Nightmusic Hardcover - 2002

Details

• Title Nightmusic
• Author Harrison Gradwell Slater; Judith Riven
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 576
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, New York
• Date 2002-10-01
• ISBN 9780151005802 / 015100580X
• Weight 1.99 lbs (0.90 kg)
• Dimensions 9.24 x 6.28 x 1.26 in (23.47 x 15.95 x 3.20 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects Mystery fiction, Musical fiction
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2002007212
• Dewey Decimal Code 813.6

CHAPTER 1

The life of every man is a diary...

-J. M. BARRIE

At the ticket window in the central station, there was a huge line of anxious, impatient travelers, mostly Italian. When I finally reached the counter, the agent informed me, "Trains heading south are running several hours late." Standing behind me in line, a traveler accustomed to the caprices of the Italian railways added that he had heard a group of disgruntled workers had blockaded the tracks at Salerno with their own bodies.

"Nothing serious," the agent at the window concluded. "Just the usual Christmas strike." But to me it suggested serious delays, and I envisioned spending hours in an immobile train packed to capacity with restless holiday travelers.

"The best thing to do?" I asked.

"Wait a day and see what happens," the ticket agent replied, and the veteran traveler concurred.

After checking into a small hotel, I crossed the street to Via Mecenate, where the windows of a large auction house caught my eye. A preview was taking place and although I suspected I would be gone by the time the items were auctioned, the quality and number of antiques were imposing enough to capture my imagination, and so I entered. Spread out over many rooms was an infinite number of impressive pieces: inlaid period furniture, marble busts, and eighteenth-century engravings, all competing for the eye. In a room dedicated entirely to leather-bound volumes and illuminated manuscripts, I noticed a dusty archival folder marked "di scarsa importanza" (of little importance). Untying it, I found a thick stack of tawny ochre pages covered with columns of script and numbers penned meticulously in Italian. The random words olio, vino, and legno-oil, wine, and firewood-caught my eye, indicating that the pages were a balance sheet for household expenditures. As I proceeded through the stack, the color of the pages shifted gradually to ashen gray and I began to detect a musky stench, the smell of damp paper.

In peeling the layers apart, my hands were continuing to search long after my mind had decided that I had better things to do on my vacation. But my fingers persisted in their silent hunt, since I realized that the folder, after making it through so many centuries, could easily end up in a Dumpster if no one bought it.

The ink, a rich sepia, glistened with a syrupy viscosity, and the enigmatic quality of the leaves and layers intrigued me. Dampness had weakened the folios, but the paper was from virile stock-much like the rich, sturdy pages used today for artistic writing paper and fine private editions from exclusive bookmakers-and seemed to have stood up to the ravages of time. After prying apart a new layer, I was surprised to find myself staring at a set of pages completely different from the anonymous ledgerlike household accounts that preceded them; these were not in Italian, but in German.

As I peeled back another page, a name caught my eye: Nannerl. The name was so special-the nickname of Mozart's sister. In fact, I realized I had never heard of anyone else using the name Nannerl. But my thoughts were interrupted when I spied numerous tiny burrows and tunnels traversing the pages, apparently made by worms eating their way through the layers. An involuntary shudder swept through my body as I searched for a date, aware that I might at any moment unpeel a page and find one or a dozen of the voracious creatures squirming and wriggling before my eyes.

The mere glimpse of the name Nannerl triggered a flood of impressions. In some ways her life had been unfortunate; she had been a child prodigy on the harpsichord, but the extraordinary abilities of her younger brother gradually eclipsed her own talent and usefulness. Although she had appeared before the sovereigns of the greatest courts in Europe, she was eventually relegated to staying home in Salzburg with her mother while her father, Leopold, traveled with Mozart to Italy in search of fame. Attractive, well mannered, and educated, she was prevented by her father from marrying the man she loved in favor of a nobleman who was almost twenty years older. And she died alone, almost blind and in poverty. The birth of a genius in her family had proven both a blessing and a curse.

