The Black Spaniard Page 6

  “My highly esteemed Eleanor, my dearest friend,” he wrote, “A year of my stay in this capital has nearly elapsed before you receive a letter from me, and yet the most vivid remembrance of you is ever present with me. I have often conversed in thought with you and your dear family, though not always in the happy mood I could have wished, for that fatal misunderstanding still hovered before me, and my conduct at that time is now hateful in my sight. But so it was, and how much would I give to have the power wholly to obliterate from my life a mode of acting so degrading to myself, and so contrary to the usual tenor of my character!” He paused, dipped his quill into fresh ink, and continued.

  “Many circumstances, indeed, contributed to estrange us, and I suspect that those tale-bearers who repeated alternately to you and to me our mutual expressions were the chief obstacles to any good understanding between us. Each believed that what was said proceeded from deliberate conviction, whereas it arose only from anger, fanned by others; so we were both mistaken. Your good and noble disposition, my dear friend, is sufficient security that you have long since forgiven me. We are told that the best proof of sincere contrition is to acknowledge our faults; and this is what I wish to do. Let us now draw a veil over the whole affair, learning one lesson from it: that when friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.”

  Luis carefully tucked a copy of his variations on a theme from the Marriage of Figaro with additional conciliatory words, and wrote the address he knew so well on the envelope. Was Bonn really that far from Vienna? And yet it might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

  It might well have been. Luis was now pulled into a maelstrom of circumstances that only his own inner resources, and wellspring of musical ideas, could survive.

  “Luis, come here, I have news for you,” Haydn stood at the door outside Luis’s room, where the young pianist was writing thoughtfully in pencil on a loose sheet of paper. It was now winter, and the young composer was a sorry sight in his thread-bare grey sweater and two pairs of trousers, layered to save on heat. Luis did not look up, to Haydn’s annoyance. “Luis!” The younger man slammed down his pencil, having had just enough of his elder’s insistence on immediate obedience.

  Haydn lifted a letter and shook it at Luis, but with a sad cast to his eyes. “I was not able to persuade your Elector to provide additional support for your studies,” he said, handing the missive to the younger man. Luis grabbed it in disbelief and read it twice through before crumbling the paper and throwing it onto the floor.

  Then the impact hit him hard. “Damn!” he exclaimed, hitting the wall with his fist. “What am I supposed to do? How can I live?”

  Haydn’s features melted into an expression of compassion. He walked over to the young man and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, my boy,” he said. “We have our differences, but you will not be abandoned. Pay me back later, when you are able. And you will be able to, I have no doubt.”

  Luis refused to look at his benefactor’s face, his own skin flushed with embarrassment. “It’s not your doing,” Haydn reassured him. “The French are taking over Bonn. The Elector and his court have fled. I’m afraid nothing that you remember from your childhood remains.”

  Luis nodded, still not facing his teacher, then walked quickly from the room. What kind of life was it for a man of conscience? To be dependent on petty royalty and then one’s own teacher. He had nothing but his own wits to protect him, and who could say what cruel trick of fate would intervene with illness or accident? A musician, no matter how accomplished, was at the mercy of fate and wealthy patrons. Society regarded musicians and composers as servants required to enter aristocratic homes through the back door along with tradesmen. If something happened to his Prince, he’d be playing the piano in a brothel or pub, if he were lucky enough to get the job.

  Turning his back abruptly on his teacher, Luis pushed on the heavy door and lurched down the steps onto the cobblestone street. He walked quickly into town, warmed by the crush of other pedestrians, and found refuge in a coffee house. Soon, Haydn would be back in England, charming well-heeled businessmen and doting aristocracy with his conventional tunes. Luis, on the other hand, was ready to explode, and wanted all the world to hear it.

