Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  My dear Maestro,

  Mrs. Nägeli and I have both taken such great pleasure in your company of late that I wish to do nothing which might prove in the least irritating and make you less inclined to share your evenings with us. But I would be remiss in the extreme, I sincerely believe, if I did not once again respectfully take issue with your somewhat low opinion of your present composition.

  You may say, “Oh, this Nägeli is of Swiss nationality, so he is naturally partial to something titled The William Tell Symphony.” To be sure, it is flattering that you would apply your genius to such an undertaking and thereby glorify our foremost folk hero—we are, after all, a small land with an unremarkable past. But I esteem your gifts far too highly to stoop to false flattery, and so please, my dear sir, believe me when I beg of you not to discredit this splendid new creation of yours, which so delights the mind’s eye as well as the ear.

  I fear that the thus far unsatisfactory results of your medical treatments may quite understandably be skewing your usually acute powers of perception when you remark that your interweaving of vocal song and instrumental passages has resulted in too fractured a structure and that the transitional sections are too awkward and abrupt. Not to our ears, dear Maestro…

  By now Harry was unabashedly intrigued.

  “But why, having invested that much effort in the project,” he asked, “and having received such unreserved encouragement from his Swiss publisher, would Beethoven have chucked it the way Nina Hassler’s letter says?”

  “Obviously the paramount question,” Clara granted, “but well beyond the scope of my inquiry. And neither of these Nägeli letters constitutes reliable independent corroboration of what really happened in Zurich—if anything.” The third letter, though, found in the box along with various receipts and invoices, signed only “R” and bearing a royal crest at the top of the first page, might well shed light on his question, she told the group. “According to Jake Hassler, this Ansel Erpf fellow tried to translate it for him while he was clearing out his grandfather’s house, but Ansel had no more luck than I’ve had—other than gleaning something about the writer’s belief that the Tell Symphony might somehow or other prove ‘dangerous’ if Beethoven proceeded with it. Almost certainly, the letter was sent by his patron and protector Archduke Rudolph—or some forger wants us to believe as much. You’ll need to engage a handwriting expert to decipher the difficult German script and a historian to speculate on the ‘danger’ the archduke feared Beethoven might face if the symphony were completed and performed in Vienna.”

  Nearing the end of her presentation, Clara considered a question that delved further into the plausibility of the Tell saga: What else was Beethoven known to have been working on at the time he was supposedly in Zurich?

  “I have found no evidence the maestro was doing any consuming professional work that summer,” Clara reported. “If not, this may be significant, especially when one remembers that summertime was usually a fruitful period for Beethoven. The only thing he was known to have done in those months of 1814 was signing off during the first week in August on the autograph score—the musicologists’ term for a final draft—on his piano Sonata in E Minor, op. ninety, the sort of busywork he might well have taken with him anywhere he traveled outside of Vienna and addressed whenever he had a few idle moments. That summer, absent any evidence to the contrary that I can find, seems to have been an uncharacteristically idle spell for him.”

  “Suggesting,” Gordy ventured, “his deafness had simply overwhelmed him at that point.”

  “Possibly,” Clara parried, “but his deafness was nothing new—and, after all, he had produced his superb Seventh and highly creditable Eighth symphonies within the previous year, not to mention the Archduke Trio and revisions of Fidelio still more recently. No, I think either he was exhausted from the cumulative body of brilliant work he had accomplished almost nonstop over the previous decade—or, possibly, he was covertly working on something else.”

  Gordy nodded.

  “Very curious, but strictly circumstantial,” he said. “It’s hard to turn a vacuum into corroborative evidence.”

  Clara acknowledged the point. “There’s one last bit of evidence cited in my report—on page nineteen—that could help fill the vacuum.” It came from the composer’s authenticated and published collected correspondence. In February of 1814, Beethoven sent a letter to his friend Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the great soprano of the day, for whom he had written the title role in Leonore, as the opera was known when Fidelio was first produced in 1805. As if vowing to improve on Fidelio, which had never pleased him, his note to Milder-Hauptmann promised that he would “make it my priority to write an[other] opera” for her, one that would presumably provide a new and better showcase for both their talents.

  “And that new opera could conceivably have been Tell,” Harry completed her surmise.

  Clara shrugged. “Well, that would depend on whether we accept as genuine the sketchbooks found in Otto Hassler’s attic trunk.” It was apparent, she said, even to an eye as untrained as hers, that the first section of the more heavily filled composition book was a rough draft of the opening act of an opera based on the Schiller play—“the names of the characters and the libretto correspond with parts of the text that someone marked up in the copy of the play found in the cedar box,” Clara noted. Somewhere along the line, though, whoever composed the work abandoned the operatic form and transformed it into the hybrid form designated “a dramatic symphony” on the title page in the second sketchbook, containing the fully scored first part of the work. “The music becomes mostly instrumental in the new version, with several vocal pieces blended into each movement.”

  Harry sat back and began chewing on one of the unsharpened pencils he’d snatched from the mugful of them at the edge of his desk. “If you can figure out that much,” he said to Clara as they arrived at the end of her report, “what’s your gut feeling about the physical manuscript itself? Does it pass your smell test as being the real thing?”

