Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  All of which added up in Mitch’s mind to the obvious conjecture that Ansel Erpf might very well possess the technical tools, the creative talent, and the volatile temperament to have written the Tell Symphony, then attributed it to Beethoven, then arranged for it to be conveniently “discovered” in Otto Hassler’s attic next door. “The problem is,” he told Winks, “that it’s just too obvious a stunt. Surely he’d know the authorities would be onto him right off the bat.”

  “The thought,” said Johnny, “occurred to me. But you need to pay Mr. Erpf a visit.”

  Mitch decided not to await the outcome of the forensics investigation already underway. If he could nip the whole thing in the bud as the runaway brainstorm of an idiot savant, his company would be spared a lot of expenditure and notoriety. The pretext for his visit to Zurich was not difficult to establish in a way acceptable to the Erpf family even while they were challenging Jake Hassler’s title to the Tell manuscript and C&W’s oversight of its pending sale.

  “This is a routine part of our effort to authenticate the work,” Mitch explained in separate phone conversations with Ansel and his sister Margot, “and of course we feel this procedure is in everybody’s interest in this case.” Once they all knew what they were dealing with in Tell, it might be far easier to reach an understanding about its ownership. Why have a spat over a clever forgery?

  Margot was satisfied with that—and she promised Mitch her full cooperation. Ansel, though, was combative, asking, “But why should the investigation be conducted under your auspices? Your client—and I used to like Jake Hassler, mind you—is trafficking in stolen goods, and your company, I hope you realize, is doing his bidding.”

  “We don’t quite see it that way,” Mitch told him, “but we and our client are prepared to let others adjudicate the matter if it can’t be worked out amicably.” Meanwhile, his firm was willing to shoulder the expense of getting to the bottom of the discovery—and anyone who found that decision objectionable might, in C&W’s view, have something to hide. Thus confronted, Ansel gave way and agreed to an interview two days later. Clara’s command of German on top of her fresh commitment to the project recommended her as Mitch’s traveling companion.

  .

  they used their first day in Zurich to reconnoiter the overgrown old market town, with its curving lakefront, cobbled streets and squares, stoutly timbered dwellings, and hulking public structures, in good repair if short on monumental scale or inventive design. The city also seemed ironically to be a model of up-to-date operating efficiency. Yet its picturesque charm had not been sacrificed to the grosser demands of modernity. The ancient core of the town, bisected by the little Limmat River that emptied into Lake Zurich, was a maze of mellow stonemasonry, meandering alleys, and endless clusters of overpriced shops and precious boutiques.

  Ansel Erpf had arranged to meet them at the Turm, a café directly across the Napfplatz, the little cobbled square where his family’s residence stood, right next door to the late Otto Hassler’s house. They were to have coffee and, if time and the civility of their exchange permitted, a bite of lunch. He had a tennis match at the Platypus Club at two, Ansel said, and he never played on a full stomach.

  He was waiting for them at one of the rear outdoor tables under the café’s blue-and-white striped awning. Ansel stood up at their approach, a short, moon-faced man with petite features. He had on blue jeans, desert boots, a brown leather jacket, the round wire-frame glasses of a John Lennon clone, and, of all things, a New York Yankees baseball cap. A single braid of light brown hair hung midway down his back. Wrinkle-free save for crow’s-feet lines at the outer edges of his peephole eyes, he could have been twenty-eight or twice that age. “It’s a souvenir of my last visit to the States—the height of kitsch,” he said, doffing his cap to expose a mercilessly retreating hairline.

  Mitch thanked him for the courtesy of meeting with them and, as they sat, asked pleasantly for a few sightseeing tips.

  “Ah, such fabulous sights to see in our precious, oh-so-pointlessly charming Züri!” He fell back in his chair, as if overcome by the question. “Where to begin?”

  “Since when does charm need to have a point to it?” Clara asked pleasantly. “Besides, your city seems to abound in purposefulness.”