Despite the damage, the pages were almost pristine: no smudged edges, no signs of reading and rereading. In fact, I had the distinct impression they had never been touched. When I found the scrawled date, "January 24, 1770," my mind shut down momentarily and my heart began to pound. Looking around surreptitiously, I tried to see if anyone had noticed my reaction, but customers were too busy discussing how items would look in their apartments, and the sales and security personnel were too interested in guarding small silver objects on display.

To avoid attracting attention, I resisted the temptation of reading through the folios and debated canceling the rest of my trip, which had been undertaken at great financial risk. Not having received any word about several job prospects, I had decided to toss caution to the wind and buy an airline ticket on my last credit card. And I was now paying my travel expenses with the remaining trickle of available credit. All because I had come to realize that Europe-that rich, elusive sanctuary of Western art and culture-was necessary to my existence. For years, my precarious financial situation kept me from traveling outside America. But I had begun to wonder what the purpose of all my hard work was. Unwisely, and regardless of the consequences, I had put up my last dollar to travel, and now I was considering giving it up in midstream.

Somehow the innocuous little stack of papers made sense of it all. The prospect of a serendipitous discovery sent a wave of optimism racing through me: for once, fate was smiling on this impoverished, unemployed scholar. Briefly, I even imagined a few lines in the Associated Press, an event that could give me an edge over hundreds of other candidates for a permanent teaching position.

Maybe it was all just by instinct but I decided to cancel the rest of my trip. After all, even established, well-paid university professors would do the same thing. And if the diary were authentic, nearly any one of them would kill for what I had in my hands.

On the evening of my fourth day in Milan, I arrived early at the imposing, frescoed auction room, where seventy or eighty buyers were seated. A huge lot of inlaid Italian furniture from the time of Louis XVI immediately drew intense activity, followed by keen interest in a splendid oil painting of the Madonna by Murillo. The language in the room was unknown to me: a pen or an index finger raised aloft almost imperceptibly, a brief raising of the chin or a subtle nod. After an hour and a half, the grimy folder that had caught my attention came up for bid, and I waited in the uncomfortable silence while the auctioneer opened the bidding at dieci...ten euros. About ten dollars.

The moment he was ready to move on, I said, "Dieci," using my best poker voice.

After a painfully silent pause, no one was interested in making a higher bid. "Once, twice..." the auctioneer announced.

"Venti." Glancing over my shoulder, I saw an extraordinarily well dressed man with a thick black mustache who raised an eyebrow when my eye caught his. Was he a professional, hired to push up the bidding? Or was his curiosity suddenly stimulated by a foreigner bidding on a worthless stack of papers?

My heart suddenly pounding, I hesitated to respond too quickly. "Trenta," I finally said. It was only about thirty dollars, but I realized I could soon find myself outside my possibilities for bidding.

After a pause, I heard, "Cinquanta." Raising his bid to fifty dollars, it seemed as if the only other bidder was playing a game with me. Although I tried to be inconspicuous as I examined the contents of my wallet, I sensed every eye in the room was riveted on me.

"Cinquantacinque," I responded. About fifty-five dollars.

"No, Signore," the auctioneer replied in Italian, with a reprimanding tone. "Dieci is the minimum bid."

"Scusi," I replied, apologizing, furious that I hadn't thought of bringing more cash. "Sessanta." Sixty dollars.

The next half minute was excruciating. With my temples pounding, the silence was interminable. The ear-splitting rap of his gavel on the desk struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. "Aggiudicato!"

That's me! I suddenly realized, I have it. Looking over my shoulder, I caught the eye of the impeccably dressed Italian, who shrugged his shoulders casually, with an ironic expression.

My precious, unexplored trophy held tightly under my arm, I exited quickly, with a slight degree of paranoia, as if an invisible gauntlet of pickpockets was poised and waiting. Walking back toward my hotel, I was both ecstatic and skeptical. Had I just been scammed by a professional bidder into paying my entire week's budget for a stack of worthless papers?

