Beethoven's Tenth Page 14

  “But he might.” Clara could tell from the fire in Lolly’s eyes that she was seized with the idea, which, even if harebrained, was a lot more constructive than her usual pointless ramblings. “At any rate, I certainly couldn’t get involved in any scheme like that—my husband doesn’t own the business, he only works there. I couldn’t risk putting him in a compromising position.”

  “Now you’re just being Goody Two-shoes.” Lolly threw down half her spiked lemonade and gave her head a spirited shake. “Okay, let’s drop it for now—it’s all beside the point, anyway, if this little bugger gets aborted. But if it turns out to be ready for primetime, you haven’t heard the last of this from me.”

  “Whatever you say,” Clara soothed. “Now can we eat?”

  .

  gordy roth replayed that morning’s developments for Clara. The meeting with the Swiss government lawyer, far from souring Harry on the problematic venture, had actually galvanized him. The stakes seemed to have grown dramatically, what with an entire sovereign nation—and a rich one at that—interested in the ultimate disposition of the property. “The three of us agree,” said C&W’s house counsel, flanked by Harry and Mitch, “that we’re ready to move to the next level of exploration—and we’ve got a phone date with Sedge Wakeham in London in a few minutes to lay it all out for him. Sedge, by the way, says he’s a great admirer of your father’s—they apparently travel in the same artsy-fartsy social set.”

  “Yes, Daddy mentioned it after Mitch joined the firm,” Clara said. No need to elaborate. Her father had described Wakeham as a drunk and a bore but a good soul.

  The plan, as roughed out before Clara’s arrival, called for the auction house to proceed at once with a three-phase authentication process. Phase one would be to hire an eminent musicologist to undertake an exercise similar to the one Clara had just performed: studying the Tell manuscript for a week or so to determine whether he or she agreed that the composition merited expert scrutiny of its every aspect. If so, the musicologist would agree to chair phases two and three of the project. Phase two, if warranted, would call for a specialized forensics team to examine the paper, ink, and handwriting of the two Tell sketchbooks to assess the likelihood that they had been composed by Beethoven with materials known to exist in or around 1814. Phase three, assuming its necessity, would be to enlist a five-person panel of the foremost Beethoven authorities, each to be allotted a week to examine the sketchbooks in private, and then the five panelists would assemble, joining the task force chairman, to compare notes and pass ultimate judgment as to Tell’s legitimacy and, to the extent possible before the music had been edited and scored, its aesthetic merits. A contract with Jake Hassler, naming C&W exclusive auctioneer of the manuscript, would be signed after stage one to prevent him from accepting a preemptive offer from a buyer before the auction could be held.

  To pay for all this, Harry had tentatively set a budget of $4.5 million, the heftiest appropriation for such a purpose in C&W’s history. A million would go for the Beethoven experts’ fees, travel, housing, and food costs. Then, $2 million would be set aside for the forensics specialists, $750,000 for Johannes Winkelman’s services as snoop extraordinaire in Europe, and the rest for legal and other contingency fees. The total prompted Sedge Wakeham, when he heard the numbers, to cry out over the speakerphone from London, “Sounds bloody rich, Harry old boy! Are we really up for our innings in this sort of match?”

  As they came tumbling transatlantically out of the squawk box, Sedge’s stentorian words had an element of self-parody about them that brought smiles to his New York listeners’ lips. Mitch, having met him only once and briefly, wondered if Sedge’s tickety-boo delivery might be the result of congenital dementia in the Wakeham family tree or, at the least, serious inbreeding.

  “I do believe so, guv’nor,” Harry said, mockingly deferential to Sedge, twenty-five years his senior. “If this unimaginable thing withstands our most rigorous authentication inquiry ever, we might wind up bathing in one helluva lot of gravy. And it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece—even a spectacular failure by a certified immortal might have considerable marketplace appeal. What I like about it almost as much, though, is the downside. Even if we have to bail out and label it all a jolly fraud, the write-off would be worthwhile for the publicity value alone—we’d be proving anew that nobody puts anything over on Cubbage & Wakeham.”

