As Meta described her journey from that first afternoon on Kalmia Avenue, Queens, to this one on Danube Street, Prague, Nebraska, Otylie marveled at her young benefactor’s perseverance and was taken aback that Meta had no patrons, no grants, to support her work. Gerrit, noting that Otylie had picked up some good midwestern practicality along the way, said, “Meta’s a classic idealist to a fault, Mrs. Bartošová-Hajek.”
“I have known such people,” said Otylie. “I can see you are devoted to her. This is why?”
“One of the reasons,” he said, charmed by her frankness.
“I’m sure there are many others.” With a smile, she looked down at her wrinkled hands with their pale knobby knuckles folded on the tablecloth. “I think it’s time you see what you have been searching for, no?”
“Nothing would make me happier,” Meta answered.
Leaning on her cane, Otylie retrieved the first movement from her bedroom and, reentering the kitchen, offered a worse-for-wear hart-skin satchel to Meta, who asked, “May I wash my hands first?”
“Please,” said Otylie.
Afterward, Meta sat down again at the kitchen table, and with the same care as if she were handling a newborn, she turned the leaves one by one and began to read the music.
The only word on the first leaf besides Otylie’s father’s tender inscription to her in German was Sonate, and it appeared to be in a different hand, probably nineteenth century. Might have been written there by a manuscript dealer rather than a musician, Meta speculated. To her delight, although exultation was more what she was feeling, the key was just as she and Mandelbaum had conjectured months ago. Sonata allegro, first-movement form in the key of E-flat major. Running her eye across the staves, turning the first page, she began to get a clearer sense of the composer’s artistic universe. Seeing its progression, the way the movement unfolded in classic tripartite form—exposition, development, recapitulation—Meta could tell at once that this music was unquestionably related to the other two movements. Plus, the physical evidence bore it out. The hand was the same. The paper, while discolored from being housed inside the acidic deerskin, was in better shape than the movement Jakub had carried before passing it along to Tomáš, and both in turn had aged differently from Irena’s. But it didn’t take a musicologist’s or conservator’s eye to see they were all of a piece.
“I would love to hear you play it,” she told Otylie, impatient to experience the music off the page and set free in the air. “That is, if you were willing.”
Otylie had been watching as Meta read the first few pages of the score, and noticed the silent, involuntary movement of the young woman’s lips and fingers.
“You are a real musician, I can see. Maybe you should play instead.”
Meta hesitated. “Oh, well. I could sight-read my way through it, and it’d be an honor to do that. But my guess is, much the same way I know the other movements by heart at this point, you must know the first. You know how it should sound.”
“I have an idea,” said Gerrit. “Otylie plays the first movement and then Meta plays the others. How’s that?”
They moved into the living room, where the piano awaited them. Outside, the snow had picked up a little. Large flakes drifted downward and reminded Gerrit of the napkin Meta had, in quiet nervousness, torn to shreds while they shared their first coffee together up in Hradčany. She’d improvised that it was confetti to toss in celebration when they found what she was looking for. He would tell her later that her confetti had reappeared in the form of snowflakes on the other side of the world.
“Do you need the manuscript?” Meta asked Otylie.
“No, you have it right. The music is all inside me.”
“Will it be okay if I follow the score while you play?”
“Of course,” said Otylie, as Meta set the manuscript on the wooden music stand that Otylie used when teaching, and for a long moment the room was filled with rich silence as the world outside its windows was shrouded in an even deeper, denser quiet.
What was wanting in technical prowess—Otylie’s fingers walked rather than ran, and her dynamics were flattened somewhat to an evenness, a plateau of attack—was compensated with feeling, Meta thought, as the woman began to play. The kind of feeling that comes only from a familiarity and complexity of experience interwoven with the work itself. Otylie was, in essence, living these musical notes.
