Beethoven's Tenth Read online

  “I’ve made just seven copies of my findings,” Clara said crisply, “the four in this room and three extras I have in my case here and will give to Mr. Cubbage when we’re done. In the interests of internal security, I’ve deleted this document file from the PC in the apartment that I was told to use to write my report and scrubbed it from the recycle bin as well.”

  “What a trooper,” Harry said approvingly, noting Clara’s pulled-together manner and appearance after her marathon research ordeal. “Coffee pour madame? Perhaps an IV drip?”

  “Just a glass of ice water, thanks,” she said, “and maybe a week in Bermuda.”

  Harry relayed the first half of the request by intercom and cautioned his colleagues not to mention the subject of their meeting while the waterbearing staff assistant was briefly in the room. “And you can dispense with the formalities, Clara—you’re among friends. So I would be Harry, this doodler over here would be Gordon, and the other gentleman I call Mitchell but you’re free to address any way you’d like except ‘Darling’—not businesslike.” He smiled and added, “Relax, my dear—only admirers are in the room.”

  Still standing, she acknowledged his cordiality with a nod and waited while four crystal goblets and a water pitcher were speedily delivered and Gordy half-filled one for her. She took a sip, flexed her neck slightly, and looked toward the other end of the table. “How do you want to do this—Harry? Shall I read all of this aloud and any of you can stop me whenever something’s unclear or you have a question? Or shall I synopsize it and then let you review the whole text at your leisure after this meeting?” She was careful to pitch her voice low, Mitch noted.

  “Let’s spare your vocal cords,” Harry said. “We’ll all read it to ourselves a paragraph at a time—no subvocalizing, please, gentlemen—and raise any questions or make comments in case we need you to further elucidate us before we move on, with all deliberate speed.”

  “Fine,” said Clara. “And sorry about the length of the report. I thought it better to err on the side of excess than—than to try to—”

  “You’re a scholar—it’s expected,” Harry said in tribute. “Curtain up, Clara.”

  Her report, she explained, was in three sections, dealing with (1) Beethoven’s hearing in the summer of 1814 when he was supposedly in Zurich for treatment by an ear specialist, (2) the composer’s whereabouts that summer and what he was working on, and (3) the appearance of the Tell Symphony sketchbooks compared to certified Beethoven manuscripts. Clara’s text began with a short aside to place the challenge before them in historical perspective:

  The seductive notion of a long-lost Tenth Symphony by the undisputed master of that compositional form is something of an old chestnut in classical music circles—probably starting with the posthumous discovery of Schubert’s Eighth and Ninth symphonies and further fueled by the similar finding of Mahler’s Tenth.

  That Beethoven had spoken of and made notes for a Tenth Symphony in the last years of his life is well known. Nearly two hundred years later, the British actor and playwright Peter Ustinov wrote a comedy titled Beethoven’s Tenth, performed briefly on the West Coast before it was laid to rest. A few years later, British musicologist Barry Cooper came upon several hundred bars of what was thought to be the first movement of an uncompleted symphony found in one of Beethoven’s four hundred or so authenticated sketchbooks. Cooper took it upon himself to complete the movement as he assumed Beethoven had in mind, then got the collaborative work performed by the National Symphony in Washington. The critics by and large dismissed the attempt for its cheekiness, arguing that no one could know how anyone of Beethoven’s unrivaled virtuosity might have resolved his musical lines, since unpredictability was an essential ingredient of his music. Researchers have discovered that on some fifty occasions Beethoven started symphonies only to cast them aside. But none of these efforts thus far uncovered amounted to more than a musical fragment.

  Harry looked up. “Well, if this Cooper fellow got roasted for working off material that was understood to be authentic Beethoven, wouldn’t anyone drawing on the Tell sketchbooks face the same sort of criticism—for daring to presume how the greatest maestro of all would have finished a symphony he abandoned?”