  But Luis was at his best in adversity, a condition he was familiar with since birth. As winter wore on, he relied on his genius for performance and composition, his charismatic personality, new connections, and pure aggression, sweeping through the early years in Vienna with one concert triumph after another. In his absence, Haydn had transferred instructional duties to the pedagogue Albrechtsberger, who, though strict, inculcated in the young composer a profound understanding of counterpoint, the art of pitting note against note, melody simultaneously against melody. Luis was at last mastering the tools of his compositional trade. In the language of the Masons, he had passed his apprenticeship and was entering the third degree.

  Soon even his homesickness was relieved. His brother Carl arrived in the spring, and Luis was happy to help his sibling become settled in the unfamiliar land. By the fall, friends from Bonn—Wegeler, Lorenz von Breuning, the Rombergs who stopped by en route to their new jobs in Hamburg, the Willmanns with their pretty daughter Magdalena—began arriving, though none would stay permanently. Although she did not leave home, even Eleanor became part of his life again, renewing their correspondence and sending him little hand-made gifts. Luis thrived on these friendships, and warmly embraced his beloved colleagues from the past.

  So between new and recent patrons, some teaching of the daughters of the nobility, and even the first revenues from composition, Luis was able to make a go of it. He continued to give recitals in local salons, though few were the pianists who challenged him to a technical show-down. His powerful hands were filled with improvisational marvels, his brain swam with musical ideas for sonatas, trios, songs, concertos, symphonies. He was seen regularly at local taverns enjoying meals with his friends, laughing, sharing stories, engaging in flirtations, or earnestly discussing republican politics. He was in sync with the revolutionary spirit of the age, the growing swell of Romanticism which, like a great cultural tornado, swept up the rational ideals of the Enlightenment and enrobed them in the warmest expressions of human passion and deep feeling, though not without a path of destruction in its wake.

  Encouragedby his still faithful patrons, Luis engaged on a tour of Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, spanning another winter and a spring season, lining the young composer’s pockets, for the first time, with gold. From the Golden Unicorn, an inn where his prince and Mozart had stayed some years before, Luis wrote to his brother Nicolas, “My art is winning me friends and renown. What more do I want? And this time I shall make a lot of money.” His reputation as a performer but also a composer to be reckoned with, spread beyond Vienna throughout the German-speaking world, but there were unresolved issues in the past that would rise to haunt him in the future.

  One of these was the death two years earlier of George Forster.

  A naturalist and explorer, Forster had been exiled because of his radical political convictions, and died of illness in 1794 in a sordid flat in the Rue des Moulins in Paris. Despite his contributions to natural science and literature, he died alone of a stroke, in squalor and disgrace, but not without leaving some eloquent artifacts behind. When his room was being cleaned out, a minor official was called in to take a look at certain written materials. They did not seem to impact the revolution in any way, but had perhaps some value to those opposing slavery, still recognized by the government in transition. These documents were notebooks entrusted to him by Luis’s cousin Rovantini more than a dozen years earlier. Living with the Beethovens at the time, Rovantini, a cousin on the mother’s side, died while trying to learn more about a shocking racial experiment taking place not 200 miles from the Beethoven home. Rovantini’s passion for justice was his undoing, but the notebooks in which he and a colleague recorded
their observations in written testimony and sketches had been sent to Forster for his protection and eventual action.

  Because of the disruption caused by political chaos in France and the German states, the Reign of Terror, and the war in Europe, the notebooks, while recognized as of interest, had no immediate relevance to those who discovered and processed them. They therefore began a journey to return to their source, which would take nearly three years to complete. The notebooks came perilously close to annihilation in Kassel (the site of the experiment, in which enslaved Africans were studied to establish theories of white supremacy). The books were smuggled into the University, lay fallow for nearly two years, were revived and sent to Bonn, and throughout a bizarre series of activities and coincidences, wound up one morning in the daily post at the Viennese apartment of one Luis van Beethoven.

