Today, a cold, quiet Sunday morning, Scott Schiffman decided to stay home and do the research he’d been itching to get to since his meeting with Susanna Kessler two days before. He made coffee and went to his desk.
Because of his family’s wealth, Scott was able to make choices. Most of his peers lived on their salaries, meager in comparison with his own resources. He never wanted them to feel ill at ease in his presence, so he made certain his choices appeared ordinary even when they were very fine. He kept his clothing simple. He limited what he discussed at work. His terrific vacations, including his family’s yearly reunion between Christmas and New Year’s at Caneel Bay on St. John, in the Virgin Islands, and the annual ski trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in March with his siblings, their spouses and children, remained unmentioned.
When it came to his apartment, however, concealing his resources was impossible. The apartment was his private refuge anyway, and he was glad to give himself an excuse to keep it that way. He invited only close friends to visit him. Dan stayed in the guest room on occasion. Now and then Scott’s girlfriends stayed over, although in general Scott preferred to stay at their apartments so he could make a graceful exit at breakfast time and be home alone in the morning.
Scott lived in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood chosen primarily because it was far from his family’s town house on the Upper East Side. He’d picked a postwar building because he’d grown up in a historic one. He’d opted for modern décor because upholstered antiques had filled his family home. His apartment was an expansive three-bedroom (one of the bedrooms served as his study) on a high floor facing north, with an open view of midtown Manhattan. Because he’d grown up in a town house, with views of the street in front and of a walled, carefully cultivated garden in back, the open view from this apartment was among its attractions for him.
Astonishingly, from his desk he could see both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. As he now became absorbed in his work, however, he rarely looked up and when he did, he didn’t notice the view. From his computer at home, he had immediate access via the Internet to Bach Digital, a site that provided scanned images of the autograph scores and original performing parts of Bach’s works. Another site supplied a searchable database of the texts to Bach’s vocal works in their original languages. These resources provided a good beginning, and their very existence was terrific and exciting. Nevertheless, some questions could be researched only in major libraries, which he’d need to visit in due course.
He wanted to compare both the musical and verbal scripts in the cantata that Susanna Kessler had discovered with those of Bach’s works from the 1720s and 1730s. He opened several windows showing the works of the 1720s, so that he could move easily among them. He cautioned himself that he must keep a critical eye. After several hours of work, he was forced to conclude that the scripts in the Exaudi cantata really did appear exactly the same as those in Bach’s works of the late 1720s.
So where did that put matters? The Tintenfrass—such a great word—that he’d observed at the MacLean had shown that the manuscript, with its rare watermark pairing of the deer and the initials IAI, must indeed be old, and now the handwriting analysis showed that the cantata had most probably been notated by Bach.
Next, he needed to determine identifications for the handwriting on the wrapper (the handwriting that didn’t appear to be Bach’s, that is). This was a needle-in-a-haystack assignment of laughable magnitude.
Or was it? Only a limited number of people would have had access to the autograph, and those who did were, obviously, German-speakers. The two writers were educated, Scott concluded from the fact that their script was fluid. Most likely they were upper class, because they’d gained possession of the autograph and had the luxury of concealing it, rather than needing to sell it. Berlin, den 9. Juni 1783 gave Scott a starting point for one of the early owners. Because of the reference to cataloging, this owner might have possessed a noteworthy private music library.
Scott loved puzzling out stories from the past. Who in Berlin had collected Bach cantata autographs in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries? And who there, furthermore, might have indicated not to catalog this cantata? Of the two most noteworthy German collectors, Georg Poelchau moved to Berlin later, in 1813, and in any event was only ten years old in 1783; and Franz Hauser, who never lived in Berlin, wasn’t born until a decade later. Conceivably one of them might have written the subsequent inscription, keep in the private cabinet. In Bach Digital, Scott checked the entry for Franz Hauser (Poelchau didn’t have an entry) under the advanced search category Schriftproben, handwriting samples. Nothing matched. Scott looked forward to following up in an actual library—and he loved a big library, filled with, yes, books. Stocked with potential discoveries.
Scott paused. Now he did look out and study the view. Much of the day had passed. The winter sun cast precise shadows that accentuated the architectural details of the cityscape before him. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building took on a glamour that reminded him of the music of George Gershwin. He couldn’t imagine anyplace he’d rather be than right here.
Yesterday, he’d attended the bar mitzvah of his nephew Greg. Scott had two older sisters and an older brother, and he’d gradually acquired nine nieces and nephews. Remarkably, he managed to remember their names—which was good, because every one of them had attended Greg’s bar mitzvah. The ceremony was held at Rodeph Sholom, where Scott himself had his bar mitzvah years before. Most of his parents’ Jewish friends went to Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, but Scott’s father (no doubt trying to escape his own father) favored Rodeph Sholom.
Scott hadn’t been to synagogue in a few years (not since the bar mitzvah of his nephew Eric), and he was surprised by the general good feeling of the place. Yesterday he’d paid closer attention to the service than he had the last time. It was affecting, especially the part when Greg, a shy, mild-mannered boy, carried the Torah around the sanctuary and the congregants, whether elderly, middle-aged, or young, reached to touch it with their prayer books. Most kissed their prayers books afterward. The scene had left him feeling a little choked up.
