The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 11

Following the antepenultimate installment in this musical parody of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," we have now reached the anteclimax, setting the scene for the final battle between good and evil in the rather limited if not terribly exciting world of musicillogical studies.

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I.M.P. Agent Al Rovescio arrived at Chez Teabag only to find the place completely deserted. He had been assigned to examine the mysterious bust of Beethoven on the piano. It was apparently a cleverly designed computer server storing a great deal of information. As he doggedly worked his way through the different sound files, he heard several conversations between the man with the hissing voice and the viola player named Nepomuck who was in the video, the guy with the spiky whitish-blond hair. It was enough to prove who the murderer was as well as who the mastermind was, for that matter. What it was they were searching for, however, did not come to light, yet much of the other information that Rovescio could find involved Beethoven, the Immortal Beloved, a mysterious box of letters and numerous libraries and concert halls around the world. From one of the files, he was able to figure out the phone number the man with the hiss was dialing.

He called Agent Solfege with the number and she traced it to a certain Count Johann Nepomuck von Bratsche. He dialed the number but no one answered. Instead he got voice mail: “You have reached Nepomuck but I’m busy practicing the White Viola or otherwise tied up doing your bidding, master, and unable to...” but since he didn’t want to leave a message, he just hung up. That was when he decided to call Hemiola.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

“Poor guy,” Renfrew thought, looking at Nepomuck all trussed up with duct tape. “Put a mailing label on you and I could ship you anywhere in the USA.”

Nepomuck looked at him cautiously, not knowing what was going to happen now. They had known each other only briefly back in their Glasgow days when both were students and Nepomuck had been teased for being the “Albino of Albion,” but either they failed to recognize each other or chose not to. He had put the tape back over his mouth and around his wrists fairly convincingly, he thought, after he alerted Leighton to the, errr... well, change of plans: at this point, he was wondering how slim the possibilities were of being rescued at all, especially since he still needed to finish the job, even though he still wasn’t quite sure what it was he was looking for. He had just missed a call from The Serpent and did not want to disappoint him again.

“Well, as Mr. Teabag’s servant, it’s my responsibility to see that his guests are looked after and since it is almost dinnertime and you had interrupted our little tea, perhaps I could scare up a little something for you to eat, hmmm?” Renfrew went back to the front of the plane and quickly returned with a china plate piled up with the last of the left-over haggis, apologizing for not having the necessary neeps and tatties to go with it, plus a wine glass of his best vintage Cabernet Sauvignon, though whiskey might be more authentic.

He set the dinner in front of Nepomuck before leaning forward and, with a quick jerk, yanking the duct tape off his mouth. Renfrew mistook the scream for one of agony and smiled, unaware that Nepomuck was thinking he would have to try that again on his own, especially after he hadn’t shaved for a day or two.

While his guest ate, Renfrew let loose with a stream of complaints about life under Teabag but now, he thought, perhaps that was about to end. This “thing” that Nepomuck was hoping to find, this silly box of letters, whatever it was, must be valuable, Renfrew assumed: if it wasn’t worth a lot of money, why would anyone be so interested in finding it? So he proposed a plan and if Nepomuck agreed to it, he would let him loose: then together they would find the letters and cash in on the discovery – together, of course.

Renfrew figured it would be no problem knocking this guy off once he’d served his purpose. Nepomuck agreed, thinking the same thing, since all he had to do was serenade Renfrew with the White Viola and then claim it all for his mentor, Charles Leighton-Quackerly, who this moment was winging his way to Rochester to help him.

One by one, Renfrew ripped off the duct-tape bonds. Nepomuck nearly swooned in ecstasy but knew there wasn’t time to have him tie him back up and do it again.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The pilot brought the plane in to Rochester without a hitch, the tank bouncing on empty. He saw the police beginning to swarm and knew that their hijacker would soon be behind bars.

As a music critic in London, Charles Leighton-Quackerly had been used to hijacking public opinion or burgeoning careers, but he’d never actually done a plane before and it was kind of exciting. He stood by the door waiting to deboard thinking he would just hale a cab and arrive at Eastman – where else would the clue be, he thought – in a matter of minutes.

But no sooner had they arrived in Rochester than someone else on the plane stood up and said “Who wants to be in Rochester? I want to go to... to the Virgin Islands! Yeah, take this plane to the Virgin Islands!”

Then a man in a business suit stood up and said “No, I want to go to Hawaii. Pilot, I demand you take this plane to Honolulu!”

