Chapter 8

After disembarking from the local train at the Granville stop, Susanna stood on the platform. The college buildings rose in the distance, up a gentle incline. Green lawns spread before her. She waited for the music she was listening to on her phone to end.

Trying to educate herself, she’d downloaded a Bach’s Greatest Hits collection from iTunes. Each piece was mesmerizing. Of course, that’s what a greatest hits set was for, to show off the best, but nonetheless she was surprised by the buoyant charge of energy the music gave her.

She took out her earbuds and put her phone away. She seemed to hear the music still playing in her mind, its patterns spinning onward. As she got her bearings, the train departed behind her. When the clattering faded, the air was silent. She was alone on the platform. She walked up the college’s ceremonial central path, beneath an arch of oak trees. When the path became steeper, a series of steps eased the way. The deserted campus was beautiful, but Susanna felt a disturbing sense of solitude. Where was everyone? She preferred a city, where people were always nearby. When she was attacked, strangers gathered to help her. If she were attacked here, no one would be close enough to notice.

At the top of the path, she made her way around the main administration building and through a series of gardens, following Daniel Erhardt’s directions. She spotted the low, bunkerlike building that he’d described. When she entered it, she confronted a double-story glass wall overlooking a forest. Deer grazed amid the foliage. The sounds of practicing filled the air, piano, violin, trumpet, and voices, singing.

She walked up the stairs and found his office. Leaves pressed against his office’s wall of glass.

“Welcome,” he said.

“Thank you.” To ease their way into conversation, she said, “This is an unusual building.”

“Prizewinning modern architecture, or so we’re told. Have a good trip?”

“It was faster than I expected.”

“Good. I got coffee for us.” He indicated the cups on his desk. “It should still be hot: from years of experience I know how long the walk takes from the station, so I timed the coffee accordingly. Took my chances and put milk in yours. Here’s the sugar, if you use it.” He pulled out the dictation tray of his desk and pushed a chair to the far side, for her.

“Thank you.” She sat down. By now she’d googled him. She knew more about his several books and many articles, and about his work tracing music manuscripts that had disappeared at the end of World War II, appropriated by the Russian army. As she drank her coffee, she looked around the office . . . floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed with musical scores, shelves of CDs, a piano. Family photos covered his desk, featuring a blond woman, soft and pretty. Midwestern, Susanna decided. Some of the photos included a child, photographed from babyhood to girlhood. Susanna glanced at Dan’s hand and saw his wedding ring. She made an assumption: happily married, one child.

Yes, surely this was the proper course. Susanna’s intuition that Dan would be a reliable and discreet consultant had been correct. She had tried to negotiate a fee with him via e-mail, but again he’d refused.

“So.” Dan sounded upbeat and positive. “Let’s see this music manuscript you’ve inherited.”

Susanna put her coffee on the far side of the desk. Opening her tote bag, she took out the manuscript. Turning it so that the title page faced Dan, she placed it on the desk’s dictation tray before him.

Dan had already planned what he would say. After dropping Becky off at school, he’d formulated a response for Susanna Kessler. Words to let her know as gently as possible that what she’d discovered was a worthless copy. Nothing wrong with a handwritten copy, however. It was a nice keepsake, even if it wasn’t valuable to anyone outside your family.

And yet, when he stared at the manuscript placed before him, he couldn’t say those words. Instead he remembered the occasions when he’d handled the Bach autographs at the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, and the New York Public Library. He rubbed the wrapper, which was the name for the outside covering, and the roughness of the paper against his fingertips was just like those autographs.

The heading on the wrapper began with the indication Dominica Exaudi: Concerto. This meant that the piece was a cantata and had been written to be performed, or rendered (the proper term for musical works included in a religious service), on the Sunday after Ascension. Bach often called his cantatas concertos, which could be confusing because people didn’t refer to cantatas that way anymore. The name of the piece was Wir das Joch nicht tragen können. This was a reference to the Bible, Dan knew without needing to look it up. Acts 15:10. The literal translation would be We are unable to bear the yoke. “Of the law of Moses” would be understood to finish the line. The cantata title was unfamiliar to him.