  Clara nodded. “But Cooper was dealing with just a part of one movement and trying to interpolate a plausible completion. Here we’re dealing with what purports to be quite a different thing—all the elements for the entire work appear—appear—to be contained in these two William Tell sketchbooks, although only about forty percent had been orchestrated by the composer when he allegedly abandoned it. I think Cooper’s procedure was far more conjectural.”

  “But still a worry for us,” Harry persisted, “correct?”

  “Sure, but a relatively small one if your authentication experts conclude that Tell is actually Beethoven’s work product.” Clara clasped her hands on the tabletop in front of her. “All I’m pointing out at the beginning is that the notion of a lost Tenth Symphony by Beethoven has been floating out there for a long time—but none of the posthumously found fragments of his work has risen to anywhere near the level of what we’re being asked to believe in this case.”

  “Which should give us more reason, not less, to question the genuineness of this thing, correct?” Harry asked.

  “Absolutely,” Clara replied. “The very idea of it would be immensely alluring to a bold—and greatly knowledgeable—counterfeiter. But, that said, such a remarkable discovery shouldn’t be ruled out in the abstract. You need to deal with what’s at hand.”

  “Quite so,” said Harry and resumed reading the first section of Clara’s report, dealing with the genesis of the Tell manuscript:

  It can be stated unequivocally that by the summer of 1814, Beethoven’s hearing had so badly deteriorated as to warrant his undertaking an extended trip to Switzerland or anyplace else in hope of finding a miracle cure. This finding is based on evidence gleaned from some six dozen books dealing with Beethoven’s life, letters, diaries, notebooks, and compositional techniques.

  Beethoven’s loss of hearing began in 1801 when he was thirty-one years old and was sometimes marked by what he described as a “hum and buzz day and night.” Initial diagnoses linked the problem to his chronic diarrhea, and he was administered infusions of medicated powders. Subsequent examinations found the presence of what modern science calls otosclerosis, slow growth of spongy bone in the inner ear, causing intermittent, progressive, and irreversible destruction of the auditory nerves, confirmed by autopsy at Beethoven’s death in 1827.

  His deepening deafness became a chronic source of embarrassment socially and professionally. “I find it impossible to say to people I am deaf,” he wrote. “If I had any other profession I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap.” His encroaching isolation brought on lingering spells of irritability, melancholy, and even suicidal thoughts that led others to mistake him for a misanthrope. And yet, miraculously—what else should we call it?—during the decade preceding the alleged creation of the Tell Symphony, this man produced no fewer than thirty incontestable masterpieces, including six of the greatest symphonies ever written, and changed the course of musical history.

  Beethoven’s hearing loss turned precipitous by 1812, and within two years, he could no longer perform in public either as a pianist, who had formerly been regarded as among the very best in Europe, or as a conductor without embarrassing himself. Thus, the anguished composer had reached a point of such desperation that he would likely have considered making a visit to a neighboring country to seek any therapy that could have reversed his hearing loss.

  “But what do we know for sure about where Beethoven spent that summer of 1814,” Clara’s report asked, “and whether he might have gone to Zurich then for such a purpose?”

  It was highly unusual, she explained, for the maestro to leave Vienna at any time for any reason—except during
summertime when he sought refuge from the heat by staying at a spa in Bohemia or, more usually, in the resort of Baden just twenty-five miles from the capital, where many of his aristocratic and socialite friends repaired for the season. It was over the summer, away from the city’s bustle and distractions, that Beethoven was in the habit of sketching out the primary thematic lines of his compositions, which he would refine and score upon his return to Vienna. “Most Beethoven biographers and students of his life have assumed that the composer spent nearly the whole summer of 1814 in Baden,” Clara added, starting right after the July 18 performance, given in Vienna for Beethoven’s own financial benefit, of his only opera, Fidelio, which included for the first time a new overture and other material he had written earlier in the year. But was there any hard evidence that he had in fact been in Baden or, for that matter, had stayed in Vienna or perhaps gone someplace else? “For the years surrounding and including 1814,” Clara disclosed, in answer to her own question, the maestro was known to have kept a Tagebuch, or diary, that chronicled his activities. But as luck would have it, the diary has disappeared from the Berlin archive in which it once resided, forcing scholars to fill in the details from letters and other scraps of documentation. Let us see what these tell us.