During the service, Scott sat next to his mother. She’d been born in Germany, and both her parents were killed during the war. She’d escaped to Britain and then Canada via the Kindertransport when she was only four years old. Decades later, through a remarkable set of circumstances, she was surprised to learn from a survivor that her father had taken his pocket score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with him on the train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where he died. Where he was murdered.
Why the St. Matthew Passion, Scott wondered, of all the compositions by Bach? He might have chosen The Well-Tempered Clavier, or The Art of Fugue, or one of the violin concertos. Secular pieces. Scott couldn’t comprehend why his grandfather would embrace above all a composition about the crucifixion of Jesus. And yet . . . Scott knew from his own experience that one didn’t have to accept Christian doctrine to be moved by the emotional content of Bach’s liturgical music. He’d been soothed often enough himself by the transcendent opening movement from Cantata 170. The St. Matthew Passion especially evoked a sense of promise within despair. Scott hoped his grandfather had felt the music’s consolation when he was pushed into the cattle car of his final journey.
And here Scott was, a Jew focusing his research on the music of Bach, in addition to his daily curatorial duties at the MacLean. He’d taken years of piano lessons without developing the skill to be a professional performer. He didn’t have the instinctive generosity and patience needed to be a teacher of undergraduate music history courses. He considered himself a historian and scientist. His position at the MacLean was a perfect fit for him.
If the cantata proved to be authentic Bach, he wanted it to be entrusted to the MacLean. Down the road, as the situation developed—and if Susanna Kessler was able to prove that she did, indeed, own the cantata—he would approach the MacLean’s director about making her an offer. He needed to remain in Susanna’s good graces, or more correctly get himself into her good graces, to smooth his way on this. If only he’d had the foresight to be nicer to her. He’d said a few things that were way out of line. At this point, who could say what she would do with the manuscript. He couldn’t dismiss from his thoughts the idea that she might even destroy it. He’d have to start afresh with her. Apart from the fact that she’d found the manuscript in her family home in Buffalo, Dan had told him nothing about her. He’d do some Internet research. Once he discovered where she worked, where she’d gone to school, where she lived, he’d find their mutual connections.
His thoughts leapt ahead. The MacLean had fantastic Web designers on staff, and when the time came to go public, they could take the discovery in several dozen directions. He imagined the Web pages they’d create . . . link after link of visual, aural, and textual material aimed at a wide audience. With the new exhibition techniques, you could clink on a link and hear only the oboe line extracted from the recording of a piece, or only the violin line.
As Scott worked through this, his rational side kicked in to warn him: the manuscript could turn out to be a spectacular forgery, perhaps even produced by the Nazis. If he allowed himself to be seduced by a forgery, he could end up humiliating himself in a way that would ruin his career.
On the other hand, if he and Dan kept their wits about them, they could get an interesting, if minor, article out of a Nazi forgery, too. So in a sense this was a win-win situation. Professionally speaking, that is. And personally? Forged, authentic . . . either way, the cantata was grim, hideous, and bleak. It concerned a topic he preferred not to think about, one that was far too close to home. This must be part of Susanna Kessler’s family history, as well: Kessler was predominantly a Jewish last name, and indulging in common stereotyping, Scott would have to say that she looked Jewish, too. Judging from Dan’s reticence, the cantata’s unsettling topic touched his family history, too. From the other side.
As a Jew, maybe he should refuse to work on this piece, with its gruesome text. Maybe he should tell Susanna Kessler to suppress it. Had he been letting scholarly enthusiasm take priority over loyalty to his heritage?
He thought this out. He’d always advocated the opposite of suppression in regard to uncomfortable truths. That was still the right path. In fact, he concluded, as a Jew he had a special responsibility to bring the cantata into public knowledge, to promote discussion and understanding of the dismal history that the cantata represented. He hated the word transparency, but he believed in the concept.
Back to work. The authenticity question remained.
When all was said and done, the music would be its own proof of authenticity. On the theme-finder sites, he typed in the letters that represented the first six notes of the opening. True, the sites weren’t definitive, but there was always a chance of a hit.
Nothing.
He printed out his digital photographs of the cantata’s first pages of music. He took them to the piano in the living room. He had a Steinway baby grand. He still took lessons, nowadays from a delightful woman on the Upper West Side who taught only adults. He played in recitals with her other students, attendance forbidden to friends and family, which suited him because he didn’t take the lessons in order to perform for family and friends. He took them because of the Zen-like state he entered when he practiced, clearing his head of all distractions except the notes. This year in his lessons he was inching his way through the third movement of Beethoven’s op. 110 sonata.
He opened the keyboard, sat down, and arranged what little he had of the cantata score on the stand. He played the basso continuo part with his left hand and as much of the string parts as he could manage with his right hand. And he was caught. Captured by the rich harmonies and the formidably complex counterpoint.
This was music by a true master. If not Johann Sebastian Bach, who?