Beethoven's Tenth Read online

  The first of what looked like two bookkeeping ledgers proved to be, as Jake began flipping slowly through it, a worn workbook with music staves ruled across the full width of its pages and a blotchy torrent of notes, chords, circles, dots, illegible abbreviations, mysterious signs, and jagged markings flooding each one in inks of different shades and thicknesses of line. Crossouts abounded, along with smudges, ink drips, and blurred mirror images on opposing pages, likely caused when the book was closed before the latest inked entry had dried. Here and there, new notes or a change in tempo had been inserted with a lead pencil. Whoever the composer was, he or she was not neat about it; the work appeared to have been carried out in a sustained paroxysm of creative energy. Just a bit more graphic turmoil, Mitch thought, and the pages would have resembled a Jackson Pollock canvas. The paper, uneven at the upper edges of each page and moldy-looking in spots, was thick yet pliant without showing any sign of crumbling at Jake’s touch.

  The second ledger-like book, in sharp contrast to the other, densely packed one, presented much cleaner and more carefully written music on both sides of its first twenty or so pages; the rest were empty, save for the ruled staves. After glancing about him to make sure he had their full attention, Jake ceremoniously turned to the beginning of the second book. It was a generously spaced title page, the top two lines of which read, in large Gothic German lettering,

  Wilhelm Tell

  Eine Dramatische Symphonie

  Below, in smaller letters, was the byline, Ludwig van Beethoven, and directly below that, in still smaller writing, In Memoriam J. C. F. v. Schiller. Running down the left side of the page was a list of musical instruments, presumably the ones to be used in performing the work.

  Irresistibly impressive, Mitch thought, for all his unfamiliarity with musical manuscripts. If a counterfeit, this was fastidious workmanship. It all certainly looked real. Very.

  Jake held the page open for several triumphant moments, letting the impact of the sight sink in. “Something, huh?” he asked when his hovering observers kept noncommittally mum.

  “Definitely some thing,” Harry allowed, breaking the word in two, “but just what kind of a thing—that’s the question.”

  “Meaning—what, exactly?” asked Jake with a trace of a frown.

  Harry did his best to regard Jake charitably and not as a member of some rudimentary species, then gestured to Mitch to field the question.

  “Meaning,” Mitch said not unkindly, “that what the title page says, Jake, is not necessarily what it is. That has to be determined by experts, no matter how authentic it may look to you—or to us. I, for one, haven’t a clue what ‘a dramatic symphony’ is—I guess that’s what this German subtitle means. I can check that with my wife—it’s her field of study.” He pointed to the other contents of the box now spread on the table. “Now what else have you got here—what’s the little book?”

  Jake slid off the attached letter and ribbon and handed the book back over his shoulder.

  “Ansel thinks old Ludwig probably used this as a kind of guide for what he was composing. It’s got lots of scribbles all over its pages and inside the covers—”

  The dark brown leather cover, flaking at the top right front corner, bore no markings, but Mitch could figure out the German on the title page: William Tell: A dramatic play in four acts by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. He glanced at the swarm of penciled notations that speckled the front and back endpapers. “Well, somebody wrote something in here, that’s for certain.” He handed the book back to Jake. “And what’s in the envelope that came with it?”

  “Okay, this is the most interesting part,” Jake said, warming to his task. “It explains the whole thing—more or less.” He pulled out a cream-colored letter from a matching unsealed folder—three sheets filled on both sides with small, precise handwriting—and explained that Ansel had translated it into English for him soon after they found it. “It knocked us both for a loop, so I asked if he’d please write it out for me in English—which he did that night.” Jake turned to his lawyer. “Here, we’ve got photocopies of it for you folks.”

  Whittaker reached into his attaché case for the copies and handed them around to the C&W team, urging them to digest the translation carefully. “It’s a real eye-opener.”

  Mitch leaned over his copy of the stapled, three-page document and, his astonishment swelling by the line, read:

  14 September 1814

  To dearest Mama and Papa—and all the world forever,

  Should any of you find this packet of papers, I wish to explain what they are and why I put them here, so you will not think I have done a horrid thing.