  By this time, Luis was 25, the musical celebrity without equal in the Austrian capital, and a force to be reckoned with. His German and Czech tour had been an artistic and financial success. Throughout Vienna, his music was discussed, debated, and analyzed, often soundly trounced in the press, but mostly celebrated for its daring and innovation. Stretching the very definition of music as it was then known, his work signaled a radical break with the past and seemed to point the way to an unstable but thrilling future. As his friends returned home, Wegeler to a post at the University of Bonn, Christopher to his beloved family, Luis filled the void with more music, score after phenomenal score flying from the pens of copyists and printing presses. Luis continued to master his craft, maintaining an ambivalent friendship with the patient Haydn on his return, but no longer a pupil of the senior master.

  There were thousands of Viennese, and those throughout Europe, clamoring for new material, and he could barely keep up with the demand. Despite a few setbacks in his health—some stomach distress, a buzzing in his ears, those damn headaches—he persisted with energy and passion, though he was becoming short-tempered and even less tolerant of stupidity and human error, feeding off the adulation of his public and believing perhaps he was invincible. The old lessons about Divine Providence, the teachings of religion and even Masonic quasi-spirituality, were laid to rest. Men were masters of their own destinies, and God, if he did exist, was the servant of human intelligence and action.

  Shortly after returning from a short concert trip to Bratislava, Luis received a package through the post. He was expecting to see a set of proofs or perhaps a manuscript from another young composer looking for guidance when he tore off the paper and string from the package that arrived that late autumn. Instead, he saw something utterly unexpected. A shock, a distant memory touched his heart as he lifted the two battered notebooks and the wrappings fell to his feet. At first, he was flooded by memories of his cousin Rovantini, then Neefe and his strong conviction that the notebooks had great meaning.

  Luis looked at the writing, some smeared and difficult to read on the brown pages, crisp, wrinkled, and water-stained. The books tended to fall apart at the spine, and he quickly placed them on a table, ruffling them further with his calloused fingertips. Perhaps the memories they brought back of his own adolescence were more compelling even than the tale they told. Luis had suffered as a child, not only from his father’s strict teaching methods, but also by bullying for his appearance. He was small, untidy, and dark complected, so much so that he was sometimes derided by his blond classmates. Even his dearest friends teased him by calling him, “the Spaniard” or “our black friend.” For Luis, the issue had evaporated with his success, but here, for the first since Soliman’s comments at the True Harmony reunion, was a reminder that not all people who suffered discrimination were as fortunate as he.

  He glanced at the horrid images in the notebooks, images of people in chains and in pain. What would he do? Did he have a responsibility? Where was this going? It was so long ago, the experiment, supported by a landgrave who had aided the Hessians in the American war, had surely come to a halt. There would be nothing left but a ghost town where once the moans and cries of oppressed people had rung. He thought deeply about his next steps for some time. Then he knew what he would have to do.

  He would entrust the notebooks to Angelo Soliman.

  Chapter 11

  Luis had not seen Soliman since the Masonic reunion several years before. Still highly valued by the Viennese aristocracy, Soliman had had no visible public role of late, and rumor had it that he was in poor health, though Luis had seen him at several of his own concerts and recitals, his white robe and turban brilliantly visible in the otherwise dark, candlelit halls. Luis decided to send the notebooks directly to Soliman. He would know what to do.

  The climate for equality had never been better. Hadn’t France, rocked as it was by conflict and bloodshed, banned slavery in all its possessions some years before? Weren’t there new abolition movements in Britain? Haydn had told him as much. And what about the leading writers of the time? Luis had not kept up with the issue as much as he would have liked, but it was as clear as that this new general, Napoleon, could become the Washington of Europe. Equality for all was a matter of fact, and would soon be a matter of policy. No thanks to the Church. No thanks to Divine intervention, if such a thing existed.

  In the next few days, Luis repackaged the materials, with a note, and did some detective work to find Soliman’s address. Then, with one final moment holding the manuscripts, released them to the carrier, and went on with his day’s work.