Half in rapture, half in a state of fervent attentiveness, Meta listened. Turning the pages, she saw the music unfold before her eyes and she clearly heard how this first movement was part of the whole composition. Goose bumps on her arms, she continued to listen, immersed. But when she turned the penultimate page and saw the last leaf, on which the first sonata movement ended just past midway down, her breath stopped. Everything for her stopped. On the bottom of the page were two heavily corrected staves of dissimilar music scrawled hastily, furiously, in yet another hand, nearly illegible and in much darker ink.
“That was beautiful,” she managed.
Gerrit agreed, noting Meta’s expression had shifted from pleasure to incredulity.
Meta lifted the manuscript from the stand and held it closer to her face, studying the unanticipated autograph musical sketch, a dozen measures or so, feverishly scored.
Gerrit hesitated before saying, “Are you all right?”
“There’s more here,” she said, looking over at him, eyes opened wide, then back at the messy notes that bristled with visual energy on the page.
“Yes, the other movements,” Otylie said. “May I hear you play them? So many years have gone by, and I’ve tried to remember. But I can only do small parts and even then I’m not sure whether I am making it up.”
“I’m sorry, yes, happily,” Meta said, collecting herself. “But, first, may I ask you about this writing at the bottom here?”
She’d taken the manuscript over to the piano and sat on the bench next to Otylie, whose perfume, she noticed, was the scent of gardenias.
“Oh, this.” Otylie squinted at it as she might have done many times before, and shrugged. “This I never understood. I tried playing it, but could never really make it out.”
“Do you have any idea what it is?”
“Probably nothing, just some foolish child from centuries ago making a mess.”
Meta eyed Gerrit, who tilted his head, conveying a silent, What’s up?
“Mrs. Bartošová, you only just met me. You don’t know me at all, but if you believe what I’ve told you about Irena, going to Prague and finding Tomáš Lang, going to London, and all the rest of what it’s taken to get us together, you need to believe me when I tell you I think this manuscript may be very valuable, not just to the history of late-eighteenth-century music but valuable in every way conceivable.”
“I believe all you have said, yes,” said Otylie.
“Let me show you the letter Irena gave me,” Meta continued, retrieving it from the leather briefcase and handing it to the woman.
This manuscript now the property of Meta Taverner until such time she is able to return this to Otylie Bartošová or heir, with agreement that she try to recover entire manuscript as were Otylie Bartošová’s stated wishes.
When the older woman finished reading, Meta said, “‘Such time as I am able to return it to you’ is what Irena wrote, and now I am returning it to you.”
Stunned, without thinking, Otylie looked at the reverse side of Irena’s note and saw her own handwriting in Czech from six decades and a year earlier, giving custodianship of the manuscript to Irena. She gazed up at Meta and—modestly, simply—said, “Thank you. I thank you and I thank dearest Irena. How I wish she was here with us.”
“She is, you know, in a way.”
“I spent so many years trying to get away from Prague, and those hard, hard days, and ended up here in a simpler Prague. But to see her handwriting, and my own to her, and hold these pages my husband protected—well, I can almost feel them alive again.”
Seeing that Meta h
ad no words, Gerrit said, “I’m a pretty secular person myself. But if I had to imagine a worthy moment when the spirits of the dead might be allowed to reconvene, this would certainly qualify.”
The three sat in communion made the more silent by the settling snow, which dampened any sounds outside the house. Then Otylie placed the letter on the music stand above the piano keys and said, “Now, unless you have another question, may I hear the rest of the sonata, dear?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll play the first movement once more, then move aside so you can finish the rest.”