The massive paving stones of the Piazza Duomo, just washed, glistened with a tired dignity, and it surprised me to see hundreds of people out at night, crowded into cafés, huddling in small groups, smoking or enjoying a leisurely stroll after dinner, just as incalculable generations before them had done. Bright lights illuminated the facade of the immense Gothic cathedral, giving the impression of daylight. Detail, so much detail, overwhelmed the exterior, a masterpiece of mannered, cluttered elegance. Sculptures of transcendental lightness, thousands, competed for attention, and tons of stone hewn into lace soared above me, more like fragile paper cutouts than marble. And from the highest pillar, a tiny gold Madonna looked down upon the mad frenzy beneath her with helpless incomprehension.

Near the cathedral was the entrance to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a massive structure of glass and wrought-iron filigree reminiscent of some great nineteenth-century horticultural exhibition. At a small indoor café, I ordered the house aperitif and then stopped short. Checking my remaining cash, I quickly changed my order to una piccola birra alla spina, a small draft beer, realizing I couldn't even afford to leave the waiter a tip.

Slowly, I began to evaluate my newly acquired treasure. Again I unearthed the folio dated January 24, 1770, and tried to remember where Mozart was living at that period of his life-an easy task thanks to Leopold Mozart, who had planned to write a biography of his famous son and had chronicled and documented his life more than that of any composer in modern history. Mozart was born in 1756, so I calculated he would have been about fourteen years old in 1770, and in Italy for the first time with his father, where they hoped to secure a commission for Mozart to write a serious opera for the theater that preceded La Scala opera house.

Although the weight and quality of the paper suggested that it could have come from the eighteenth century, I returned to the folio that had caught my eye with a more critical, even skeptical, approach and started to make a careful transcription of the text.

January 24, 1770

This journal will, of necessity, be brief. It will be my silent companion and faithful confidant. It will be the only possession that is mine alone, the one part of my life that is truly my own.

Papa is in the next room discussing practical matters with two gentlemen. He knows my usual pace in composing so it would not be wise to spend too much time on this diary. For this reason, my journal will have to be comprised of short passages.

Perhaps a diary is the only way to understand the many feelings I am experiencing. After all, we are alone in Italy for the first time, without Mama and Nannerl, and the sense of freedom is exhilarating. My impressions of this new world are too powerful to suppress, they burst from my pen like themes flowing from my fingers at the keyboard.

Papa would certainly disapprove of my "ill use" of the gifts God has given me in my writing a diary instead of a new composition. But he himself keeps a precious book of notes, and his weekly letters to Mama are just like a journal, carefully preserved each week in our heavy wooden chest in Salzburg. Why should the same privilege be denied me?

Each day a ferocious thought returns to torment me: I have been denied a great deal. Over and over again, I hear, "The most fortunate, the most blessed of children. A miracle, a gift of God." All this and more. Yet something has been missing for a long time: my childhood evaporated like snowflakes on the windowpane. Like an inquisitive bird peering from the nest, I desire to spread my wings. And I fear the inevitable, that the days of my adolescence will be denied me as well.

Papa insists that the tailor, the wigmaker, and even the artist who just painted my portrait emphasize my youth, and he has even told people that I am younger than my true age. Yet, regardless of his determination to portray me as a child, since our arrival in Italy, I have become a man, and nothing Papa can do will ever change that.

As I leafed through the folios, a mounting rush of excitement surged through me: discovering a Mozart diary could be my first big break, my chance of establishing a foothold in the tight, closed world of academia. Somehow, all the struggles to make ends meet now seemed worth it-the nights researching and writing until 2 A.M., knowing that I still had to prepare music classes for the next day. Perhaps the meager times were coming to an end. The diary began to represent that elusive, seductive light at the end of the tunnel.

The text of the document was certainly credible since, at that time in his life, Mozart consistently referred to his father, Leopold, as Papa. And what a father Leopold was: a renowned educator who supervised every aspect of his children's development and a keen businessman who controlled every detail of the many journeys made with Mozart. Perhaps, as the diary suggested, he controlled too much and too successfully. But the material was convincing-either it was the work of an expert forger who knew Mozart's life well, or I had stumbled onto something authentic.

It was my last night in Milan, so I was reluctant to surrender myself to the barren, unadorned walls of my hotel room. Instead, in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, I was immersed in a world of frescoes, mosaic floors, and sculpted ornaments, lit theatrically to evoke space and perspective-a stage set of scrolls, shells, and sculptures and of tiny wrought-iron balconies where no one could walk. And the Galleria was overflowing with a vibrant celebration of life.