  It was a dark autumn day, cool for this time of year, when Soliman’s servant brought the package to the ailing Moor. He frowned as he noted the return address, and his servant snipped the roughly knotted twine from the paper. Soliman coughed, a hacking cough, and returned to the settee where he had been confined of late. The servant quietly removed the outside paper, and lifted the two notebooks and note from the wrappings.

  “What are they?” his master asked.

  “I do not know, sir,” said the servant, thumbing through the pages slowly and deliberately, “but there is something disturbing here.”

  He brought the books to Soliman, put a clean cloth on his master’s lap, then placed the books on it. He bowed and left, removing the wrappings and putting them in the fire. Soliman began to read, and as he read, he became agitated. The writing awakened long dead memories in this man, who may have been a Prince or Lord in his native land. His coughing increased, but when the servant reappeared, he shouted at him to leave, and uncharacteristically, threw a nearby book of poetry at the unfortunate man.

  “Get out!” shouted Soliman, who picked up the cloth containing the books and, bent over in pain, carried them to the credenza beside the fireplace. He was cold and shivering, but the fire in the grate was no match for the fire now raging in his brain.

  “What is this? What is this?” he repeated to himself. “This cannot be. This cannot be.” Scenes he recognized, recalled, had hidden in his memory for a lifetime, rose up like daggers in his heart. Soliman gripped the sides of the books with all the force of his body, as though by pressure he could squeeze the reality away, the memory of torture, the memory of his mother dragged off in chains. The fire reflected in the diamond brooch he wore on his headpiece, his eyes blazed in the agitated light. The experience of years past, the dread and guilt over his serene life away from what should have been his responsibility, convulsed his body, and taking both volumes in his hands, with a great roar, he heaved them into the fireplace, releasing a cloud of smoke and cinders, and he fell with a crash, taking the contents of the credenza—all porcelain and silver like that from the Habsburg Palace—with him and on him as he collapsed onto the floor. The servant ran in again, and called for help, but it was too late for help, for Soliman was in a fit of some sort, and it would be a matter of hours before a medical doctor arrived and pronounced it a stroke. And before nightfall, Soliman was dead.

  When Luis heard the news a day later, he was stunned. Then he thought of the notebooks and a cold wave of fear swept over him.

  “Did th
ey find anything…anything unusual, any odd packages?” he asked van Swieten during a Wednesday evening visit. The Librarian, now an enthusiastic patron of the young composer, shook his head sadly.

  “There was nothing. He was sitting on a couch, his servant heard a shout, rushed back, and found him thus,” van Swieten said. “You will have to play me something funereal this evening, my son, something with poignant variations to bring tears to my eyes but solace to my heart.”

  But other thoughts were on Luis’s mind. The servant, he reflected, day-dreaming through van Swieten’s panegyric. The servant might have a clue as to the current whereabouts of the notebooks. It would be smart to pay a visit to the dead man’s dwelling before it was cleaned out. So Luis played for van Swieten and managed to lull him to sleep, a rare event indeed, allowing Luis to escape earlier than usual. The next morning, he went to Soliman’s rooms, but there was a terrible crush of visitors and official-looking vehicles. Not sure what was going on, Luis wove his way through the enclave and managed to find someone who appeared to be in charge.

  “I hear that Lord Soliman has passed,” he said to the director, who was supervising the removal of furniture and property. The man looked dismissively at Luis.

  “Out of my way,” he said, “we’ve got business here!”

  Luis persisted, “I want to speak to his servant! I was an acquaintance of the deceased.”

  The man smirked. “Back door!” he said pointing with his shoulder, since his arms were full of linens and a folded tapestry. Then he turned his back on him. Luis was annoyed, but determined to find the servant, and squeezed through another group of merchants, as well as mere onlookers, as tragedy has always been a spectator sport. With some effort, at last he made it to the servants’ entrance, and walked in unimpeded. The door led to a kind of mud room which opened into a storage area, followed by a rough kitchen. There at a table sat two young men, one hardly more than a child, one as dark as Luis, the other fair. Luis sat down with a sigh, as they looked at him in surprise.