The Prague Sonata Read online

  “Brava, bravissima,” he cried after the final resolving notes, followed by the rondo opening, dissolved into silence for the third time. The children, following their father’s lead, applauded. “Bloody excellent, the setup in A-flat major, then off the cliff into the doloroso of C minor. It’s like now you’re young, in love, you’re floating along in some beautiful alpine meadow on a perfect spring day—there’s birdcall in there, Messiaen has nothing on this guy—and then, with no warning, you’re plunged straight into hell. The meadow flowers wilt, the birds become bats, and the sky’s the color of tar. It’s eccentric, all right, but well within the classical parameters of Preromanticism. Can you imagine what this must sound like if the outer movements, assuming you find them, are as good as the one you’ve got?”

  “How could they not be?”

  “You know as well as I do that one masterpiece movement doesn’t guarantee a brilliant symphony. Despite myself, I really love only one short movement in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. The rest I could live without.”

  “True,” Meta conceded. “Paul McCartney wrote some monumental, immortal stuff. I could listen to ‘Hey Jude’ all day long. But he also wrote ‘Silly Love Songs.’ Not so hot.”

  “Except for Bach and Shakespeare, who I doubt were actually human, everybody’s uneven. But what comes next? It’s totally unfair!”

  “I want to know what comes before too. That’s the main reason I’m here.”

  “I can see why Mandelbaum had his knickers in such a twist. What’s weird, though, is that there’s something here I swear I’ve heard before.”

  Her heart rose. “Really?”

  “No, never mind,” he said, with a backhanded flick of the wrist, as if shooing away an annoying insect. “I’m just full of it. Wouldn’t be the only time.”

  “Don’t dismiss your idea so quickly,” Meta pressed. “What’s familiar?”

  “Just bells in my belfry, ding dong ding.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “I’m trying to think,” he answered, seeing how intent his guest was. He got up from the piano and walked over to the balcony overlooking the murmuring street. It had grown dark out, and evening sounds from open windows of apartments across the way wafted in. Laughter, television racket, chitchat. But hushed, echoing like a memory of neighbors more than neighbors themselves home from their workdays. “Seriously, Meta. I know it sounds contradictory, but I’ve heard it and I haven’t heard it. I mean, I can’t place it in the repertoire but this thing is familiar somehow.”

  “Maybe it seems familiar simply because it’s such an exceptionally beautiful piece,” Meta tried, rising from the piano bench. She winked at David and Lucie, who were now quietly singsonging, “Ding dong ding.”

  “I don’t follow,” Kettle said.

  “Sometimes when I hear music that’s moving, upsettingly moving, if you know what I mean, I have the weird feeling of familiarity with it. Like it was a part of me already, hidden in my mind, and all it needed was to be awakened from the outside.”

  Distracted, he didn’t answer.

  “He knows,” his wife intervened, looking at Meta with a conspiratorial nod, stroking her son’s hair. “Sam knows about what you say. He has this feeling himself sometime.”

  “Well, it’s just a thought,” Meta added.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said, shaking his head as if coming out of a daze. “Sure, I’ve had that experience too. I think most musicians have. It’s just, this is going to pester me until I figure it out, is all. Would you like to join us for dinner?”

  “Yes,” Kettle’s wife insisted. “Nothing much special. Over lefts.”

  “Leftovers,” he corrected, with a fond smile.

  “I probably should be getting back to my pension.”

  “What, so you can sit alone in your room? We won’t hear of it. I’ve got a bottle of decent French champagne around here somewhere and this is a special occasion. It’s not every day another Mandelbaum nut drops on my head,” he said, breaking into laughter.

  Meta looked back and forth from Sam to Sylvie, wondering what was so funny.

  “Is not that good joke,” Sylvie explained with a shrug. “Mandel mean in Czech a nut, almond nut, and Baum in German mean tree.”

  “Seriously, though,” Sam chortled, “do stay. We’ll drink a toast to the unknown soldier who wrote this piece of dark paradise, bless his troubled soul wherever it roams.”

  “Or hers,” Sylvie added.