  Ansel’s pinpoint eyes bored in on her; he was at once joyfully engagé flaunting his barely accented English. “And what purpose would that be, Mrs. Emery? Beyond, I mean, stuffing our wallets? Oh, for sure, we are one shimmering shitload of fat cats, without a doubt—with all our brimming banks and great pharmaceutical houses, all the fancy shops and glitzy jewelers’ windows.” He reached inside his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Someone told me we have a thousand jewelers in Züri, and I believe it. They say there are vaults just below the Bahnhofstrasse heaped with precious metals and gemstones.” He pushed a Gauloise between his thin lips and lit it with a cheap lighter. “All these riches, you see, have bought us a nice little everything—smartly appointed homes, rigorous schools, spotless clinics, punctual railways and trams, state-of-the-art plumbing and waste removal—to go with our nice little land.” He took a swallow of black coffee, cradling the cup and resting his cigarette in the saucer. “Not to mention our unspeakably nice little cultural institutions—have you been to the Kunsthaus, our most eminent art museum? Not a single first-rate work hangs on its walls.”

  Mitch was briefly jarred by this acidic spiel, likely delivered for its shock value. But hadn’t this fellow been advertised as a patriotic Swiss, out to rescue Tell for his worthy, if misunderstood, countrymen? He fed Clara a curious look that invited her to keep goading Ansel.

  “We spent a couple of hours at the Kunsthaus yesterday afternoon,” she told him, “and found a lovely assortment of regional and genre works that serve quite well to illustrate your—”

  “Candy boxes and gift wrappings,” Ansel cracked and inhaled with a vengeance.

  “I doubt the Kunsthaus was ever envisioned as a second Louvre,” Clara countered.

  “Exactly so! Because we’re the boonies. We have a tiresome history, smalltown values, and insular imaginations to match. To be sure, I exaggerate—it’s a fine little museum, just as we have a fine little opera house and a fine little repertory theater and—and a no-longer-so-fine little symphony orchestra, ever since it and I went our separate ways.” He gave his braid a fierce wag. “There’s just no creative juice flowing through Swiss veins, not a thimble of panache. Where are our writers and painters, our poets and composers, our inventors and thinkers?” He contemplated his cigarette ember for a moment. “Poor little rich people.”

  Mitch sensed it was all rehearsed, an act to stir scorn in unwary outsiders unaware they were being had. By most standards his country was the envy of the world—peaceable, prosperous, and pristine, or more nearly so than anywhere else. So why the extravagant pretense otherwise? Were they just words he savored spouting, a performance that Ansel’s troubled psyche could not restrain? Or was this a calculated put-on to divert them from inquiring too deeply into the particulars of the William Tell Symphony? Mitch needed to find out.

  “If you find Switzerland and Zurich so sad and stultifying, Mr. Erpf,” he asked, trying to sound sympathetic, “why do you stay? Surely you have the means and skills to make your way anywhere else in the world if you’d choose.”

  Ansel folded his arms and rested his elbows on the tabletop. “You see, that’s a perfectly intelligent question that only an American would ask. You are famous for your mobility, always restless and ravaging as you go, whereas we Europeans embrace our rootedness. I’ve seen my share of the world, mind you, and enjoyed the adventure of it, but in the end the Swiss, even the disaffected among us, remain Swiss. We may be stuck in a deep rut, but it’s such a nice little rut that it takes both stamina and a degree of madness to try to climb up out of it. In my case, there is an added consideration. How shall I put it tastefully? My family, we have a certain standing in
the community—which I have not exerted the slightest effort to enhance, you understand—yet it’s there, and I cannot ignore the reality, which brings pleasing advantages, of course, even as it smothers the spirit the same way that this so-called city can be suffocating. It’s too small to spread out in, too hard to get lost in, everyone knows you, and your every gesture gets reported—and so one’s every thought is conditioned accordingly.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer and cut himself short, like a standup comedian whose opening monologue had gone flat. “Forgive me—it’s just my morning catharsis. I believe we have other business to explore.”

