Beethoven's Tenth Read online

  The Swiss Philharmonic, as the orchestra was called, was not a place, however, where any gifted and ambitious artist would wish to remain for long, Ansel contended. Its concert hall close by the lake was gloomy, and the orchestra itself was less a fixed ensemble than a shifting pool of mediocre local and imported past-their-prime musicians. Among such company, Ansel stood out as a natural candidate for the principal cellist’s chair as soon as it fell vacant. That, though, seemed an eternity away, “and I grew restless,” he confessed to the Emerys, “and then my marriage turned into a sour joke—Lisa was twice as spoiled as I was and no more faithful.” He endured the situation with mordant humor, taking solace anew in drugs while starting to compose in a haphazard way and inventing his classical-pop music act for gigs at local wine bars.

  “My mother’s election to the Philharmonic Board, for all her good intentions, served only to complicate matters,” Ansel added. After one board meeting, she drew aside Herr Richard Grieder, the aging, worse-for-wear conductor and musical director, and inquired about her son’s prospects for becoming principal cellist. Thereafter, Grieder, no doubt supposing Ansel had put his mother up to it, was curt with him and implied that he would never bow to pressure, no matter how generous the Erpfs were to the orchestra. The ultimate indignity came, Ansel lamented, when he had the temerity to submit several of his own compositions for performance by the philharmonic. “The scores were returned to me without a note of regret or even thanks.”

  After a dozen years of dutiful time-serving, Ansel related, “I launched guerrilla warfare against the stuffy bastards, but Grieder was hopelessly entrenched.” His discipline was lax, he could not communicate, his program selections were mired in cliché, and no concert passed without his falling a half beat off tempo for twenty or thirty bars before he woke up to it. “He was, and remains, a gross incompetent, and I said as much to whoever would listen.” One day, he did so at a rehearsal after Grieder had unfairly singled out Ansel for criticism. “Then I got up and marched off the stage—probably about three seconds before they were going to pitch me into the lake—and I haven’t gone back since.”

  His marriage had likewise ended on the rocks. “And just as well,” he said. “Our parents had pressured us into it—good for our emotional stability, they claimed. Ha! Now I just look after my family’s house, smoke three cigars a day in peace, stay up all night with my Artie Shaw records and a variety of lady friends, and do my comedy act whenever I like. Not a bad life.”

  That Ansel would unburden himself to strangers in this fashion struck Mitch as testimony to the man’s fragile emotional state. “Sounds kind of lonely to me,” he said. “Not unlike Beethoven’s life, now that you’ve brought it up.”

  Ansel drew off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and began to clean the right lens with his napkin. “Perhaps you should show me your psychiatric license before you begin practicing on me,” he said without looking up. “As you may know, Mitchell, I’m already well attended to in that department, so spare yourself the effort.”

  “No, no—I meant only that you’re a musician, too, who’s faced considerable adversity and pain and have gone largely unappreciated despite your considerable—”

  “Genius?” Ansel gave a wry grin, redonned his glasses, then teetered back in his chair and folded his hands together behind his head in a cradling position. “What you say is quite true—and I blame the outcome on circumstances beyond my control more than on any deficiency in my character. But I hardly think that categorizes my case as raving paranoia.” He peered across the table. “Now why don’t you tell me what you nice people came all this way to find out?”

  “Since you ask,” Mitch said without hesitation now. “There’s a gentleman back in our office who’s a suspicious sort—they pay him for that particular trait. He raised the possibility, however farfetched, that you may be the actual composer of the William Tell Symphony—and so I’ve been dispatched to look into the matter. I asked Clara, who is completing her doctoral dissertation on Schubert, to join me.”

  Ansel’s eye-blink rate did not increase. “Ah—now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Did you?” Mitch asked.

  “Did I what—write the Tell Symphony and—what—attribute it to Beethoven?”

  “Yes.”

  Ansel gave a derisive snort.

  “Such an insult to poor Beethoven,” he said, pausing to light another cigarette. “May I ask if this colleague of yours, who I’ll assume to be a total ignoramus about musical matters, has examined the manuscript?”

  “He doesn’t pass himself off as an authority on music. It’s just a gut feeling on his part.”

  “Just so. And yourself?”

  “Do I have musical expertise? Only by proximity to my wife. What of it?”

  Ansel turned to Clara. “Perhaps Mrs. Emery—since you know music—have you seen it?”

  “The manuscript? I have, actually.”

  “And doesn’t the very idea strike you as—I don’t know what else to call it other than completely idiotic—to imagine that anyone could sham the consummate artistry of a Beethoven? I suppose it’s very flattering to be considered even remotely capable of such a stupendous deception—Beethoven had unique powers, soaring inspiration…” Now his agitation began to show. “And it’s obviously a worn old manuscript. Do you mean I would go to the extent of, what, antiquing an old composition book and all the rest?” The edges of a tremor in his voice hinted at a rising level of distress.