But that couldn’t be. He knew the titles of all of Bach’s 1,100 extant works, as well as their catalog numbers in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis. He had a good memory for such things, because he’d learned them when he was young. Same with the Bible: his parochial school had stressed Bible study, and biblical references had been imprinted in his brain.

The annotations on the wrapper indicated three separate scripts. One, listing the title and the instruments, was a handwriting he knew. He recognized it, incredibly, as Johann Sebastian Bach’s.

Dan wasn’t familiar with the next script, but he could read it: Sollte nicht catalogisiert werden, “Not to be cataloged,” followed by the place and date, Berlin, den 9. Juni 1783.

The third hand had written, Im Privat-Kabinett halten, “Keep in the private cabinet.”

So, concealment from early on.

He opened the wrapper. J.J. was written in the upper left hand corner of the first page of music. Bach almost always began his compositions with the initials J.J., meaning Jesu Juva, “Jesus, help me.” Then the title was repeated, Wir das Joch nicht tragen können. On the upper right was the signature, di J. S. Bach.

Dan could and would compare the signature to other examples illustrated in the Bach reference works on his shelves. He chose to ignore the signature for now. Any decent forger could copy a signature. Other things weren’t so easy to imitate.

The piece began with a section for virtuoso solo violin accompanied by oboes, orchestral strings, and organ. This filled two pages of music. Then the bass voice came in, declaiming, Wir, wir, wir das Joch . . . Dan didn’t remember encountering this text or its musical setting before.

As usual in autograph cantata scores of Bach’s, the words were essentially illegible to modern readers. Dan, however, had spent years reading and studying old German script. He would need to investigate the libretto carefully later, but glancing through the piece, he was able to get an overview.

No, he certainly didn’t recall this text appearing in any other Bach cantata. The arias for the most part were biblical in origin. He didn’t know any textual sources for the recitatives. The first recitative read, in his quick translation, We are at fault for not striking them dead. The second said, Burn their synagogues . . . and bury anything that doesn’t burn. The others continued in a similar, extremely troubling vein.

He turned his attention away from the text, to the musical notations. Composers often had striking idiosyncrasies in their writing of musical noteheads, rests, clefs, and so on. Dan could identify the general characteristics of the musical handwriting of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. And of Bach. This looked like Bach.

The manuscript certainly had the general appearance of being old, with the ink eating into the paper and creating mirror images on the opposite side. For ink to corrode the paper like this took a fairly long time.

Indeed, the manuscript looked like a composing score, with cross-outs and compositional revisions throughout. Sometimes a composing score showed scrapings where corrections had been made. As Dan turned the pages, he saw that this score had a few such scrapings, and even a small hole. Smudges showed where the composer (or the forger) touched the still-wet ink with the side of his (or her) hand. Here and there the composer (or forger) had paused for an instant, and in doing so had left a blot of ink on the paper.

In the lower margin of the third page, there was a small, rough sketch of a few measures of music, intended for the top of the next page, an aide-memoire for the composer (or a bit of high verisimilitude for a forger?), while he waited for the ink on this page to dry. On another page was an example of tablature, the use of letters to represent notes when space was short at the end of a line. The fourth page had a large ink spill toward the bottom.

A fantasy spun out in Dan’s mind . . . Bach in his apartment in the Thomasschule, next to the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig, children and students tumbling over one another, ceaseless noise. Bach sat at his composing desk, and as usual, he was in a rush, working under what today would be called a deadline. For at least his first five years in Leipzig, he composed a masterpiece cantata for virtually every Sunday church service (except during the penitential times of year, when cantatas weren’t rendered). An astonishing achievement, although Bach himself, judging from his surviving personal correspondence, may not have perceived how remarkable it was. On this particular day, a child ran over to him, breaking his train of thought. Depending on the circumstances, Bach laughed or scolded or comforted the child. In the confusion, he spilled a blob of ink onto the margin of his composing score.