It was getting ugly and soon everybody on the plane was standing and hollering, protesting where they would hijack the plane to. With a cabinful of wannabes, the flight attendants retreated into the cockpit just before the police opened the doors.

Seeing no airline personnel, the sergeant shouted and ordered everybody to sit down. “All right. Now... who’s the hijacker?”

Leighton stepped forward and said matter-of-factly, “I’m the hijacker.”

But no sooner had the police trained their guns on him than the man in the suit who wanted to go to Hawaii stood up and said, “I’m the hijacker.” Then another passenger stood up near the back, a young man wearing the pink Spartacus t-shirt, and said “I’m the hijacker.” In a matter of seconds, the entire cabin was again resounding with people standing up and waving their arms – even a 90-year-old woman who needed some assistance with her walker – all claiming to be the hijacker.

It gave Leighton the opportunity to sneak out behind the baffled policemen and stroll down the runway. At least this way, he figured, he’d have first dibs on a cab.

And in minutes, he was left off in front of the Eastman Theater. The question now was, where would Nepomuck be?

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

As they left the roof of the theater, Nepomuck checked his phone and saw a strange number on his message window. A hang-up. It wasn’t The Serpent’s phone that had called him, after all. Perhaps it was a telemarketer or just a haphazardly dialed wrong number. Or, he wondered, had the phone-line been breached? But if so, by whom?

Meanwhile, Renfrew was checking his own phone as they went through the back hallways of the theater. Years before he worked for Teabag, he had been an insider in Washington, walking through the halls of power but not as a lobbyist: he thought going in through the lobby was far too easy. He was more of a second storey kind of guy, himself, which came in handy for the various political parties’ dirty tricks projects he had worked on, planting false evidence in this office or complex bugging devices in that one. The most famous one he’d been involved with concerned a blue dress. So now he could return to the world of adventure, quickly figuring out how he could track down his boss and that annoying Dr. Dick, then eventually the fortune they were all searching for.

Thanks to Teabag’s health and the need to find him in that huge castle should he fall and couldn’t get up, Renfrew had installed a small tracking device on Teabag’s cell phone without his knowledge so he could locate him through the GPS. He smiled as he logged into the system on his own phone: aha, not surprisingly, he was in the library. A cinch. No doubt a cargo bay in the back would get him in without anyone knowing. After all, walking around with a near-albino over six feet tall, all cut and bloody wearing a tattered tuxedo, might be difficult to ignore. But they had to hurry: the surprise would be spoiled if left to simmer too long on the stove.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Hemiola barked into the phone. Reception, as usual, was very bad here. Not given clearance to fly Teabag’s helicopter, Accelerando had been forced to land at the nearest airport. The earliest available flight was a commuter plane from Muskrat Airlines that connected with Buffalo. Unfortunately, they had to make stops in Binghamton and Syracuse before they’d reach Rochester. Blame it on the austerity budget imposed on them at the end of the fiscal year.

But he had to admit what Rovescio had found some interesting information. Unfortunately he now had nothing but time on his hands to go back and forth over the possibilities.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

We ran back to the rare documents reading room only to find it dark and empty. In the distance we heard the soft whoosh of an elevator, so we ran toward it. Teabag impatiently brought up the rear, hobbling along with his cane. I told him he should just meet us in the main lobby. At that point we saw the freight elevator had just reached the ground floor. We got into the other one and soon found ourselves in an open space on the street level of Eastman Place. Across the street we could see the theater.

And there was Buzz, smiling but dazed, as if he were waiting for us.

“What happened,” Tony asked breathlessly, “who grabbed you?” And then she looked at him standing there with his usual clueless grin and added somewhat caustically, “and how did you... uhm... escape?” (Me? I was just relieved we didn’t have to rescue him!)

Buzz tried to explain. “At first, I had no idea. He’d put this cloth over my mouth and I figured it was going to be some ether-like stuff that would knock me out but it smelled sweet and familiar and then I began hearing the Pachelbel Canon in my head which immediately began to relax me, you know? So then I realized I’m being dragged into this elevator but I could hear two men talking. One of them sounded familiar. And, well... by this time I was so relaxed listening to the Pachelbel I just... uhm, slipped into... So, d'you remember the chili?”

We looked at him blankly for a moment before it registered.

“Ewwww, gross!” she laughed.

“Buzz, I’m not sure chemical warfare is sanctioned in the Geneva Conventions, not that it matters any more,” I added, “but I’m glad you’re safe if not sound!”