  “I’m not competent,” Clara said softly, “to evaluate the manuscript beyond observing certain similarities to Beethoven’s compositional techniques. What someone else might be capable of by way of imitation, for whatever reason, is hardly for me to—”

  “Wait, wait—I see it all now!” Ansel interjected. “It’s known that I play several instruments and can satirize the styles of many composers—and that I’ve attempted some composing of my own—and that our home is next door to where the manuscript was found—therefore, according to this brilliant line of logic, I must have written it.”

  “And,” said Mitch, unwilling to let the point be lost to mockery, “how better to attract recognition from the world than by tricking yourself out in the guise of a certified superstar and trying to pass off your work as his?”

  “I see.” Ansel calmed himself. “How thrilling even to be seriously suspected of such a ruse.” He leaned forward to engage his inquisitor. “But if one were to contemplate such an unthinkable undertaking, why dream up a work like Tell? It’s so utterly unlike most of what Beethoven wrote—a ‘dramatic symphony’ with substantial vocal interludes—”

  “Which would help to explain, of course,” Mitch replied, “why Beethoven might have chosen to set such an extensive work aside as a noble experiment gone irreparably awry. Quite an ingenious idea for a forgery, if you think about it.”

  Ansel inhaled deeply and let the smoke out contemplatively in a thin stream. “And my skills are supposed to extend as well to forging Beethoven’s sloppy handwriting?”

  “Or hired someone else to do it,” Mitch replied.

  “How—by placing a help-wanted advert in The Times or the Tagblat?” Ansel paused, eyes widening, and said, “Oh, wait—now that I think about it, I could have hired my dear cousin from Vevey—Sofie Ries. A highly regarded creator of children’s books, and her illustrations have a marvelous depth thanks to her intricate cross-hatching.” He looked Mitch in the eye. “I suppose with a little practice she could have learned to forge Beethoven’s writing.”

  The man’s bravado was a challenge not to be left hanging.

  “Did she?” Mitch asked.

  Ansel gave a triumphant snort. “Well, you’ll just have to ask her,” he said. “I believe her number’s listed in the Vevey directory. If not, Margot or I have it around somewhere.”

  Food arrived and broke the tension of their exchange. Ansel pou
red wine for all of them with a steady hand and said, “Well, thank you for your directness, but I hereby and equally directly assure you—we have a Bible in our house that I’ll swear on if you’d like—that I did no such thing as your deranged colleague imagines. And if I were capable of it, why would I be wasting my time playing an imposter instead of creating masterful music in my own name?”

  On their stroll along the Limmat heading back toward their hotel, Clara let Mitch steep in silence as he processed all they had seen and heard. “I’ll bet you’re wondering about dear cousin Sofie’s connection to the whole story,” she finally intruded. “Why on earth would he even bring up her name if she was involved in this thing?”

  Mitch dug his hands into his pockets. “Who knows—he seems clever enough to be playing all sorts of games with us.”

  Clara had a different take on Ansel. “I think you may be too hung up on the coincidence between his being a professional musician and his living next door to where the manuscript was found. Actually, if both weren’t the case, the manuscript would have been lost forever after Otto’s house was cleaned out.”

  Mitch nodded. “But that’s not one coincidence,” he said, “it’s two. His occupation and his address. Two coincidences have a whiff of premeditation about them.”

  Clara liked watching the cogs of his brain whirring. “He could also just be a genuine neurotic telling us more than we want to know about him because he’s enjoying all the attention,” she said. “I find him rather appealing, actually—in a homeless puppy kind of way.”

  .

  their luncheon appointment the next day was at the Belvoir Park restaurant, a cheerfully retrofitted mansion on a hillside overlooking Zurich’s western lakefront. Margot Lenz, who said on arrival that she lived only a few blocks away, bore little resemblance to her brother. Her angular features, a bit too severe to qualify her as a beauty, suggested an Erté femme fatale in a smart, dark tweed suit instead of a diaphanous chemise. Her satiny voice was low-pitched, her manner one of deep concern.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” she told them after the briefest of pleasantries. “I’m still hopeful that we can work something out with Mr. Hassler and your company, so I’m going to be entirely candid with you. Our family’s privacy has already been compromised by my brother’s history, and you shouldn’t be under any misapprehension where Ansel is concerned. It was good that you were able to spend time with him yesterday, so you can better sense—” She cut herself short. “I act as our family’s unofficial caretaker for him, more or less—my parents are no longer in the best of health and are often away traveling.”

  “He didn’t seem to be in particular need of a caretaker,” Mitch said.

  “Not in the sense of a nursemaid. But he’s been under medication for some years now, and he’s rather at loose ends these days ever since he left the philharmonic and his marriage broke up. He’s fine much of the time, but if he forgets his medication or thinks he can get by without it, well, that’s when the trouble begins. It’s one reason he’s been living in our family’s old home—there’s help around to keep an eye on him, just in case.”

  Five years older than Ansel, she had been acting as his guardian angel all his life, Margot confided over drinks, “for which thankless service I have been rewarded with alternating bursts of unconditional love and bitter resentment on his part. It is not a mission I enjoy.”

  “Is Ansel—how shall I put it politely—in control of his mental faculties?” Mitch asked.