  Maestro Ludwig van Beethoven departed our house here in the Napfplatz today after having occupied the top storey apartment since the latter part of July, during which period he endured treatments almost every day for an ear infection that is said to have greatly reduced his hearing. The conditions for his tenancy included the transfer of the pianoforte from our drawing room up to his quarters and a pledge that his identity and visit here never be revealed. We called him “Herr Schmidt” and said, when inquiries were made, that he was a renowned traveling concert pianist.

  Maestro B. was in a sour humour for much of his residence with us, as I can vouch, being the daughter of the house and given charge of tending to our tenant’s needs. His daily program was unvarying. Early each morning he went to work at his piano, and judging by the musical books and sheets scattered on and about the instrument and from the way he played—in fits and starts—we all believed he was creating a new composition. At noon, he went to the physician for his ear infusions and afterward would walk beside the lake, where he appeared preoccupied and could be heard humming aloud to himself and seen pausing at times to scribble something down with a pencil in a little notebook he drew from his pocket. Once, I came upon him in his quarters shortly after his return and he was still wearing his hat while scratching away like fury in the large book he kept beside the piano. Evenings he would dine at the modest taverns in the student neighborhood or with acquaintances unknown to us. More than once he declined with gratitude an invitation to sup with our family, wishing to keep his distance and privacy.

  I summoned the courage one day to inquire of him the nature of his new work, and in response he asked if I was familiar with William Tell. Every Swiss knows the story of the great bowman and his son and the apple, I told him. And did we all know what foreign nation was oppressing Tell and his people, he asked me, and I confessed I was not sure, not wanting to give him offense, since I knew well it was the country of Austria, where he lived. No matter, he said, “I am writing a symphonic version of your glorious legend, with singing parts as well, but it is proving very difficult work.” I then made the error of asking whether he might play me a small part of it. He grew angry, saying he did not give recitals for chambermaids, which caused me to remind him that I was also the daughter of the house and for that reason (and others) ought not to be disrespected.

  His temper, I am sorry to say, did not improve much, probably because the medical treatments he was taking were not benefiting his hearing. He used an ear trumpet whenever I addressed him and asked me to please speak louder. Once, however, he admired the dress I was wearing and spoke appreciatively about the sunshine flooding his rooms.

  I was much troubled, though, when, preparing to conclude his stay at our house this morning, he pointed to his music composition books and some other papers he had piled into a corner. “Please do me the kindness of destroying this material,” he said. When I asked him why he did not wish to take them on the coach ride home, he quite bristled at me. “It is none of your affair,” said he. “Will you do as I ask?” But think of all your work, maestro, I said to him, what a great pity to give it up. “No, no!” he shouted. “The pity is that it is so poor a job that I can not put my name to it.” I wondered aloud if he might not perfect it at a later time, o
r perhaps hold a higher opinion of the work when his spirits had lifted—all of which caused him at first to charge me with impertinence. Then he saw I was trying to be kind, so he shook his head, saying that beyond its inferior quality, the work was “far too dangerous” and so had to be destroyed. I said I feared it would be a sin for me to do so and wondered why he did not discard it himself. He looked forlorn and said, “I have not the heart for it.”

  He took my hand upon leaving and made me nod assent to his request. But almost at once I had regrets and thought it could do no harm for me to store his papers for safekeeping somewhere in our house—in the event he should change his mind. I ran over to the casement and began calling down to him, but then soon realized that of course he could not have heard me. I write this, then, to explain why I have taken it upon myself to defy the wishes of such a great man, who I am sure has not been himself due to his medical infirmities. Perhaps I shall write him some day and confess what I have done. Or perhaps not—and this composition will remain hidden from mankind until many years from now, when we are all long gone, along with whatever “danger” the maestro imagines might result from the creation of this symphony. May the world forgive me then and understand why I have acted so.