It was time for me to make an important decision: whether to try my luck with the diary in the lucrative commercial world of international auctions or in the academic world. Unfortunately, my life in the world of academia had brought nothing but disappointment. I thought that my total devotion to Mozart, music, and my students would mean something. But by now, my career had become a nonstop odyssey-traveling from one single-year appointment in musicology to another, always in places where no one wanted to live, always for a pitiful salary. Sometimes tenure was offered as the proverbial carrot and stick, but in reality, universities periodically fired me before that could ever take place, as they did everyone else. Hiring junior faculty simply cost less. It was all a painful blur, a nightmare I needed to forget in order to go on, to survive.

Of course I had to take some of the blame for my lack of success in academia. I had refused to play the game, to treat pompous and arrogant professors the way they expected to be treated, with fawning acquiescence. But it wasn't in my nature to agree with people when I thought they were misinformed, or to hide my track record in the area of "publish or perish": everything I wrote made it into the best scholarly journals. And tenured faculty told me to my face that I was brash and tactless...maybe I was. And they always knew how to get back at me. Maybe it was time for me to change, to bite the bullet and be deferential at all costs. The alternative had proven ruinous.

Yet my financial difficulties could all change with the diary. Sotheby's might bring in a bundle and finally I might be able to replenish my shabby wardrobe and to afford a car instead of riding the T. To cash in the diary could mean renting a larger apartment, joining a newer health club instead of the YMCA, and even taking a date to a good restaurant for a change.

But, almost immediately, I was forced to come back to reality: the documents would first have to be scrutinized and discussed in the unbiased, disinterested forum of academia-nonprofit, nonpaying academia. Naïvely, I told myself that if the diary were authentic, the scholarly world might actually turn and notice me; it could represent my chance for acceptance, for recognition. And the most likely venue would be either the upcoming Mozart Millennium Edition or the Mozart 2006. Each scheduled for publication in 2006 (the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart), the two prestigious editions of the music and letters of Mozart were expected to surpass anything of their kind in the past two centuries. The director of the Mozart Millennium Edition, Dr. Manfred Braun in Salzburg, was unquestionably one of the most important and respected Mozart scholars in the world.

I vaguely remembered him, short and balding, with salt-and-pepper hair shooting out around his ears, a statement in gray with all the proud shabbiness of an Ivy League professor. Charming and gracious around those he felt his equal, but abrupt and short-tempered with students and younger scholars. Had I met him? I could remember his legendary, violent temper and see his metal-rimmed glasses perfectly and hear his clipped Austrian accent and his fussy, meticulous choice of words. Serious, extremely intelligent, but bitter. And I began to picture his face: petty academic humiliations had left their mark, and the rage and pain of a thousand small defeats were reflected in his eyes. On rare occasions, he was engaging, but cold, very cold. And ruthlessly vindictive. Where had I first seen him?

"So you bought them." The suave voice from nowhere startled me. Standing before me was the manicured Italian who had forced up the bidding on my folios. "Anything interesting?"

Instinctively closing the folder, I replied, "No. Useless household accounts."

"Sorry to hear that," he replied, smiling ironically. "Can I buy you a drink? Because it was my fault you lost your money."

Gathering up the folder, I replied, "It's all right. Forget it." As an afterthought, I added, "Do you work for the auction house?"

"No, I have my own business. Antiques, books, anything sellable. I'm sorry you didn't find what you wanted. In this world, one has to be a little...furbo."

Standing up, I excused myself and said, "You're right." Unlike in English, the Italian word for cunning-furbo-is an acceptable, even positive characteristic. As I departed, I caught a glimpse of his expression over my shoulder: enigmatic, intensely curious, and decidedly furbo.