  There was silence on the London end for a long moment until Sedge, quavery upper lip stiffening, from the sound of it, asked, “And who gets to run the show for us—a ruddy bunch from Düsseldorf, I suppose? Damn old Jerry owns the classical music franchise, don’t he? But I rather loathe the thought of surrendering our flag to them.”

  Harry looked over at Clara. “He’s asking if our top-of-the-line musicologists have to be an all-German crew.” He turned back to the speakerphone. “We have Clara Emery here, Sedge—you know, Piet Hoitsma’s daughter. She’s been helping us out at the beginning—very brainy girl, knows her music, and, I suspect no more of a krautophile than you are, old top.”

  “Oh, hullo, dear girl—awfully good of you to lend us a hand,” Sedge enthused. “You must come by next time you’re home visiting, and bring the folks. Haven’t seen Piet and—and your dear mother—sorry, can’t fetch up her name—in a dog’s age. Met your pa in the big war, you know—hush-hush stuff. And bring your hubby. Harry says he’s doing bully work for us.”

  “Right,” she said, “will do—without fail. And it’s Gladys—my mum.”

  “Oh, righty-oh. See to it you visit us. Now about Jerry…”

  She reined in her whirling emotions, the sharpest being irritation with Mitch for having ambushed her at the last minute to join the high-level conference without a clue about its purpose. Winging it was not her forte. She’d reprimand him in private; now it was showtime. “Yes, well, it will be hard,” she confirmed, “to avoid turning to them for major assistance.” Like them or not, Clara conceded, the Germans had undeniably invented what the world thought of as classical music and thoroughly dominated it for two hundred years. Not until Berlioz and Chopin came along was their monopoly broken. Accordingly, musicological academia and literature dealing with that period had become the specialty of German scholars and commentators. “Not that there aren’t some perfectly fine people elsewhere,” she said, “but if you asked me to name the world’s ten leading authorities on Beethoven, most would be German or Austrian—a meaningless distinction in this case. But I don’t think you people should be totally reliant on them, by any means—after all, art is an international language.”

  “Then maybe only our top expert—our phase-one person who’ll chair the project—needs to be a German,” Gordy proposed, “and the panel of authorities brought on board for our intensive phase-three vetting can be an international all-star cast.”

  “That makes a certain amount of sense,” said Harry. “If you had to name the foremost Beethoven scholar alive, Clara, who would it be—a German, no doubt?”

  She had to reflect a moment; so many scholars out there publishing, so little time to keep up with the torrent. “There’d be a handful of contenders, by any academic consensus. But if you ask me, there’s one who stands head and shoulders over the field—a rather dreadful old warhorse named Emil Reinsdorf, a professor of history and composition at the National Conservatory in Berlin. His trilogy on Beethoven’s works is a collection of close textual analyses of the music, and they’re bloody brilliant. He’s also done dozens of monographs and journal articles on one or another element of the Beethoven canon and is in worldwide demand as a lecturer. If Emil Reinsdorf were to conclude that the William Tell Symphony was composed by Beethoven, then ninety-nine chances in a hundred Beethoven it was.”

  “Mmmm,” said Harry, proprietary interest aroused. “But what makes him so dreadful?”

  Wait, Clara thought before answering, who am I to gossip about an Olympian figure in my discipline? Tone it down,
girl, or you’ll come across as a schoolyard snitch. “There’s a lot of jealous slander in the music world, I’m afraid, and I’ve never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, you understand—but Herr Doktor Reinsdorf is said by some to be as ill-tempered as he is exacting. Immensely knowledgeable, of course, but contentious by nature. Devours all rivals in the field, and—well, an ego the size of Pomerania.”

  “How big is that?” Gordy asked.

  “Big,” she said with smile. “I could check if you’d like.”

  “He sounds just the ticket, rotter or not,” Sedge cracked. “Rather like your people kidnapping the Nazis’ ace rocket fellow—Von Braun, was it?—to run your program.”

  Harry looked doubtful. “I suspect this prima donna would take a fair amount of coaxing, and I don’t know that we have the time or inclination for that. How could we land him, Clara, short of handing the swine our whole bank account?”