  “Or hers,” Meta and Sam agreed.

  Her dinner in Vinohrady with the Kettles carried on until the small hours of the dawning morning. Lucie fell asleep with her head on Meta’s lap long after midnight while the adults conversed about every musician under the moon from Copland to Coltrane, Saint-Saëns to Sting, Brahms to Beck. When Sam escorted Meta on a black-coffee tram ride to her pension through streets so empty it seemed as if they were the only people alive, she once again felt dizzy with the promise that this place was her destiny. By the time she washed in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall, stowed her clothes in the serpentine-front chest of drawers in her spare but clean little room, and finally crawled into bed, the Prague sky was already brightening with streaks of pink and apricot outside the second-floor window. For all the disappointment she’d felt after her clumsy meeting with Kohout, Sam Kettle and his family reminded her of who she was and why she was here.

  DESPITE THIS AUSPICIOUS EVENING, the days following her arrival in Prague were a rich brocade of some highs and more lows. Steps and missteps. Crescendi, diminuendi. As she conferred with others among Mandelbaum’s professional acquaintance, following up on contacts some of them in turn provided, she seesawed between hope and despair. More than once she scolded herself for not knowing what she was doing. Though she tried to hide it during her phone calls with Jonathan, the temptation was strong to cut her losses and return to New York in time to salvage much of her semester and reconnect with her students before they all found other teachers.

  “Gillie and I had dinner last night,” he said. “We toasted to your success there.”

  “Thanks,” said Meta, heart sinking. “Miss you guys.”

  “You know you don’t have to. You could be back here tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s not possible yet, Jonathan.” She wasn’t surprised when he went silent on her, essentially ending the conversation.

  Three fruitless days in Vienna and a sweltering bus ride down to Brno, on what proved to be straw-grasping exercises with music historians who were happy to examine the manuscript but were sorry not to be of much help, drained her pocketbook, not to mention her faith. A pregnant archivist at the Lobkowicz Palace in Nelahozeves was, along with Sam, the kindest among the experts she met. But even she could offer Meta only collegial encouragement and a chance to examine the original performance manuscript of Le nozze di Figaro from the vast Lobkowicz collection, which was being unpacked after years under Communist lock and key. Because the Mozart score dated from roughly the same period as the Prague Sonata, Meta was able to verify again what she already knew—that the paper, ink, and other elements were characteristic of the late 1700s. Disappointed not to have gotten more from the meeting—after all, the Lobkowicz princes were among the most important aristocratic patrons of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven—she consoled herself with the thought that there were worse ways of passing a morning than turning the weighty leaves of the Figaro folio with fingers sheathed by white cotton gloves she’d been given to wear. And how surreal was it to look out the archivist’s office window in the palace perched on a promontory and see, down by the Nelahozeves village square, the house where Dvořák, son of the town butcher, was born?

  It was all heady, yes, all very fascinating, but Meta caught the riverside train back to Prague feeling more lost than ever. Her initial enthusiasm began to seem the illusion of a dilettante. Rather than seeing light at the end of the tunnel, Meta saw an unending tunnel and no light at all. What was more, she still had t
o face the most renowned of Mandelbaum’s musicological experts. Nor was he an easy man to pin down, whether or not her mentor had, in his own words, “softened his beaches with irresistible passion and inarguable wisdom.” Mandelbaum was being half serious and half self-deprecatory, but his friend in Prague had proved to be more elusive than a fast-moving cloud. Two appointments had already been canceled, and a third, his sweet but harried assistant told Meta, had unavoidably been pushed back to the beginning of the following week owing to unforeseen circumstances.

  This was Petr Wittmann. His widely read and translated biographies of such mainstays as Bach, Chopin, and Wagner were credited with generating popular interest in classical composers among the young, and were admired for their stylish, vivid portrayals even if some carping critics noted their reliance on the well-trod scholarship of others. Still, he was a phenomenon. There wasn’t a field within the precincts of music he hadn’t touched upon, if only tangentially, from bel canto to serial composition. He had even published a book, which Meta had read and enjoyed, about classical influences in the music of the Beatles. Meta had put off seeing him until she’d had time to confer with others, prepare herself to bring perhaps more to the table than the problem of the manuscript itself. That Mandelbaum had only ever spoken of this man in the warmest terms made her feel even more ill at ease.