Dan felt a chill as he imagined the scene.

At the end of the autograph, the letters SDG appeared. This meant Soli Deo Gloria, “To the Glory of God Alone.” Bach almost always put these initials after the last bar of his compositions, liturgical and secular alike.

Dan returned to the beginning and reviewed the score again. This time, he followed only the music. He heard it in his mind. From the first notes it was vibrant and thrillingly motoric—and a piece he’d never heard before. The first chord was itself a sort of musical signature move of Bach’s, a V⁷-of-IV. At the first episode, Dan saw that the bass line, spectacularly, was an extended augmentation canon in contrary motion, set in the dense, chromatic, baroque harmonic language of, well, Johann Sebastian Bach. Most assuredly no one except Bach could pull off such a formidable compositional feat. A forger would need to be as musically brilliant as Bach himself to create this kind of music.

Dan held a sheet up to the light.

“What are you doing?” Susanna asked, startling him. He’d forgotten about her. Now he felt delighted to think that she might enjoy this next detail.

“I’m checking for the watermark. In Bach’s day, paper was made with a distinctive watermark. Only very fancy paper is made this way nowadays, with words or pictures impressed into the paper and barely visible unless you hold the paper up against the light. Look.” He held the sheet at an angle so she could see. He watched the recognition gradually come to her.

“A deer. With antlers. And the letters IAI.”

“Watermarks are a field of study unto themselves. Let’s look it up.”

From the bookcase, he pulled out the Katalog der Wasserzeichen in Bachs Originalhandschriften, a two-volume, large-format German publication cataloging the watermarks on the various papers that Bach had used.

“We need a deer with its head in profile, and a round tail and dark eye, combined with the letters IAI, which are presumably the initials of the paper maker.” Dan leafed through the book, showing Susanna pictures of leaping unicorns, knights in armor, hunters on horseback, crescent moons.

“There.” She pointed.

He held up to the light a sheet from the manuscript score, and she held up the book beside it.

“You’re right. A perfect match.”

“What does the watermark tell us?”

“We don’t know yet. This particular deer watermark is given the identification number ‘six’ in the catalog. So we look in the accompanying commentary volume . . .” He made his way through the charts. “Ah,” he said when he found it.

“Yes?”

“It’s the same, somewhat infrequently encountered watermark as for Cantata 43, a cantata for Ascension. That makes sense, because Exaudi is the Sunday after Ascension. And IAI apparently stands for Johann Adam Jäger, a paper maker from Bohemia. In older German spelling, the letters I and J were often interchangeable.”

“So?”

“I need to think about this.”

A realization swept over him, too involved to explain to Susanna, even though she gazed at him expectantly. He turned away from her and stared out the window. The fact was, the Exaudi cantata from Bach’s third annual cantata cycle in Leipzig, the piece that would have followed Cantata 43 in the liturgical calendar, was missing. Was Susanna’s manuscript the lost cantata?

“Let’s move to the next step,” he said, concealing his uneasiness. “We’ll look up the opening measures, to make absolutely sure this music doesn’t appear elsewhere among Bach’s works with a different text.” He pulled another book from the shelves, the Melodic Index to the Works of Johann Sebastian Bach, compiled by May deForest McAll. “This book organizes the opening melodic ideas of all Bach pieces by their shape.”

“Their shape?”

“It puts the opening musical gestures of the pieces into a kind of alphabetical order, so you can search for them by means of the music itself. You see here,” he explained an example at random, “two notes moving up the scale followed by two notes moving down, and so forth.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

He checked the opening phrase of the cantata and went to the required section of the book.

“This melody isn’t listed,” he said.

“What does that tell us?”

He didn’t answer her. He faced a shocking conclusion: the manuscript might well be authentic. It probably was authentic. And both its music and its libretto were unknown. A wholly new discovery.

Stop: a genuine, previously unknown Bach autograph could not possibly be brought into his office on a Friday afternoon by a young woman who’d been cleaning out the home of her deceased uncle in Buffalo, New York. The chances of such a thing happening were nil.