  “With all due respect,” Clara said after a moment of due deliberation, “administering smell tests is not my thing. And as you’ll understand, I didn’t have the time or equipment to examine any of these materials except in a cursory fashion. Nor am I qualified to assess the virtuosity of so complex a composition and in such a—I’d almost call it a derelict condition. You’ll need to hire people using technical tools that can’t be fooled as readily as I can by cosmetic appearances.”

  Now she looked straight at Harry and avoided Mitch’s narrowed eyes. “But in a word—yes, these sketchbooks certainly have the feel and—well, okay—the smell of a genuinely old work, and their appearance is very similar to the sample pages from his manuscripts that I found reproduced in the leading scholarly reference work on the subject.”

  “And could any or all of that be faked?” Harry pressed.

  “I suppose, with an inordinate outlay of time and money and given sufficient familiarity with all things Beethoven. If this is a hoax, the perpetrators have—to my amateur’s eyes, anyway—done their homework superbly.”

  Everyone sat stone still for a moment, weighing the gravity of Clara’s conscientious recitation. “And have you any sense,” Gordy asked finally, “whether the music in this Tell Symphony is good, bad, or in-between?”

  Clara threw up her hands. “It’s impossible to say—for me, anyway—at this stage. You’ll need to enlist a team of eminent musicologists to transcribe, edit, and score the music before any overall aesthetic judgment of it can be ventured with real authority.”

  “Could you decipher any portion of the music?” Gordy wondered.

  “Well, sort of—in a segmented fashion at best—especially since I had only a piano to work with at the apartment, and his symphonies, like most others, don’t have piano parts. I can’t get a real sense of how the passagework flows and shifts and resolves itself—the manuscript is too disjo
inted as it stands—the seams still show.” But she had been able to hum a dozen or so bars of the melody to the men’s chorus in the first movement, Clara said. “One was titled ‘What Need of Noblemen,’ which comes across as a rousing anthem of the folk origin of the Swiss uprising. And there’s a quite touching—almost piquant—quality to the duet in the second movement between Tell and his wife, Hedwig, who fears for his and their son Walter’s safety as they head off toward the vicinity of Gessler’s nasty troopers. The piece is called ‘I See the Avalanche Engulfing You’—not terribly subtle, or, of course, characteristically Beethoven. But then the whole conception of a ‘dramatic symphony’ attempting an almost literal translation from one artistic form to another would be a departure for him—and thus add to the historic value of the work—if it’s his.”

  “And is it, do you think?” Harry asked, casually raising the bottom-line question.

  Clara stood her ground. “Mr. Roth—Gordon—asked me a moment ago about whether the manuscript seems to have artistic quality, and the most I’d risk answering is that it could be genuinely affecting music. But that’s a far cry from determining at this stage whether Beethoven could have written it.” She measured her words precisely. “He could have written a great many things—in different styles. He was a monumental genius, as we all know. My assignment from you was to look for any evidence I might be able to detect within a week’s time—historical, biographical, musicological, circumstantial, logical, intuitive—whatever—that definitively stamps these manuscripts as fraudulent, or points strongly in that direction, that screams, ‘No way could Beethoven have done this.’” She gathered up the pages from her report. “In spite of this entire proposition flying directly in the face of all my rational faculties, I haven‘t found such evidence. Others might very well—bear in mind I’m still very much a novice in this field.”

  Harry cleared his throat, leaned forward, and gave her a short salute. “We’re grateful, Clara,” he said and turned to Gordy. “Please make sure that accounting cuts a check for Mrs. Emery before the day is over.” He began to rise from his chair, signaling the end of the session.

  “Sorry—one small last question, please,” Mitch said, glancing at the library’s high, vaulted ceiling and freezing further motion in the room. “This may sound dumb, but am I the only one to find it odd that the Nina letter makes no reference to Beethoven’s having brought a servant with him? Wouldn’t a man of his eminence, even if financially strapped, have been able to afford at least one personal retainer to take along on his travels—particularly for a trip of that length to a strange city and given his physical handicap?”

  He had not directed his question at Clara, but it came out sounding that way.

  “That never occurred to me, to be honest,” she said, betraying a hint of impatience after nearly two hours of intensive engagement. “But if pressed, I’d guess that paying the room, board, and wages for a servant for that length of time would have seriously depleted the maestro’s already drained resources. For all his critical success and popularity for a time with the fickle Viennese masses, Beethoven generally lived hand to mouth—and had to humble himself to gather handouts from the aristocracy. The coachman who might have brought him to Zurich could have attended to his luggage and personal needs during the trip, and Nina and others in the Hassler household—they probably had a number of maids and hired men—could have done all the rest. Her letter suggests she was assigned to attend to his personal needs.”

  “Makes sense,” said Harry, moving purposefully toward the door. “Nature calls.”

  When they were alone in the room, Mitch reclaimed Clara from her mission, engulfing her with a fierce hug suitable to reunion with a long-lost love.

  “So?” she asked while they were still entwined.

  “So,” he said softly, “you were awesome.”