  “In Prague, Petr’s the top of the heap, or he certainly was when I used to go there a lot. He’ll be either your Canaan or your Elba,” he told her over their promised New York lunch of steak, creamed spinach, and the rest, which took place after they spent hours combing through the score on Meta’s piano one careful page at a time. Mandelbaum even missed his train and had to take a later one home. “Of course, I’m hoping he’ll be the former. Who knows, but he might independently confirm my suspicion—and it’s a wild one, I’ll be the first to admit—about what you may have here.”

  “And what, old owl, would that suspicion be?”

  “Let me rephrase. I won’t be the first to admit. It’s best kept to myself.”

  “That’s not fair and you know it,” Meta persisted.

  “Haven’t I always made it my life’s cause to look after you?” he asked, slyly looking over a dessert menu his wife would have confiscated without comment had she been at the restaurant. He ordered a chocolate soufflé and filled the pause by adding, “Well, have I not?”

  “Annalise wouldn’t want you eating that, would she?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I think I just did. Why don’t you answer mine?”

  Mandelbaum may have canceled his soufflé order, settling for a double espresso instead, but did so with an air of friendly aggrievement. Still, he wouldn’t tell her anything further about this theory of his, finally dismissing it as they left the restaurant as “madness.” He telephoned her the next day, uncharacteristically apologetic. “I don’t mean to be coy, especially in light of the importance of what the music speaks and what those who carried it had to go through to allow me the honor of hearing it. But you need to know, I’m no final arbiter here. My hopes for this may wind up being only that—hopes. Please don’t let me jinx you with my own flights of fancy. Go meet these people I’m sending you to. Get their input. Branch out from there. Find the rest of the sonata if you can and don’t ask me what I think anymore. Tell me, instead, what you learn.”

  “Thanks, Paul,” she said. One of her rare moments of calling him by his first name. He was always professor or old owl or just plain Mandelbaum. With that one word, his given name, they both knew she had sealed an understanding.

  Meta had followed his advice. All Mandelbaum’s people came to the table with strong personalities and left behind differing opinions. Some were intrigued. Others saw nothing more to pursue than publication of the discovery in an academic journal where it might become, for a time, a seminar curiosity to dissect. One optimistically suggested that it might find its way into recitals as a newly unearthed rarity. Hadn’t Schubert’s first two sonatas survived as fragments? The first, in E major, was abandoned by the composer in 1815 after he finished only three of four movements. And the C major from the same year survives without a finale, which moody Schubert might have drafted and lost, or drafted and tossed. Even his third, the so-called “Grand Sonata,” was a gathering of foundling movements from the broken families of other works. Yet that hadn’t deterred a world-class virtuoso like Wilhelm Kempff from recording them.

  Be content with what has already come to hand—that seemed to be the consensus. Which Meta, increasingly against her better judgment, still could not quite accept.

  “Please to pardon,” said one of the more engaging scholars she met, after allowing Meta to play it on her piano. A reed-thin lady named Gretja Toplová; she was the only woman other than the Lobkowicz archivist among the collective. “But what is to make you think there is some other movement to find?”

  “Well, you can see the beginnings of a new movement on this last page.”

  “Could be this is just abandoned fragment. Maybe to use up the paper, not to waste. It was common practice, you know.”

  “I do, but that seems doubtful to me. Besides, as I said, the woman who gave me the manuscript in the first place told me the whole story behind the dispersal, specifically, of three sonata movements.”

  “And you believe her based on why?”

  Gretja’s English might not have been the most polished Meta had heard among the bilingual Czechs she’d met thus far, but her question wasn’t without merit.

  Folding her hands on her lap, Meta said, “I believed her because she had no reason to lie to me and every reason to tell the truth.”