And yet, evidently it had happened. The manuscript bore no library number or stamp. Who had written the messages on the wrapper, ordering that it be kept private? Where had it been hidden, in the many years since its creation?

Dan considered Bach’s Calov Bible, lost for centuries and then found in an attic in Michigan. One day in 1934, a Lutheran minister in town for a conference stopped by the home of his cousin, and the cousin said, “I’ve got a big old multivolume German Bible in the attic, maybe you could take a look at it and tell us what to do with it.” The Bible turned out to have Bach’s signature on its various title pages and to be filled with Bach’s handwritten comments.

Dan’s heart was racing. He felt as if he’d gulped down five cups of coffee. This could be the most significant discovery of his career. Or if he was wrong, he’d make an everlasting fool of himself.

He turned to Susanna. “Tell me again,” he said, suspicion entering his voice. He needed to keep her at an objective distance. “Where and how did you find this?”

“I was cleaning out . . .”

Dan listened to her story without interrupting. She showed him the note from her uncle. He read it. He studied her uncle’s hand-drawn map. From the bookcase he pulled out an atlas of Germany. He matched the handwritten map to the atlas’s map of the area in and around Weimar. He returned the note to her.

“From your uncle’s letter, it appears that the manuscript was stolen. Looted after the war. Sorry to be blunt about it.”

“My uncle possessed it for over sixty years. The people who owned it were probably murdered in the Holocaust.”

Dan heard her defensiveness. She didn’t want her uncle spoken of as a thief. “I keep up with the databases on materials stolen during the war,” he said, “and I’ve never seen a reference to anything like this. As far as I know, it’s never been reported stolen.”

“I looked at those websites, too. I do realize that my uncle wouldn’t have been able to know for certain, what happened to the family. If I can find any family members who survived, I’ll give this back to them. But let’s put the ownership question aside for now. I came to you because I’m trying to find out what this is. I need to know if it’s authentic and also why my uncle was concerned about it.”

She sat up straighter, appearing to Dan even more self-possessed and confident, and making him more conscious of her short skirt and black tights. He didn’t intend to notice such things, especially with Julie staring out of the photos on his desk. He couldn’t help himself. It was instinct. Judging from the conversations he overheard in the locker room at the gym, he was no different from most other heterosexual men in this regard.

“What do you think we’ve got here?” she asked.

She wasn’t an expert, Dan knew. “Let me start at the beginning. It seems that Bach may have written as many as five cantata cycles.”

“Which are?”

“An annual liturgical series in which music is set for the appropriate church services in the year. The purpose of a sacred cantata was to provide musical and poetic reflection on the biblical readings of the service. For unknown reasons, only three of Bach’s five cantata cycles survive, and even those aren’t complete.”

He heard himself taking on an excessively professional tone, to ward off his increasing recognition of the attractiveness of her legs.

“There are various theories about what happened to the many cantatas that disappeared. In those days, there was no photocopying or scanning,” he said, stating the obvious to provide some perspective. “For nearly all of Bach’s cantatas, the only record of them that existed in his day was the composing score, plus the separate individual orchestral and vocal parts that were copied out by Bach’s students from the composing score, for the performers to use in the rehearsals and church services. When Bach died, all these materials were divided among his wife and several of his sons. From there they were sold, and some were lost, discarded in error, never seen again.”

“Are you saying that this is a completely unknown piece of music by Bach?”

“Yes. Possibly.” He made himself sound circumspect. “My opinion is subject to the corroboration of other experts. I don’t know enough to make a definitive evaluation on my own.”

“So this manuscript could be quite important?”

“If genuine, it would be tremendously important. And it could be worth millions of dollars. The smallest Bach discovery creates a sensation, and this would be major.”

“What’s the next step?”

“A thorough investigation. Because there will be an uproar when—if—this becomes public, every aspect of the manuscript needs to be explored. I’ll need to gather as much information as I can, to develop a context. First I should tease out the full text of the libretto. That could take a few hours.”

“I’ll wait. I have work I can do.”