  —Nina Hassler

  The scale of the thing, the sheer daring of the concoction—if it was one—nearly arrested Mitch’s breathing. It was so toweringly, outrageously preposterous a scam: a Moby Dick in a sardine can. And the letter of explanation was too transparently perfect. Yet—yet—confronted with the object itself sitting right there, with black-and-white evidence apparently in the composer’s own hand and presumably certifiable, Mitch found himself witlessly hoping against hope that somehow, through a confluence of forces he could not even guess at, it was true. Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony: the William Tell, about to take its place proudly, if more than two centuries belatedly, with the other three symphonies of his that bore a name as well as a number—the Third, the Eroica; the Sixth, the Pastoral, and the Ninth, the Choral. The fantasizing lobes of his brain at once discounted the likelihood that the peerless composer was right, that the work had been properly cast aside because it was, to be direct about it, piss-poor. No, that sadly stricken titan must have been an emotional basket case at the moment he discarded the manuscript and had likely lost his powers of discernment, as Nina Hassler, wise maiden that she was, had dared to suggest to him. It had to have merit—assuming it was actually his work—and here it was, albeit in a still raw, apparently unperfected state, just waiting for destiny to arrive and…

  “Terrific,” whispered Gordy Roth, the first of the C&W team to break silence. He was shaking his head and reading the letter through a second time. Mitch looked past him to see Harry’s perplexed brow undulating in tempo with his eye movements as he absorbed the text.

  “See?” Jake Hassler said, a little smile pasted in place. “I told you it was something.”

  Mitch’s tolerance for the supermiraculous fled as fast as it had come over him. Jake’s naïveté made him recoil. Was this guy a used car salesman in sheep’s clothing? “But anyone could have written this letter,” Mitch said with clinical blandness, directing his words to the room at large, “and put it in this box—and put the box in the trunk—and the trunk in the attic—”

  Jake spun around to face him.

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me! Why would anyone do—”

  “So we’d all think it’s real,” Mitch cut him off quietly.

  “Why all the rigmarole to hide a fake?”

  “That’s a very good question, Jake.” Mitch placed the Nina letter on the tabletop. “It just might have something to do with money—isn’t that why you’ve come to us?”

  Jake’s roundish face grew pinched with bafflement.

  “Sure, to sell it for a bundle—but I don’t get it. How would—how could—anyone else make money off it—if I’ve got it?”

  “Another good question,” said Mitch, his mind racing now over the complexity of the sudden challenge he faced. The most exotic document investigation he had overseen since joining C&W involved certifying an early sixteenth-century map of the Spanish Main. Even when fully authenticated, the map sold at auction for just $12,500. But an entirely new Beethoven symphony, if that was what this was, and the accompanying rights to its commercial uses would be a spectacularly different matter. Think of all the performance and recording revenues—they’d gross in the tens of millions. But Jake had a point: How could hypothetical perpetrators of an international, high-stakes forgery scam prosper by allowing their work product to fall into the hands of a hardware salesman living in the New Jersey hinterland?

  Harry, Mitch recognized, had gone down roads similar to this one many times in the past, so there was no need for him to voice his skepticism at this stage. Instead, he put two questions to Jake: What was Ansel Erpf’s initial reaction to the stunning find, and had there in fact ever been a Nina Hassler on his family tree?

  “Oh, Ansel—he nearly had kittens,” Jake chuckled. “I mean, he’s a musician, a pro—and we’re talkin’ Beethoven here—so whaddaya think? His eyes bug out of his head, and he says it’s got to be a mistake or something—this Nina must’ve got it wrong—or it was maybe somebody masquerading as Beethoven. Then he started going through these two big composition books here and shaking his head like crazy and begins to change his tune the longer he looks, and next thing I see, he’s cryin’ his eyes out—and probably pissing in his pants. That’s when it started getting to me, too.”

  Jake took a deep breath. “I asked him what we should do with the stuff, and first he said he wasn’t sure, and then he asked if he could have it to himself for a few days—ya know, so he could look it over and try to figure out if it was legit—because that would make it historical and all. He said it would be best if he could take it all back to his house, right next door, to study it and fool around with it a little on the piano, so he could, ya know, hear what it sounds like.”

  “In other words, he tried to grab it away from you,” Harry prompted.

  Jake shook his head. “Nah, it didn’t seem like that—at least not right away. It seemed natural enough—Grandpa’s house was dark—Ansel probably wanted to spread the stuff out, so he could get a real good look at it.”

  “You weren’t a little bit suspicious of him?” Gordy wondered.

  “Like I said, not then. The guy’s a musician—I thought that was a lucky break—he could probably figure out what the hell it was all about. Also, he’d always seemed like a good guy to me from when we were kids, and his folks had let Grandpa stay there all those years.” What did concern him, though, Jake added, was the possibility that Ansel, heavy drinker that he was, might somehow mess up the precious discovery by, say, spilling coffee or liquor all over it or burning it with one of the cigarettes he practically chain-smoked. So he told Ansel as nicely as he could that it would be better if he left it all where it was and used the old piano upstairs in the drawing room if he wanted to try out the music. “But he didn’t much like that—gave me a fishy look like maybe I didn’t trust him worth a damn, which wasn’t true—I mean, I wasn’t thinking he’d just take off with the stuff or anything like that. It was only when he began to get pissy about it that I kinda wised up.”

  All at once it hit Jake that, since Ansel’s family had first claim on the house and everything in it except the personal Hassler family things, the excited look in Ansel’s eyes maybe meant he was thinking that this could-be-Beethoven discovery legally belonged to the Erpf family now that Grandpa Otto was dead. Jake’s attitude turned resolute. “So I told him that was the way it had to be—he could spend the next day at Grandpa’s looking over everything, and meanwhile I would get hold of old man Schacht—he’s Grandpa’s lawyer—Martin Schacht. But Ansel wasn’t too tickled by that idea, either. He said maybe we should just keep it all hush-hush for a little till we could sort it all out. That really got my motor racing.”
/>   Once he had hauled the box from the dining room back upstairs to the drawing room, Jake called Herr Schacht, and the lawyer and one of his assistants came over as fast as the old boy could totter, and soon they sent a clerk to Zurich’s official recording office to try to certify the former existence of Nina Hassler. By the next afternoon, there was an answer. Nina Christine Hassler was born in 1792 to parents residing on the same square as Otto’s house, though no numerical address was given. With a little genealogical homework, they conjectured that Nina was probably Jake’s great-great-great-great-aunt—“maybe there was another ‘great’ in there that I lost track of,” he said. Further research, however, failed to uncover either a marriage or death certificate for Nina. “Chances are, they said, she went away and got married somewhere else and died. Schacht and I, we figured maybe she never had a chance to tell anyone about the box she’d left in the attic—or maybe she just plain forgot about the whole shebang.”

  While Ansel devoted the following day to poring over the Tell Symphony at Otto’s house, Jake and his lawyers tried to unpuzzle the miscellaneous papers that had come in the cedar box with the composition books and the copy of Schiller’s play about William Tell. Much of it seemed to be irrelevant junk, invoices and dinner invitations and routine correspondence, all of it addressed to a “Johann Schmidt.” Three of the letters, though, appeared likely to have some bearing on the credibility of Nina’s written account. Two were from the same man, a Zurich resident named Nägeli, who was apparently acquainted with the maestro in some professional way and a keen admirer of his. A third, much longer letter, also in German, was written in a hand difficult to read—only the signature, the single letter “R,” was unmistakable—and bore some sort of crest at the top of the first page, suggesting it might have been sent by one of Beethoven’s noble patrons. All three letters, Mitch mentally noted, would now require the most scrupulous examination by his department.

  After his labors in the drawing room, accompanied by intermittent and somewhat halting strains from Otto’s old warhorse of a piano, Ansel reported back that evening more exhausted than exhilarated but definitely gratified by his findings. He told Jake he believed the composition was very likely genuine Beethoven. The far messier composition book, Ansel thought, was the one in which the maestro had sketched out his work in rough fragments and then refined them as he went along. While the musical handwriting was often difficult to decipher, it looked to him very much as if the composer had begun the work using the operatic form and after a dozen or so pages abruptly abandoned it for a predominantly instrumental approach. But the new version integrated a substantial number of vocal segments unlike anything else that Beethoven had been known to write, other than the last movement of his Ninth Symphony—“which,” said Jake, “I just bought a CD of the other day. Fantastic!”