspiration had come partly from The Arabian Nights and partly from the infamous Christmas festivities held at Fonthill in 1781. This extraordinary occasion had involved the house being shuttered and sealed for three days’ orgy, during which a Black Mass was celebrated. Among those present was a trio of Italian castrati: Rauzzini, Tenducci and Pacchierotti. Rauzzini was director of concerts at Bath and thirteen years later Haydn was to stay at his house in Perrymead on his second visit to England and write the round ‘Turk was a faithful dog and not a man’ to Rauzzini’s own words. Tenducci’s style was little cramped by castration. He had already eloped famously with a fifteen-year-old girl and briefly fled England for debt. A friend of Mozart, who wrote him a scena (now lost), he was to marry three times and wind up in court for adultery. For his part, Pacchierotti was eventually to spend a month in prison in Padua for a political witticism and be championed by Rossini. All three had sung in Il Tributo, a cantata Rauzzini composed especially for Beckford’s twenty-first birthday celebrations in September 1781. All of them knew Kotzwara, who was almost certainly at the notorious Christmas festivities three months later, revelling in the debauchery and marvelling at the cosmopolitan collection of geniuses and charlatans, lords and bawds.
Now, ten years later, who should be performing Handel in the Westminster Abbey jamboree besides Kotzwara? Why, Rauzzini and Pacchierotti (Tenducci had died in Italy the previous year). The three are amused to see each other with their shared memories of Somerset bucolics and much besides, and can doubtless spot among the thousand performers several others who have been party to various shenanigans at Fonthill and elsewhere. From time to time they catch the eye of another Bohemian, Adalbert Gyrowetz, a young composer who in Vienna five years ago had had one of his symphonies performed and praised by Mozart himself. Now the impresario Salomon has just engaged him together with Haydn to write music for his Professional Concerts. Gyrowetz is currently writing an opera (Semiramide) in which Pacchierotti is to sing and in whose orchestra Kotzwara is to play … The shades of Handel hover and roll gloriously about the vaulting; the ranks of Court dress glitter and glow; the King is in his box, Haydn in his; God is quite conceivably in his heaven.
But as usual there is seediness and despair in the lives of those contributing to this radiant din. Unknown to all, poor Kotzwara is never going to play in Semiramide. He is about to become famous again. Not ordinarily famous, either, such as his Battle of Prague made him, but scandalous enough for Haydn to mention him censoriously in despatches and to cause a law court shorthand-writer’s transcript of evidence to be torn up and burnt.
For, three months later on 2nd September, a Friday, he is making his way down Vine Street on the Strand side of Covent Garden. It is the lunch hour between one and two o’clock and it may be that he is already slightly drunk. It is probably not by accident he is walking this notorious area where the ground-floor front parlours of the houses are rented almost exclusively by prostitutes. From the doorway of No. 5 a woman accosts him and he hesitates. There is something in her voice or manner which attracts his attention for she is not beautiful nor even very young. Her name is Susannah Hill and she is twenty-nine. She was born at Frome in Somerset, not
far from Bath; maybe it is her West Country accent which reminds Kotzwara of pleasurable times past. At any rate he goes inside and asks her if she would like a drink. She says she wouldn’t mind a little porter. Kotzwara’s own preference is for brandy and water and he gives her the money to buy both. At the last moment he adds two shillings for some ham and beef, for he is hungry.
When Susannah returns she and Kotzwara go into the back room where, having disposed of the brandy and meat, he makes ineffectual sexual advances. This may be a result of the drink but Susannah, who has seen all types come and go in her three years as a woman of the town, suspects a more fundamental problem. Her client’s impotence distresses him; suddenly he offers her money if only she will cut his penis off. Horrified, she refuses. Kotzwara is deep in his gloomy fantasy, urging on her the knife stuck with grease and fibres of ham. When she still refuses, he agrees that he would be content to be hanged a little instead. Susannah protests that there’s not an inch of rope in the house but this strange man with the foreign accent gives her some coins and tells her to go out and buy some at once, good and long. ‘For,’ he says, ‘hanging I promise you will raise my passions.’ Susannah walks the length of Vine Street but can find only two short pieces of rope which nevertheless seem to satisfy her client. Kotzwara knots them together and makes a noose in one end which he slips around his own neck. The other end he passes over the parlour door and ties to the handle outside. In this way he need only go into a half crouch in order to bring about his own strangulation. Insisting that payment depends on her sticking to his demand to be hanged for five minutes, no more and no less, he at once bends his knees and the rope takes the strain. The whole operation has been carried out with a practised efficiency which reassures her that this is something of a habit with him. In any case she soon observes the effect he predicted. Maybe a strange delicacy or else her professional ministrations make it impossible for her to look up in time to see her client’s blackening features. When after five minutes she cuts him down he falls heavily on his face and lies on the floor without moving.
The Music Page 6