Their tempi were different, as were their dynamics. They’d grown up listening to different pianists from different eras. One was an aged yet skilled amateur, the other an injured yet all but professional keyboardist. Meta marveled while watching Otylie bring to life the opening of a musical narrative by a young composer expressing his grief, yearning, and stubborn will to survive in the face of eminent loss. Then the woman shifted to the end of the long bench. As she watched Meta’s fingers attack the same middle movement that she had heard her father play so often when she was a girl, an unexpected feeling of contentment rose within her. Music, she thought, had a magical way of collapsing years and bridging distances. Meta’s interpretation varied from the way Otylie’s father had approached this bright ascent to a trill or that mournful descending scale, but the music itself maintained its integrity, its character. Otylie was, she supposed, the last person to believe in miracles, but as the middle movement came to a close and Meta began the third, with its delightful melody as fresh now as it’d been when she heard it as a child in faraway Olomouc, it occurred to her that what she was experiencing here, now, bordered on the miraculous.
When the last notes of the rondo were struck and vanished, the living room, whose windows were filled by the soft motion of falling snowflakes, was overwhelmed by silence once more, none of its occupants knowing quite what to say. For the first time in well over half a century, the complete Prague Sonata had been played, and the two women along with Gerrit, their rapt audience of one, felt the weight and history of this private shared moment. What had been purposely dispersed, lost in order to save this piece of cultural history, had finally been brought together. Otylie reached over, took Meta by the hands, and shook her head in disbelief.
“Thank you, Meta,” Otylie said again, after another while, “and thank you, Gerrit,” as she reached for and found her cane, then rose from the bench. “It is as beautiful, even more beautiful, than I remembered. Maybe we can play it again in a bit?”
“As many times as you like,” Meta said, inhaling deeply, realizing she’d been half-holding her breath these last minutes. “And then you can relearn it and play it whenever you want to. It’s yours again.”
“But what about you?” Otylie suddenly said, looking at Meta. “I must share this with you, otherwise all you have done—it is not fair.”
Meta glanced at Gerrit, down at her hands momentarily, then at Otylie, saying, “Mrs. Bartošová, Mrs. Hajek, I did little compared with what you and your first husband and many others did.”
“I am an old woman. No heirs, no one to pass it on to. You have given me back a precious part of my past, but I can give it no future.”
“Let’s not think about that right now,” Meta replied, her words emerging slowly as she imagined what Wittmann’s response to Otylie’s comment would have been. “You can decide what to do with it later. As for me, all I want to do is study it. Especially now that there’s this other handwritten music at the bottom of the page here.”
“You think these scribbles are important?”
“I think yes, extremely. But that’s one of a hundred things about this piece of music, and the manuscript itself, that I want to understand.”
Otylie sat for a minute, watching snow gather on the sill. Hadn’t it snowed the day the Nazis marched into Prague and turned her life, and the lives of all those closest to her, into a nightmare? But this was a different snow, calm and white, covering the earth for its winter slumber.
Meta’s voice broke the brief pause. “I have another question. I’m wondering, did your father ever tell you the story about how the manuscript came to be in his possession? I know it was long ago, but any scrap of information you can recall might be very useful.”
“I do remember that he bought it from a manuscript dealer in Vienna.”
“Do you remember who and when?”
The old woman tipped her head to the side with a slight frown. “If he told me, I have forgotten, I’m afraid. I was nine when he died. The one thing I do recall is that when he made his embarrassing claims that this was written by Beethoven—”
“Not so embarrassing,” Meta interjected.
“—the dealer told him it had been a gift to a girl, an inamorata whose name I do remember because it was so beautiful. Maria Anna von Westerwold. I even told my poor papa that when I grew up I wanted to change my name to Maria Anna von Westerwold.”
Meta shot another glance at Gerrit. “I feel guilty asking you, but would you mind making a note of that name?”
He smiled, pulled out his pocket notebook, and began to write.
“Anything more?” Meta gently prodded.
“My father always said that war is music and music is war. This I never understood. But if you think of war as more than just nations fighting each other, think of it as all the demons we wrestle with, all our pain, then I can understand how this composer, whether or not it was Beethoven, brought music to life out of war. Personal war and disappointment, yes. And also the joy of life.”
Meta was awed by what she had just heard. Again she looked over at Gerrit, who said, “Every word.”