  If the woman were looking Folly itself in the eye she couldn’t have wagged her finger with any less charming affection. “First rule in life is never to ask why some people they say something. The second rule is not to believe them unless what they say can be proved. Me, I am, yes, a scholar of music. But any stories you tell me about this Irena Svobodová and Hitler and Heydrich and all the other, I can only trust so far and so you should.”

  Meta asked her if she recognized the work or could identify a composer.

  “I have never heard this. To me sounds a little Haydn, but too what, wrong for him. Too, how to say it, peculiar.”

  “C. P. E. Bach was someone I thought might be a possibility.”

  “It is wild enough. The Affekt is there. I was thinking, when Doctor Mandelbaum called me, before I hear it, that Mozart has that second son, the one born fourteen weeks before his father dies—”

  “Wolfgang Amadeus the Younger. Sure, I know what you’re referring to.” Sensing the dialogue was veering off course but willing, at this point, to listen to any idea, no matter how far-fetched, Meta said, “You’re thinking of that unpublished rondo in G, but wasn’t that for flute and piano?”

  “You are almost right. No, I am thinking how Geiringer, or is it Walter Hummel, says that the rondo comes from a lost sonata in E.”

  This breached the boundaries of far-fetched, Meta thought, hoping her impatience and disappointment didn’t show. Mozart’s second son, burdened all his life with his father’s weighty name—unlike Bach’s son, who thrived—was an often miserable, peripatetic soul who had written four published sonatas between 1808 and 1820. They were late-Classic works by one whose talent sparked through now and then. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t studied with Antonio Salieri himself, a considerable teacher and force in his day despite his role nearly two hundred years later as a jealous fiend in Amadeus. But in this score, musical decisions were too dynamic, changes in mood too rash, and certain sonorities and emotions just didn’t point to a lost Mozart fils.

  “But this idea was wrong,” Professor Toplová said, as if reading Meta’s mind. “Bach is a much better possibility. Late Emanuel Bach.”

  “Well, thank you for your thoughts on it. Even wrong theories are helpful in that I can rule them out, narrow the field.”

  Gretja nodded in agreement. “It is mos
t beautiful,” she said when bidding farewell to Meta, whom she had invited to her apartment, unlike most of the others, who’d preferred the impersonality of offices or cafés. “I don’t know what this is but it is good. Thank you for letting me know of it. And keep me on touch.” Meta gave her an embrace, then faltered back into the streets feeling she was leaving behind a woman who, for all her rules, would have believed Irena as Meta herself did.

  Some of her best days were spent with Sylvie Kettlová—Meta had grown used to the feminine ending ová added to Czech surnames, but it still sounded strange on the American name Sylvie had taken from Sam. Sylvie had rapidly become Gillian’s stand-in. With her help, Meta had located Irena’s old address in the municipal records. Armed with this information, they met in Malá Strana and walked to the house where Irena had lived. Entering through a pair of large, undecorated wooden carriage doors, they crossed a courtyard and climbed a flight of outdoor stairs to a landing on the second floor, their footfalls echoing in the silence. These must have been the very steps down which Irena’s husband was dragged to his death. Meta grimaced, glancing at Kettle’s wife with an air of anticipation shaded by the unspoken question, Do we really think we’re going to find anything here after so many years?

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she told Sylvie, then pressed the round doorbell knob.

  A wiry, priestly gentleman of about sixty, with neatly combed yellowish-white hair and dancing blue eyes, answered the door. Sylvie, speaking in rapid Czech, apologized for disturbing him and explained Meta’s purpose in Prague. To their surprise, he asked both women inside.

  His English was no better than Meta’s Czech, which was to say that the two couldn’t communicate much beyond handshakes and wondering smiles. Sylvie acted as translator while they sat in his cluttered parlor. Lots of furniture, most of it very old, or at least very tired. In one corner stood a wickerwork dress form with an array of bowlers stacked on top of its metal neck. Paintings hung on the walls. They had been made by the man himself, as he proudly indicated by pointing at one and then at his chest after seeing Meta admire the canvases. Quiet geometrics in oil. Not bad, not great, Meta thought, but sensitive, striving. The room had a bachelor feel to it. One could see he had lived alone for a long time.