  At Baden, he would most likely have stayed in a rented private cottage or at his favorite hotel, the Alter Sauerhof—but there is no surviving evidence that he did either. And while it has long been known that from 1804 until 1815 Beethoven made the fourth-floor flat in the Vienna home of a Baron Pasqualati his main residence, the encyclopedic, well-respected Beethoven Compendium states that for September and October of 1814, the maestro’s address was simply “unknown.”

  “Mmmm,” said Harry, “the plot begins to thicken.”

  Clara looked up and saw that the men’s eyes were now riveted on her. “Well,” she said, “it’s somewhat suggestive, anyway.” And Beethoven’s correspondence from the period in question was equally tantalizing. In a published volume of his collected letters was one missive that scholars dated “Summer 1814,” but no more specifically, in which Beethoven wrote to his principal music publisher, “At last my wish is granted, and I go the day after tomorrow for an excursion of a few days”—yet he made no mention of where he was going. “If he had wished to make a clandestine visit to Zurich for health reasons,” Clara theorized, “Beethoven would very likely have been purposely vague about his travel plans, as he was in this case.”

  In a second letter datelined August 8 from Vienna—“by which time, Nina Hassler’s letter has him installed in Zurich,” Clara reminded her readers—and sent to Prague, Beethoven asked his attorney there to settle a lawsuit against the delinquent heirs of one of the maestro’s prominent patrons. “Why, one may wonder, would Beethoven have been in Vienna at the height of the summer,” Clara asked, “when he was customarily at Baden or some other, cooler countryside location? One can speculate that the letter to his lawyer may well have originally been sent from someplace else, possibly Zurich, to somebody in Vienna, such as his confidant—one could, a bit unkindly, call him Beethoven’s flunky—a man named Zmeskall, who handled all manner of chores for the maestro, and this fellow Zmeskall could well have forwarded the letter to Prague.”

  For the first time, Mitch sensed that Clara might have lost a degree of objectivity in the course of her homework. He hesitated a moment, lest he be seen as undercutting his wife’s critical faculties, then decided he might be doing her a favor by speaking up.

  “Sounds a little like you might be stretching the shoe to make it fit,” he remarked.

  “You might think so,” Clara volleyed, “but my report, if you’ll bear with me a bit, refers to another letter to the same Prague lawyer, a man named Kanka, and sent the very same day as the one I just mentioned, that directs Herr Kanka to—and I quote—‘for the time being please address letters to me in the following way—to be delivered to the house of Herr Johan Wolfmayer,’ accompanied by a street address. Wolfmayer, we know, owned a prosperous drapery business and was a good friend of the maestro. From this instruction to him, one may reasonably infer that Beethoven was out of town—and possibly someplace he didn’t want his correspondents to know about.”

  Clara’s report then abruptly changed gears, or at least momentarily appeared to do so.

  “We cannot avoid, however, considering one piece of documented evidence that strongly suggests Beethoven remained at home during some of the time that he was purportedly in Switzerland.” The chief impediment to the Zurich story was a surviving receipt issued in Vienna on September 1, 1814, and bearing Beethoven’s signature in acknowledgment of a draft for 750 florins drawn against the account of Archduke Rudolph. The emperor’s younger brother, a gifted pianist and composer of promise, was Beethoven’s only student at that period and one of three noblemen who pooled their resources in 1809 to provide the maestro with an annual dole of 4,000 florins in order to sustain his household and keep him living in Vienna at a time when it was under Napoleon’s heel. But by 1814, the composer’s other two financial supporters were out of the picture, “and Beethoven was in a serious financial bind,” Clara wrote. Thus, the funds he could still draw upon from the archduke were of vital importance to him—“and yet the maestro might readily have arranged, by presigning and predating the receipt, for the trusted Zmeskall to present it at the bank on the designated day and deposit the funds in Beethoven’s account for him.” Indeed, a letter sent by Beethoven to Zmeskall sometime that summer—“scholars are uncertain of the precise date,” Clara admitted even while trying to bolster her speculation—had invited this devoted intimate to drop by his flat at eight o’clock that evening, “possibly to discuss with him such arrangements as forwarding his mail and making bank deposits for him while Beethoven was to be away—someplace he may not have revealed to anyone.”