“Otylie,” Meta said. “Anything more you can tell me about the sonata, your father, even the smallest details, could be helpful.”
“I have many questions for you as well. But first, let me ask, were you two able to eat something when you were down at the Kolach Korner Café? That is where you were, right? The only one in Prague.”
“We didn’t, actually,” said Gerrit. “Once we discovered that an Otylie from old Prague was living a few blocks up the way, we were too excited to eat one of the square fish sandwiches we saw on the menu.”
“Mrs. Paul’s,” Otylie said with a winking frown. “Bad for digestion. Let’s go into the kitchen and have some of my nice chicken casserole. I made more than enough for all of us. And I want to hear more about old Prague. What it’s like these days.”
“Gerrit’s Czech American and he’s lived there for years, so he’ll be able to tell you better how it’s changed since the revolution.”
“And more about your trip, about so much.”
The afternoon stretched into evening. Otylie pulled out her best bottle of vintage wine, one that Danek himself had told his wife he was saving for a special occasion. While she made no mention of it, sharing the bottle with this young couple was her way of including him in the festivities too, along with Jakub and Irena. Her cheeks warmed and reddened with the second glass Gerrit poured, and she felt ardently serene, surrounded by ghosts of the past and these angels, as she thought of Meta and Gerrit, of the present.
“Where were you planning to stay tonight?” she asked, noticing the hour. Nine thirty, a little after her usual bedtime.
“Honestly, we just assumed we’d be driving back to Lincoln,” Gerrit answered.
Meta added, “I guess we never believed we would actually find you.”
“No driving back to Lincoln in this weather. You can spend the night right here with me. I have a guest bedroom where you can stay.”
“Are you sure? We can find a place here in town if it’s an imposition.”
“No imposition. Besides, there is no place in town. The thing is, I’m afraid I have twin beds in there, so you’ll probably have to sleep apart.”
“I doubt I’m going to be able to sleep tonight anyway,” said Meta.
But she was wrong. The couple stayed up for only
an hour after Otylie retired, having set out fresh towels for them. Over the last of the wine, Gerrit asked Meta what that look was in her eyes when she noticed the two staves of scrawled music at the bottom of the last page of Otylie’s movement. Meta took a deep breath and said, “I’m not infallible. No, strike that. I’m fallible. All right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m all but certain that so-called scrawl is in Beethoven’s autograph. The system braces are vertical lines without slashes at top and bottom, and the treble clef has a central dot, which he abandoned for the most part in later years. Not to mention the dynamic signs, going from pianissimo to fortissimo just like that? Very Beethovenian. I can’t be sure of any of this, but I’m more and more convinced this sonata is a lost piece of juvenilia. Whenever this sketch was made, he might have incorporated some version of it into another composition. He did that all the time, borrowed from himself.”
Gerrit understood at once. “My God, this means your work hasn’t even begun.”
“That’s just what it means.”
Rather than sleep apart, they nestled together in one of the twin beds. Wound up though she was, Meta slumbered deeply until a brilliant morning sun, reflected by sparkling fresh snow, came pouring through the lace-curtained window. Gerrit had slipped out of bed earlier, she realized as she gradually awakened, stretched, and swung her feet onto the rug. She could hear his voice and Otylie’s in the kitchen, and smelled coffee and sausage. Peering down at the faded cotton nightgown Otylie had lent her, she was enchanted by the old-fashioned pattern of small flower garlands. She looked around the room and noticed an old photograph, a silver print perhaps, of a newlywed couple posed stiffly, although emanating a nervous happiness, before a painted mountain scene. The bride was seated and the groom standing just behind to her left, his forearm resting on a carved wooden pedestal. Otylie’s parents? She would have to ask, she told herself, as she changed back into her jeans and black wool sweater. She glanced at the bed where she and Gerrit had spent the night, tucked her hair behind her ear, and left the bedroom, following Otylie’s distinctive and already familiar voice down the hallway.
The Prague Sonata Page 45