“Why don’t I take photos with my phone to save time?”

“No photos. At least for now.”

He debated whether to challenge her on this. The lack of a reproduction of the manuscript for study purposes would make the entire research process more difficult, but he could understand that she would be concerned about the possibility of digital images being spread around the world in an instant.

“Okay. With your permission, I’d like to consult with a friend who’s the curator of music manuscripts at the MacLean Library in New York. Scott Schiffman. He’s an expert in authenticating and dating music manuscripts through handwriting analysis. A composer’s musical handwriting changes over the course of a lifetime. The way the bass clefs and the treble clefs are written, the way the beams are placed on the notes—this is Scott’s expertise. Among much else. He’s an expert in the history of ink, for example. I’d like him to see the manuscript so we can get his opinion.”

That was a huge understatement. Anxiety was setting in as the full import of what this might be—of what it was—hit him.

“May I contact Scott?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“We—you—should go to Weimar, follow your uncle’s map, and try to find the house he visited. If the house is still there. At least determine the address. Visit the municipal archives and learn the family’s name, so you can trace survivors. And we Bach scholars would want to know if anything else significant is still to be found at the house; again, if it exists.”

“That makes sense.”

“In the meantime I could contact a friend at the university in Leipzig and send him a copy of the map. He could do some research to try to find the family.”

“I’d like to keep this to ourselves for now. Scott Schiffman at the MacLean Library is fine, but no one else.”

“In early July, I’ll be attending a conference in Leipzig, not too far from Weimar. If you’re not able to visit Weimar before then, I could go.”

“Thank you.”

“Where are you storing the manuscript?”

“In a bank vault.”

“Not good.” This was really not good, but he kept his voice measured. “It should be kept in a temperature-controlled environment. Scott can help with that. The MacLean Library would be perfect. You should take it there today. They have terrific facilities. I can phone Scott to alert him that you’ll be arriving later.”

“I’m going to keep it in the bank vault for now.”

“I don’t like you traveling around with this and dropping it off at a bank. In fact, doing so is unconscionably reckless.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I’ll keep your opinion in mind.”

What could he say to that? He had no standing to challenge her. He didn’t want to offend her. They’d only met once before. She could easily decide to take the manuscript to another scholar, or opt to sell it. And once she understood what it was, and the reason her uncle was rightly concerned about it, she might even, God forbid, think nothing of destroying it. Nonetheless he had a responsibility to be honest with her.

“I need to explain something else.” He hesitated. He didn’t know where to begin. The cantata that lay on the desk between them reflected the bleak history of Europe. In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled from England and burned at the stake in France. The Spanish Inquisition murdered tens of thousands. Pogroms were a fact of life in many parts of Europe, even into the twentieth century. The absurd so-called blood libel had recurred all over Europe, also into the twentieth century, accusing Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies, resulting in further anti-Jewish violence. The Holocaust hadn’t come out of nowhere.

Abruptly two thousand years of history became personal for him. His great-grandparents had emigrated from Germany to the United States. One of his grandmothers had been born in Germany. He had relatives who fought on the German side during the war. And Dan felt more generally implicated because of his religion. He and his family were part of the Christian biblical heritage represented by this manuscript. He shared a collective responsibility. He felt ashamed. Surely this cantata text was not the message that Jesus himself had taught?

She was waiting for him to continue.

But he couldn’t. All of it was too close.

“With any discovery of this magnitude,” he said, avoiding the issue, “the press will descend in droves. We have to be prepared. Make certain we’re one hundred percent correct. After I’ve copied out the libretto and am able to do research on its origins, we’ll have a firmer idea of what we’re dealing with.”

The sun had moved, and the light was dappling into the office through the trees outside the window. In the golden light, her eyes were a shade of blue that he’d never seen before, dark and deep.

“Thank you.”

Where had she come from, this delicate and graceful woman, her body full beneath her sweater?

He wasn’t prepared to tell her outright that the text of this cantata, powerfully supported by its musical setting, explicitly proclaimed a stark and murderous contempt for Jews. For her.