  Mitch shook his head. “Unless he wanted his loyal pal to come by to play backgammon or just to shoot the breeze with him.” Why was she trying to hype such frail evidence? “Sounds like a bit of a reach, Clara,” he remarked before Harry or Gordy could call her on it.

  “Except,” Clara replied coolly, “for indications we have that by the middle of September, when Beethoven was back in Vienna or at Baden, he had been out of touch for quite some time. See the paragraph in the middle of my page fifteen.” An authenticated letter dated September 15 to the composer’s Scottish publisher began, “Owing to my very many occupations, I have not been able to reply any sooner to your most esteemed letter…” But Beethoven was not known to have been working on much of anything during that period, Clara noted. A few days later, Beethoven wrote in a similarly apologetic vein to another important supporter, Count Linowsky, that, “Unfortunately I did not receive your letter until yesterday.” In short, one could plausibly suppose that Beethoven was catching up with mail that had accumulated during his extended absence, perhaps outside of Austria—“conceivably he was in Zurich.”

  “Okay, you’ve raised some possibilities,” Mitch said with clinical detachment, “but is there any corroborative evidence that Beethoven was in Switzerland that summer—or even had a reason to go there?”

  Clara cast him a neutral sideways look. “None at all,” she said, “other than the three letters that we’re told Jake Hassler found accompanying the Tell manuscript in the wooden box in his grandfather’s attic—and of course we don’t know if they’re real or fabricated—your forensics experts will have to try to date them. But I’ve been able to translate two of the letters, which came from the same person, and they certainly serve to make the Swiss story sound credible.”

  The two letters, addressed to “My dearest Maestro,” were signed by a Zurich music publisher named Hans Georg Nägeli, who eleven years earlier, as Clara had discovered while sifting through Beethoven’s published correspondence, had issued three of the composer’s piano concertos and, in the process, earned his displeasure because they contained multiple printing errors. Understanda
bly eager to redeem himself in the eyes of the renowned maestro, this Nägeli—“a certifiably authentic person, you understand,” Clara stressed—might well have sent the neatly penned letter dated 17 February 1814, imploring Beethoven to visit Switzerland’s leading city. Clara’s translation concluded:

  …In the heartfelt hope of prolonging your creative energies and restoring your hearing to its former condition, I pray you will accept my suggestion that you avail yourself of the services of the above named physician. I also know of a gracious and well-bred family who could provide you, at modest cost, with entirely satisfactory lodgings on a quiet square but a ten-minute walk to the physician’s clinic. It would be my high honor, furthermore, to serve as your guide and familiarize you with our city and charming countryside as well as to receive you with open arms for dinner at our home whenever you may be in a sociable humor.

  Needless to add, all aspects of your visit would remain strictly confidential as I understand full well your natural reluctance to disclose the purpose for it even to those favorably disposed to you in a city like yours, teeming with musicians so envious of your achievements…

  “Very nice,” said Harry, “and perfectly plausible—which, as Clara properly observes, would be the point of a con artist including it in the cedar box. And what’s the other letter from this Swiss publishing bloke all about?”

  It addressed the most serious challenge to the believability of the Tell discovery—why the composer would have discarded a largely completed work of such magnitude. Clara related that the Swiss music publisher apparently made good on his promise to offer Beethoven the hospitality of his parlor and dinner table, and on one occasion, August 29—determinable from the date on the letter sent to him the next morning—the maestro must have brought along part of the manuscript from his work-in-progress and played excerpts for his trusted admirer’s assessment. The two men apparently disagreed about the merit of the work, judging by Clara’s translation of the second Nägeli letter: