Beethoven's Tenth by Richard Kluger

Author:Richard Kluger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2018-06-21T00:20:13+00:00

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The Somerset Hills were washed in coral by the approach of sunset, and the piney air stirred with a mid-October tang as drinks were passed among the guests gathered on Gordy and Sara Roth’s cantilevered deck to behold the fading vista. Everyone agreed the spectacle was all the more pleasurable thanks to a pair of large space heaters that neutralized the encroaching chill. The afternoon had been devoted to a microbus tour of New Jersey’s Revolutionary War battlefields, organized for the members of Cubbage & Wakeham’s panel of experts on the eve of their week-long meeting to decide Tell’s life-or-death fate. Also on hand for the outing and the buffet that followed were Jake and Daisy Hassler, the owners—well, claimants, at least—of the luminous, if worse for wear, manuscript that had drawn the group together.

For the benefit of the C&W contingent on hand, composed of Harry and Lolly Cubbage and Mitch and Clara Emery as well as the hosts, Anna Hayes was retelling the traditional version of the maestro’s death late in the afternoon of March 26, 1827. According to bedside witnesses, she said, the Viennese sky darkened suddenly a bit after five o’clock and filled with thunder and lightning, which caused the comatose composer to open his eyes a final time. “He looked about him, so the legend goes, clenched his right hand, raised it threateningly—perhaps in anger at the Divinity for calling him away with so many tasks undone—and breathed his last.” Hayes’s capacious bosom rose and sank perceptibly. “And here we are, all these years later, considering perhaps the most ambitious of those undone tasks.”

“Unless, dear Anna,” cautioned Emil Reinsdorf, “it wasn’t his.”

“Not that it matters,” Mitch asked diffidently after a moment’s pause, respectful of the composer’s demise, “but I’m a little curious about that death scene, moving though it is. I’ve read your book, and I know you call the description hearsay, but what troubles me is how the thunder and lightning could have caused him to open his eyes.”

Anna looked puzzled. “Patients have been known to awaken from comas.”

“But if his eyes were closed,” Mitch persisted, “he wouldn’t have seen the lightning—and since he’d been stone deaf for about fifteen years, he couldn’t have heard the thunder.”

“Felt it vibrate, perhaps,” Anna suggested tolerantly, “or perhaps it just seemed that way to those present. I’m not vouching for it.”

Clara leaned toward Mitch, seated beside her in the gloaming, and whispered, “Give it a rest, sweetie—it’s a legend, for God’s sake. Stop being such a literalist.”

Over dinner, Mac Quarles laid out the panel’s modus operandi to begin the next morning. The ground rules for their proceedings were simple. Only the five panelists were to be allowed in the C&W library; all officers and employees of the auction house were barred in order to preserve an arm’s-length relationship between the experts and those paying them for their services.

The first three days were to be devoted to formal remarks by each panel member, going in alphabetical order, except for

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