Back in Boston, in my scantily furnished single-room apartment crammed full of unpacked crates, I awaited the response from Dr. Braun. It had been a difficult decision to keep my apartment and try to make it in Boston, without a definite job prospect. But at least there were enough part-time teaching possibilities so that I didn't have to move every year, and in fact, one undergraduate music history course came through. And it was great to be back in the Hub with my oldest friends, in the city with so much university life, so much music. Opportunities to play a solo piano recital, or to accompany an instrumentalist or singer, were always there. But to survive as a freelance, I had to be flexible, so I again took up performing in bars and restaurants, mixing Mozart with Cole Porter. After a decade of university teaching, I suddenly found myself churning out requests for barfly customers interested in picking up a date, who often hardly paid attention to a note I played. But somehow the applause and occasional interesting conversation, along with the cosmopolitans and margaritas sent over by appreciative patrons, managed to sustain me.

When the response from Dr. Braun finally arrived, it was surprisingly cool, guarded, and devoid of enthusiasm. "Rumors of a diary or diaries by Mozart have been circulating for years," he wrote. "Several exemplars have emerged that proved to be fakes." He cautioned me that what I found could be the work of a clever forger whose efforts were for profit or for the mere pleasure of deceiving a gullible public, much like the Mozart "Adélaïde" violin concerto discovered in 1931 by Marius Casadesus, which turned out to be a fake that the violinist himself had apparently written.

Dr. Braun added that he strongly urged against any "race to press," as happened with the so-called Hitler diaries-later revealed to be forgeries-that were published in 1983 by the reputable West German magazine Der Stern and the British Sunday Times. He would need complete assurances that I would not make any announcements or discuss the diary with any publishers before he finished examining the manuscript. It would be necessary to see the originals, and he concluded, "Please sign the enclosed form for our records."

The "enclosed form," in German, was a legal document with a brief phrase buried in the seventh clause: "All materials submitted become the property of the Mozart Millennium Edition." Alarmed, I contacted a lawyer specializing in intellectual property, fully aware that, in order to pay his bill, I'd have to take on some beginning piano students-a prospect that I detested.

"I've never heard of anything like that," the lawyer told me. "The affidavit indicates that you would no longer own the documents you found. If you wanted to publish all or any portion of them, you could be prohibited from doing so. Say you wanted to sell them one day. If you sign that form, you've relinquished all rights."

The situation left me annoyed and perplexed. And suspicious, as I had reason to be: the academic world had not proven as honorable and scrupulous as I had originally thought. Just two years earlier, an Italian scholar had plagiarized three entire pages of an unpublished article I sent him. After months of expensive legal wrangling, I ended up with a few lines in a subsequent issue that attributed the material to me. It was all too complicated, as my experience with the academic world had always been. And what was Braun offering in return? Just "examining the manuscript"? My initial enthusiasm was replaced by intense disappointment.

But I had to admit grudgingly that Braun at least had a point about fakes: literary forgeries were common in every century. The "Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland," supposedly written by the third-century Gaelic bard Ossian, were actually penned in the eighteenth century by the poet James Macpherson. And in the epoch of unprecedented literary fraud-the twentieth century-Sir Edmund Backhouse had forged histories of the Chinese court, while Clifford Irving had invented memoirs of Howard Hughes. Worse, the elaborate forgeries by Mark Hofmann of Mormon documents actually led him to murder two people, resulting in his imprisonment in 1987.

So, instead of enclosing the originals, I had excellent Docutec photocopies made and sent Braun a set, with a note that I was not comfortable sending the originals, nor signing the affidavit. And at the last minute before sending them, I removed the second page from the stack-to protect myself. When I handed the packet to the Federal Express agent, I felt I had taken the right step. A quote from Ecclesiastes reverberated in my mind with the powerful resonance of a bronze church bell: "Cast thy bread upon the waters..." And the blue sky over Copley Square looked splendid, more radiant than I had ever seen it.

Over the next few weeks, I found myself anxiously awaiting a response, but Braun never acknowledged receipt of my packet. Exasperated, I debated writing to the editor of the Mozart 2006, Dr. Dennis Landry, who was locked in fierce competition with Braun. But I decided it was too much of a risk, as protocol in the scholarly world dictates that an author submit materials to one publisher at a time. And Manfred Braun had specifically stipulated that I deal exclusively with him.