  Clara gave a small sigh of relief. “Harry didn’t seem to think so. He doesn’t exactly gush with praise, does he?”

  “Harry,” said Mitch, “has a steel rod up his bum.”

  .

  by the next morning, the principal concern within the Cubbage & Wakeham executive offices had shifted from whether the William Tell Symphony was Beethoven’s Tenth to who actually owned the manuscript regardless of its authenticity. The latter question was raised within moments of the hastily scheduled appearance in the firm’s library of a baggy-eyed, deceptively soft-spoken visitor whose card identified him as Philippe de M. Saulnier, legal attaché to the Confederation of Switzerland’s embassy to the United States. His government, he made clear shortly after the introductions, did not subscribe to the precept that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

  “We are most appreciative, gentlemen, of your courtesy in arranging this meeting so promptly,” said Herr Saulnier.

  There was no polite way of determining whether he was the legal attaché for the Swiss embassy or one of many. He could even have been dispatched from the staff of his country’s New York consulate and thus be a careerist of low rank as attachés go. But he looked and acted official enough, Mitch told himself, and Gordy, having put in a five-year stint with the US Foreign Service before beginning his C&W career in its London office, had pointed out that in diplomatic circles, subordinates were not infrequently assigned to deliver sensitive messages in order to avoid high-level confrontations and thus leave the parties wiggle room for conflict resolution. Saulnier exuded the politesse of a wiggle-facilitator.

  Owen Whittaker, Jake Hassler’s attorney, had been the one to propose the joint session with Cubbage & Wakeham’s brain trust after the Swiss embassy had phoned him to say there appeared to be “certain irregularities and related concerns” in connection with Otto Hassler’s estate and that a meeting with Jake and his counsel might prove constructive. Since Beethoven’s name was not mentioned in that initial exchange, Harry was hesitant to become involved prematurely in an international wrangle with a sovereign state as his adversary. But Gordy counseled him, “Since we have no legal exposure in the matter so far, I really don’t see the harm in our sitting around the table and trying to thrash things out. We’ve got potentially very high stakes riding on this property and a client with shallow pockets—let’s try to help him, and us, out.”

  Harry deferred to Gordy as the presiding C&W officer for the occasion, giving him the chair at the head of the library conference table. Harry even assigned Mitch, though now a nonpracticing attorney, to sit at Gordy’s right hand and next to Owen Whittaker, while he himself retreated to the far end of the table, allowing the lawyers to have a go at one another up close. Saulnier, seated to Gordy’s left, began by advising, in purest Oxbridgean English, that the Swiss Cultural Ministry had received a protest from a prominent Zurich family “in connection with the removal from our country of a certain musical composition that may be of more than passing interest to our citizens.” The family’s communication with the Swiss government, said the attaché, had been made in confidence—for the time being, at least—in the hope their concern might be allayed by timely intervention through diplomatic channels.

  “And what is your understanding about this musical work?” Gordy tested him.

  Saulnier phrased his reply in carefully formal language. “Our ministry was told that, in the first place, the composition was inspired by the story of our country’s great folk champion, William Tell, and named after him—and that, in the second place, it appears to have been created by the hand of the immortal Beethoven.”

  Gordy nodded noncommittally. “And what is the problem?”

  “The complainant family asserts a preexisting right to the work that Mr. Whittaker’s client surreptitiously removed from our country,” said the diplomat.

  “There was nothing surreptitious about it,” Whittaker objected calmly. “Mr. Hassler took the box containing the manuscript and other papers on board the plane after showing its contents to Swiss security and customs personnel at the Zuric
h airport. He did so in the belief it was his property under his late grandfather’s last will and testament. It was a perfectly straightforward act, so we don’t accept its being characterized as illicit or in any way involving subterfuge.”

  Saulnier nodded. “Your client’s Zurich counselor has explained it to us in that fashion, of course.” He paused and then added matter-of-factly, “From our standpoint, however, Mr. Jacob Hassler took possession of what may prove to be a greatly valuable and historic work of art without first allowing the Swiss authorities to review and probate his grandfather’s will.”

  “The will is uncontested,” Whittaker replied, “according to my conversation with the attorney for the Otto Hassler estate.”

  The diplomat shrugged. “That remains to be determined through the probate process. My government feels that your client acted rashly—by leaving Switzerland in such haste and carrying with him a work of art that he didn’t bother to describe as such to our customs examiners.”

  “But it hadn’t been established at the time—and remains to be—whether this manuscript is a bona fide work of art,” Whittaker countered. “And your customs people didn’t ask my client to identify the nature of the material in the box he brought with him.”

  Having registered his charges, the Swiss officer switched to a different tack. “And there is the further matter of whether the musical manuscript in question was legally the property of Otto Hassler—and thus whether title to it can pass to his grandson.” He turned to Gordy and then Mitch while adding a bit more forcefully, “And even if these matters were resolved in Mr. Hassler’s favor, his ability to remove this document from Swiss jurisdiction may conflict with Swiss law regarding national treasures, which would supersede the grandson’s claimed right to offer the manuscript to your company for the purpose of auctioning it to the public.”