  Margot hesitated before answering. “I’m afraid he’s abused himself and his native resources for so long that there’s no short answer to your question.” What most people would regard as fortunate—to be born into a family with the Erpfs’ advantages—had, in Ansel’s case, almost certainly worked to his detriment, she implied. “And his basic musical skills came almost too easily to him.” But their father’s strong opposition to his son’s pursuit of a career in the precarious field of music and Ansel’s own laggard, if willful, spirit were too problematic for his natural ability to overcome, “and so he’s forever wavered between playing the half-hearted rebel and the devoted sybarite. The result is that his career as a serious artist is in shambles, and all he has left is a part-time job as a kind of musical clown at a piano bar.”

  “But he claims he had reformed and worked earnestly as a cellist with your philharmonic, only to be rebuffed,” Mitch related.

  Margot shook her head slowly. “Yes—well, with Ansel it’s always other people’s fault. The truth is, he got bored with the orchestra early on and took to calling it ‘this third-rate band in a second-rate town’—not exactly words to endear himself to his colleagues or, when they got repeated, to his superiors. They doomed his hopes of gaining the first cellist’s chair, and when our mother tried to patch things up, he blamed her for only making it all worse. He began showing up late at rehearsals and then missing some altogether, phoning in some feeble excuse. They wanted to let him go, but Mother held them off for a time.” Margot sighed and attacked her martini in earnest.

  “What about Ansel’s compositions?” Mitch asked her. “He claims they never gave him a hearing. Has he ever played any of them for you?”

  “I’ve asked, but he’s afraid I’m too judgmental about everything where he’s concerned.”

  “Has anyone told you whether he’s gifted—or just—more or less delusional?”

  “Only his friend—well, they’re more like former friends now—Felix Utley. He’s a first-section violinist with the philharmonic. He should have been made concertmaster years ago, but he had a run-in with Grieder also. He and Ansel were in the soup together, for quite different reasons. Felix looked after Ansel, always urging him to play it straight and stop clowning and give up his drug habit whenever he fell back into it. He’s a very understanding guy.” At the Erpfs’ Christmas party one year, Ansel showed up with Felix in tow, and Margot got to thank him for his kind efforts. “Ansel told me the day before that the philharmonic had flatly rejected his latest concerto, so I asked Felix privately if he had ever heard or read Ansel’s music. He said yes and then shrugged and looked away. ‘I’ve heard worse,’ he said, which I think you would have to characterize as damning with faint praise. I suspect Grieder, our uninspired old conductor, and the other powers that be at the philharmonic gave Ansel’s creations at least a cursory review and found them wanting. But Ansel can never take no for an answer.”

  “And his marriage? He claims the family drove him into it.”

  Margot’s frown deepened. “He simply won’t accept responsibility for his own actions—and inactions. Nobody told him to marry Lisa—she was too young, too headstrong, and too—well, let’s just say that her affair with the tennis professional at our club became common knowledge—was even flaunted in a setting where discretion is greatly prized.” All of which served to cast Ansel as a lost soul and shame his family unbearably.

  His sister turned toward the window and gazed at the lawn and the floral plantings at its scalloped edge. “It’s one reason our parents are out of town so often. And I keep my distance from our club most of the time—it’s embarrassing to be the object of sideways glances from the members—and let me tell you, in my business and in a community as tight as ours is, social contacts are all-important.”

  The woman’s anguish could not be doubted. “Not a happy tale,” Mitch commiserated.

  “No, but perhaps you can see now why this quite extraordinary discovery of Ansel’s right next door to our house seems such a godsend—and why our family has chosen to pursue the matter. This goes well beyond the legalities involved.”

  “Meaning—what? It’s a form of therapy for him, and so—”

  “Not just therapy—it’s become his driving mission in life, though he probably didn’t let on as much to you people. He’s totally consumed by it—he reads, eats, sleeps, and breathes Beethoven all the time now. Don’t you see—here’s so
mething of his doing that nobody can complain about. He found the Tell Symphony—not Otto Hassler’s grandson. Jacob would have undoubtedly disposed of the old trunk as worthless. Finally, Ansel has done something immensely useful—or so we all hope it proves. It’s given him a noble purpose in life just now—and I thought the family ought to stand by him in the matter.” Her feeling had been translated into the Erpfs’ proposal to the Swiss government—“The subject of the symphony, after all, is of keen interest to our country”—to enlist its help in retrieving the manuscript from America.

  “Yes,” Mitch confirmed, “a Swiss official explained the arrangement to our firm—quite creative on your part, and I’m not being cynical.”

  “What probably wasn’t mentioned to you, though—and I’m sharing the information with you because you’ve come to us in a civilized way—is a side proposal we made to Herr Grieder.” In return for the Erpfs’ kindness in trying to direct a sizable portion of any funds the Tell Symphony might generate to benefit the Swiss Philharmonic, as well as the family’s insistence that the world premiere of the work be performed by the Zurich orchestra under Grieder’s baton, the conductor was to reengage Ansel and, given his good conduct for one year, to appoint him principal cellist. “The fellow they chose when Ansel was passed over is due to transfer soon to the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. And to patch up his old friend Felix Utley’s falling out with the conductor, Ansel asked that the understanding with Grieder also ensure Felix’s long overdue appointment as concertmaster.”