  Before Mitch could channel the conversation, Ansel signaled the waiter to bring them menus, highly recommended the trout salad, and began to rail against Jake Hassler. “My little anti-Swiss tirade shouldn’t mislead you,” he confided. “I’m still enough of a chauvinist to be repelled when one of your countrymen runs off with a manuscript by an icon of European culture—and especially one dealing with the noblest hero in our national folklore. And really, now—what good do you suppose will come out of it once you Americans begin to hype this Beethoven manuscript, or whatever it turns out to be?”

  Mitch contemplated their volatile luncheon partner with dispassion for a moment. “You mean how could a nation of frontier savages possibly treat a high-culture god with reverence?”

  “Something like that. It’s not in your people’s character.”

  “My guess is,” Mitch said, trying to avoid a strident reply while hoping to further stir up this smoldering firebrand, “what’s really bothering you about the Tell manuscript is that it was lying around right under your noses for a couple of centuries—quite possibly—and the moment it was pointed out to a typical American yahoo, he knew enough to grab it and head for open water—and probably had every right to do so.” Mitch glanced at the menu to mitigate his provocation. “Frankly, I don’t blame you for being upset.” He looked up at the hovering waiter. “I’ll have the mushroom omelet and a glass of the house red—assuming it’s Swiss. If not, would you pick it for me, Mr. Erpf?”

  Reference to the Tell manuscript focused their attention on the Hassler house directly across the square. The five-story building had high ceilings and large, open-shuttered windows that must have kept the interior cool and bright but lacked grace notes of the sort enlivening the carved stone façade of the grander Erpf home to its immediate right. A strip of red-and-white plastic tape was stretched across the Hasslers’ doorway, barring entry. Mitch asked the reason.

  “The health and engineering departments are afraid the house has been neglected over the years and may no longer be structurally safe.” Ansel shrugged with disdain for the bureaucratic mentality. “So they’re investigating, even before Otto’s estate is fully certified and my family’s firm can take title to it. Repairs may prove costly, but I’ve told my barracuda sister not to worry—if the Beethoven manuscript is authenticated and amounts to almost anything at all, the house will surely become a shrine for sightseers, perhaps tripling in value. Who wouldn’t like to own it and be able to say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s the room where Beethoven’s Tenth was composed’?”

  Mitch studied him without addressing the rhetorical question. Ansel’s body language—the quick gestures, staccato speech, constantly shifting posture—was thick with coiled tension. Were his visitors making him jumpy, or was he in dire need of a fix? Or was this just his normal angst on display? Perhaps all three. “And do you really believe that?” Mitch asked, trying to catch him off guard. “Do you think this whole Tell thing is on the up and up?”

  Ansel fished for another cigarette and wore a puzzled look. “‘On the up and up,’” he parroted. “I thought I knew every American expression—what does it mean?”

  “Honest—legitimate.”

  “I gather, from the context. But the image—why the two ‘ups’? What does the repetition signify? I’m fascinated by derivations.”

  Was this another diversionary tactic? Or was Ansel flustered and just trying to buy time while he cobbled an answer? “I can’t help you there,” Mitch said.

  Ansel gave a dismissive shrug, then draped one leg over the arm of his chair. “Ah, well—as to the up-and-upness of Der Wilhelm Tell Symphonie. Like every serious musician, I know my Beethoven, but ever since our little discovery”—he gestured across the street—“I’ve been reading up on him intensively.” The small eyes narrowed to a slit. “What most bothered me at first was why he would have just left the manuscript behind like that instead of destroying it himself. Freud, of course, would have said he was conflicted—driven by whatever reasons he had to set it aside, yet perhaps subconsciously hoping that the daughter of the Hassler house would disobey his wish.” He propped his left elbow on its corresponding knee and cupped his chin. “But then I decided his rashness in abandoning the work was not so very mysterious. Creative geniuses, you know, are notoriously quirky sorts—they often do such impulsive and self-destructive things.”