Everyone knew there was bad blood between Braun and Landry, two major figures in the world of Mozart scholarship. In fact, it was an international cause célèbre. An initial mild rivalry over whether Mozart had actually written certain sections of the Requiem gradually deteriorated into ugly, heated scenes at international conferences alternating with nasty rebuttals in print. Perhaps the total disintegration of civility and rationality came when Landry announced he would be editing an English version of the complete Mozart letters for publication in 2006, the same year Braun's German edition was scheduled to appear.

Landry's financial resources assured a spectacular deluxe edition guaranteed to make Braun's look pitiful. But, most important, the two editions were competing on the level of scholarship to become the definitive version of the Mozart letters for the twenty-first century. And completeness was foremost, so new discoveries of authentic Mozart material could determine which edition had the edge.

Considering the potential volatility, I concluded it would be disastrous to write to Landry. Optimistically, I awaited the arrival of the mail each day, hoping there would be a response from Braun, while telling myself that everything in the scholarly world takes time, a great deal of time.

But with each passing day, I was more irritable and impatient, and it became more and more difficult to reassure myself. As I prepared my lectures for the only class I would be teaching in the fall, I found myself nervously pacing the room each time the mail was due to arrive. To compound the problem, the sweltering heat in my Boston apartment-with no air-conditioning or cross ventilation-was getting more oppressive. And I was so deep in debt that escaping to a restaurant, a nightclub, or even a film was out of the question. My nerves began unraveling like a taut, frayed cord, one thread at a time.

What had gone wrong? My future had seemed so bright. I was at the top of my class in Boston Latin, and my SAT scores in math were so high that a computer programming firm offered me-a seventeen-year-old-a yearly starting salary of $50,000.

But it had been music. And Mozart. That was all I wanted to do. At age ten, the first time I heard Mozart's great G minor symphony, something changed in my brain. From that moment, music became the principal passion of my life. Yet I never imagined things would turn out so badly. With my financial situation nearing the breaking point, I found myself obsessing on the old question: would the computer programming offer still be good after all these years?

Instead I was debating whether to take a job I had been offered at the New England Conservatory, teaching fourteen beginning piano students a day. A guaranteed paycheck, all right, but something I genuinely loathed. At least it would make my family happy, as they had begun to regard me as a loser, someone always short of money. My brother, a colonel in the army, was raising a model family, my glamorous sister earning an excellent living and traveling the world as a flight attendant. And what was I doing, my relatives wondered. With all my high aspirations, my desire to make a contribution, I was a failure to all of them, a dreamer who was never going to make it.

Waiting for the mail to arrive, Ihappened to catch a glimpse of the figure in the mirror: five foot seven, with broad shoulders, the result of high school training as a wrestler and years spent in the YMCA gym, aiming for a lean, toned look. As I examined my ash blond hair, a hint of premature gray in the mustache and temples caught my attention. And I knew I had to do something about it if I had any hope of dating younger women. Age thirty-five and unmarried. My most recent girlfriend had waited patiently for me to propose as I resisted commitment, and she finally gave up. By the time I changed my mind, nothing would change hers-I had missed my chance. Now I was left only with regrets, lonely and pessimistic about my chances, and dismayed to discover that the women I desired weren't attracted to me. And after the first or second date, I usually lost interest in the women who were.

People always commented how striking my blue eyes were or how young I looked without glasses, which I preferred in academic situations. But appearing younger wasn't an advantage; in practically every teaching job, I had been mistaken for a student by security guards, and now, even in my mid-thirties, I had to make sure I always carried ID, as I was inevitably carded.

As I reflected on my problems, the doorbell startled me. Looking out the window, I saw a Federal Express truck, which could mean only one thing: Braun's reply. It was only after I signed that I realized the packet was not from Braun.

Copyright © 2002 by Harrison Gradwell Slater

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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PRAISE FOR HARRISON SLATER IN CONCERT

"[Slater's] Mozart Concerto in B-flat, K. 456 . . . was fluent, tasteful, and
spirited. It conveyed the sense of the music and [Slater's] love for it."--Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

PRAISE FOR IN MOZART'S FOOTSTEPS

"An amazing feat of scholarship, and a labor of love. It will delight the specialist no less than the Mozart lover in search of Mozart the man."--Alfred Brendel