  Clara felt a rush of empowerment. She was being treated as an equal participant at the table. No time to turn squishy.

  “First, I doubt that he’s purchasable,” she said. “It’s the tribute to his stature that might appeal to him—”

  “I thought that was what the money was for—to buy his stature,” Harry said.

  Clara was beginning to see what Mitch had to deal with every day. “Actually,” she replied, “I don’t think I’d try for Reinsdorf—or any German, for that matter—to supervise this project for Cubbage & Wakeham.”

  “Good girl,” Sedge’s voice chimed.

  “How so?” Harry asked. “If he’s the best, and the Germans are the class of the field?”

  “Yes, quite,” Clara said. “But there are several points on the other side. For one thing, given that the Germans view themselves as keepers of the flame with regard to classical music in general and their great maestro Beethoven in particular, they may react with high resentment because this manuscript—whatever it turns out to be—has fallen into the clutches of an American—not to mention an Anglo-American auction house that might be tempted to pass less-than-totally-disinterested judgment on the legitimacy of the work. Frankly, the more eminent the German authority you approach to chair the investigation, the more likely he is to view you as pillagers. And the Germans, whether or not you care to admit it, might have a point. How would Americans or Britons react if a newly discovered autobiography by, say, Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill were suddenly to surface in the hands of what Mr. Wakeham calls ‘that ruddy bunch in Düsseldorf’? How delighted would we be about their proprietary claims on it—and then their passing definitive judgment on its authenticity, and finally putting it up on the auction block, so that it might fall into insensitive hands that might exploit it abusively?”

  “But isn’t that just what we need,” Gordy asked, “a German commandant who’d be the ultimate skeptic, the least gullible interrogator, raising the most demanding questions?”

  “Perhaps,” said Clara, “but I don’t think you want a closed mind or all but guaranteed hostility in your chief arbiter. I’d rather you try to enlist one or two eminent Germans and Austrians for your panel of five experts, Reinsdorf ideally among them, but that’s quite different from hiring one of them to oversee your entire proceedings. I’d vote for a top-flight American scholar to head the project. The manuscript is in the possession, legal or otherwise, of an American. C&W is an Anglo-American firm, and logistically it will be far more manageable—since you can’t risk letting the manuscript go flying around the world—to have an American within easy reach of this building to serve as your presiding guru.”

  “Grand thinking, young lady,” Sedge put in. “Huns make trouble.”

  Harry saw her point. “So preferably we want the top Beethoven person in the States?”

  Clara looked dubious. “To crack the whip over a pride of lions, you probably wouldn’t hire another lion, would you?” she asked. The firm might be better off enlisting someone without his or her own axe to grind, but possessed of wide-ranging yet thorough knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, from the late Baroque through the Classical heyday and deep into the Romantic era. “You need someone perceptive who can see both the forest and the trees—someone collegial enough to forge a consensus and not stir a lot of acrimony—and not a rarefied scholar specializing in theory but someone with working knowledge of composition and a practical grasp of performing.” As she paused for breath, her face suddenly glowed with an incandescent thought. “And I may have the perfect person for you,” she added, “assuming he’s obtainable.”

  .

  harry himself phoned clara, at Mitch’s behest since he didn’t want her to think it was his doing alone, to ask her to continue as a paid C&W consultant until the Tell Symphony had been either fully authenticated or cast aside as a fake. She thanked Harry and said she’d think it over, but she had no desire to go on the firm’s payroll, she told Mitch afterward, nor to be exploited by him, however incidentally or unwittingly. “I’ve got my own work to do,” she said, “and you’ve got yours—okay?”

  “But this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for anyone as passionately dedicated to music as you are,” Mitch argued. “I mean, doesn’t this whole thing knock you out?”

  “Sure—it’s utterly fascinating. And I hope you’ll keep me posted, if you can without, you know, violating company security.” She guessed that Lolly and her indiscreet tongue would reveal whatever Mitch felt constrained to keep mum about.