  Mitch wanted to keep him going on the chance of pushing him into a self-incriminating slip-up. “That’s a possibility, for sure. I mean, hadn’t Beethoven revealed self-destructive tendencies well before 1814? What was it called—the Heiligenstadt Testament, the letter to his brothers, telling them that the onset of his deafness was driving him toward suicide?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that, necessarily,” Ansel said. “He had this deep, self-pitying streak in him—it wasn’t only his hearing problem that depressed the man. Everything in his life seemed to have been put there to torture him—and turned him, if you ask me, into a borderline sociopath. You start with his father being a roaring drunkard and then throw in his dear old mum, giving him delusions of grandeur with her hints that Ludwig might have been the love child of the King of Prussia or the Elector of Hesse when she worked as a maid in the court castle.” Ansel warmed to his captive audience. “And, of course, there was his unfortunate appearance—he was short, you know—not even my size”—with his massive head that must have made him look top-heavy, his protruding teeth, indelicate nose, pocked cheeks, and whirlpool of untamable hair. Hardly a creature to lure the ladies, “especially of the rich and refined sort he pined after. I think he was fated never to share himself intimately with a woman. Some people have room for only a single passion in their lives, and for him it was plainly his music. And his deafness must have driven him deeper into loneliness and self-sorrow.” Ansel emitted a empathetic sigh. “He had nothing going for him in life except his great gift, and you know what they say—talent is a blessing, genius an affliction.”

  Mitch sensed he had struck pay dirt. It sounded to him as if this homely, isolated, and idle nobody was identifying his own travails with those of classical music’s supreme master. Not a confession, to be sure, but a less-than-subtle hint to arouse his listeners’ interest. A cellist with the philharmonic, Ansel would naturally have known a great deal about Beethoven’s music, life, and psyche, but was it possible for him to have absorbed all of that detailed and intimate knowledge about the man within the few weeks since Tell had surfaced—or was it the harvest of a long-running fixation? Too, there was this preoccupation of his with language and its nuances—Ansel seemed to choose each word with precision. Might this acute aptitude have been applied to fabricating the Nina and Nägeli letters found with the manuscript by way of embellishing the tale he had woven to explain Tell’s existence? It was a tantalizing possibility. But then why would he risk awakening such a suspicion in his interrogator? A pyromaniac openly playing with fire and daring his onlookers to stop him before he torched again?

  “And is that your affliction as well?” Mitch asked with an awkward show at empathy.

  Ansel was onto him, replying with a brief peal of dark laughter. “Ah, Mitchell Emery—so you think you detect a stark raving Beethoven complex in me, do you?” Then out poured an account of passionate devotion to his muse and all her siren song, sustained in the teeth of continuous
discouragement by his family. His father, he said, had always objected to a career in the performing arts for Ansel as undignified and certain to leave him financially needy. But by twelve he was the youngest and best musician in his gymnasium orchestra; by fifteen he was attending the conservatory for both piano and cello lessons and classes in theory. Belatedly his father tried to shove the musical genie back inside the bottle, ordering a cut-off in all lessons for a year and condemning Ansel to apprentice in the family’s Limmat Realty offices to learn about property assessments, rent collection, sales and lease agreements, and how to cosset clients.

  “It was all too ghastly and tedious,” he recounted, but in concession to his unbending father, Ansel enrolled at Zurich University, immersing himself not only in studying music but also German literature and philosophy. Even as he defiantly distanced himself from the Erpf real estate empire, thereby opening the way for his sister Margot to take his place as heir apparent, Ansel gradually withdrew from the university and turned playboy, by day a fixture at the Platypus Club bar and tennis courts, by night a consumer of more than his fair share of drugs readily available through former university companions and at the dives along the Niederdorf strip. Tired of tolerating this desultory lifestyle, his father offered to fund a year of travel and oats-sowing if Ansel would kick drugs and promise to knuckle down to something useful—even serious music—after he came home. One year of subsidized vagabonding stretched into three. On his belated return, he took up with “my divine Lisa,” the socialite daughter of another Platypus Club family, powerful people in the pharmaceutical industry—much to the Erpfs’ approval—and returned full-time to the conservatory to turn himself into a polished cellist. Eventually he won a job with the Philharmonia Helvetica National, an occupation acceptable to his family, which had long been generous donors to the symphony orchestra. Marriage to Lisa the Drug Princess—as Ansel called her, even to her face—soon followed, and for a time, things stabilized.