  He looked crushed. “I still need you with me on his, sweetie—I’m in over my head here. And I don’t want to wind up getting tossed out of Harry’s window.”

  His confession, she could tell, had cost him several cubits of ego. “That’s very wrong and—and extremely underhanded of you, trying to prey on my sympathy like this. You’ll have all the expert help you need to make the final call. I’m not your satellite, Mitch. I thought we’d established that.”

  He threw up his hands. “Have it your way. But at least come with me to try to lock up our main guy. He’s your nominee.”

  Clara narrowed her eyes. “You’re making me feel trapped—if I’m not willing to be your crutch in this thing, I’m disloyal. It’s bloody selfish of you, frankly.”

  His sheepish look said he admitted the charge. “Okay—just this final time, then.”

  She yielded with a scolding frown. “But this is it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  On summer break from his academic duties, Macrae Quarles was touring in Provence with his wife when Mitch tracked him down by telephone at his hotel room in Nîmes. There was still a whisper of Kentucky hill country in his soft, reedy speech and a pleasing cordiality that might have well served the often-abrasive Harry Cubbage. Even so, Professor Quarles sounded politely put upon when Mitch explained the nature of the problem confronting C&W, without revealing the composer’s identity beyond classifying him as “a major figure.” With a honeyed, scarcely perceptible twang, Quarles replied, “This sort of thing comes up every now and then, Mr. Emery. I wouldn’t get too worked up about it if I were in your folks’ shoes.”

  “We’re trying not to,” Mitch assured him, “but this just might be something quite remarkable.” It was not a subject to be discussed on the phone, however, he added and expressed the hope that he and Clara—“my wife is an admiring former student of yours, incidentally”—might fly over and impose on him for an hour or two, at the most, a few days later. “I don’t think you’ll find it a waste of your time, sir.”

  “Sounds mighty urgent.” Quarles cupped the mouthpiece of his phone briefly, then came back on the line. “My wife and I plan to visit some of the perched villages around here this week,” he said, “but I guess a few hours with you folks won’t unperch them. Come ahead.”

  On the late flight to Marseilles, Mitch scanned the bio material on Macrae Quarles that Clara had hastily assembled. A product of hillbilly stock, Mac (as even his
students were invited to call him) had somehow contrived to prep at Hotchkiss and earn a Phi Beta Kappa key at Amherst, where his student music group, the Double Cues (for Quarles Quintet), performed everything from rag to rock, with blues, bluegrass, swing, and Dixie in between, and turned the large, lumbering young rube into a campus celebrity.

  “He has these great gangly arms that hang almost to his knees,” Clara noted, “and big, soft hands, so he can play every note on the piano without exerting himself—and can he play!” En route to his doctorate at Juilliard, he wrote—before his twenties were over—three piano concerti each named for a different Kentucky county, an oratorio he called Requiem for the Flower Children, and his best-known work, The Swing Sonata. Soon sobered by the near impossibility of making a living as a serious composer, Quarles immersed himself in heavyweight scholarship as the core of his career, starting with an expansion of his Juilliard dissertation on polyphony in Bach. It was published by Oxford University Press and received favorably even in the German journals.

  As an assistant professor at the Yale School of Music, he turned out his most widely read book, The Classical Zenith, a comparative study of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. “But this time,” Clara’s memo on him related, “the German critics were less generous, dismissing the dense volume as largely derivative—and probably resenting that a mere American had the brass to attempt it.” Juilliard brought him back as a faculty stalwart, and he wrote his National Book Award winner, Virtuoso: The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the first full-scale biography of America’s first musical genius. After that, Quarles turned to the art of conducting, which he took up in stints with summer festival orchestras and for a sabbatical term with the St. Paul Philharmonic. His latest book, due out in the fall, was Bravo! Bravo!: Maestros of the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music had just snared him as its associate director, promising that he would assume the top post within a year or two. “Mac Quarles is a perfect bridge figure between the musical traditions of the Old World and the New,” Clara summed him up, “on top of which I had him as a guest lecturer one term at Columbia, and he’s a total charmer.”