“I think if I had eaten the whole bowl, they might’ve died. Well, they started gagging and gasping for air so when the elevator opened, they let go of me and went dashing out into the hallway so I was, like, able to slip away. It was... it was that big guy who broke through the window at Teabag’s place? And Renfrew, our pilot!” Looking around, he added, “Yeah, where is Ol’ Teabag, anyway?”

“Uh oh, I had a feeling something’s wrong here.” I felt for the latest post-it-note in my pocket.

I explained that we’re to meet him in the main lobby but I also voiced my reservations about his involvement: that he was in it for the greater glory of what little musicology would have to offer him for his discovery. Is this really what Schnellenlauter wanted us to do? His job was to preserve the Immortal Beloved’s identity, so I highly doubted he’d be telling us all this so we would reveal it to the world – or at least that part of the 3% of the classical CD-buying world who might freakin' care.

“But it seems something was going to be revealed tonight,” Tony said looking back and forth at us. “I mean, today is the Golden Section between the Mozart and Shostakovich anniversary birthdays, it’s Midsummer Day, it’s the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist... and, well... it’s also my mother’s birthday, but hey. Maybe these clues we're finding are meant to reveal something on this day.”

The question, of course, was what.

“Well, here’s something I did find in the library – the list may have been interesting, but I think I found what Schnellenlauter wanted us to find. Something he put into the file himself. I would certainly file this under long-range planning: he couldn’t’ve done this, last night!” I showed them the post-it note and we read it together.

ONE
SQUARE’S
MAGIC
SOLUTION
OVERLOOKS THE STAGE
WHERE YOU SEEK YOUR LIGHT AND SHADOW

“No coded gibberish to transpose!” Buzz was delighted.

“The magic square – you mean Sator Arepo again?”

“That was apparently a scratch pad Schoenberg was doodling on,” I said, “but I think Schnellenlauter may have slipped it into the Beethoven files years ago, maybe even back when he would visit the school when I was a student here, maybe in some attempt to protect it. But the post-it note is more recent.”

“How can you tell?”

“We didn’t have post-it notes when I was a student.” They looked at me in disbelief, as if I were trying to explain what a rotary-dial phone was.

“So what’s this reference to an identity crisis... you know, that stage of your life where you’re looking to find yourself? Is our next clue in California? Isn’t that where everybody went back in the ‘60s to find themselves?” Buzz thought back to our earlier discussion of the Sator Arepo Square. “How does that translate again? THE SOWER AREPO HOLDS THE WORKS OF THE WHEEL? What the heck does that mean!”

“It doesn’t translate well, no – everybody’s always assumed AREPO was a personal name, maybe some farmer. TENET can mean ‘understand’ as well as ‘hold’... OPERA is the plural of OPUS which we usually think of as ‘work’ but it also means ‘art’ as in ‘art-work.’ Now, ROTAS, for that matter, could be... uhm... accusative plural of ROTA or wheel... but it could also be the 2nd person form of the verb ROTO, to turn... Hey... it just occurred to me... if ‘you turn the works’ could be, like, turning a wheel to create something artistic, like fine pieces of pottery... and the ‘you’ here refers to an intelligent person who could follow such a riddle, maybe an artist... and if this farmer Arepo were maybe the lower-class equivalent of Joe Blow, could it be a statement to remind an artist that ‘The common man understands the art-works you turn out’? I mean, he comprehends them innately without having to be told how they’re put together, without needing to have them explained to him in order to appreciate them? I wonder... hmmmm...”

“Or...” Buzz began thoughtfully, “I dunno, Doc...” I hated it when he called me “Doc.”

“But this clue says ‘One Square’s Magic,’ not ‘THE Magic Square’ – just like he made the distinction between THE Immortal Beloved and AN Immortal Beloved before. He’s been leading us, bit by bit, to clues he’d planted long ago, figuring someday these would be needed to solve something... to answer some questions which might indirectly lead us to the location of the Immortal Beloved’s identity, but only indirectly...”

We thought for a moment. Then Buzz said, “Wait a minute! He’s been sowing the seeds for years so that at this very moment we would understand... the works or clues he’s been spinning along for us all day, now?” His tone of voice moved quickly from confidence to extreme doubt.

That’s when Tony discovered the group of numbers scribbled at the bottom of the note. They were almost too small for my middle-aged eyes to read.

“Look at this – a magic square. Okay, so it’s a very simple one, just three numbers, but look at the numbers! It only uses 1, 2 and 3.” She felt all tingly again as if she were on the verge of some important discovery. She pointed it out to us as we focused on the small piece of paper: there were the ‘dal segno’ signs in the usual pyramid shape and in the bottom center, a small square:

2 1 3
3 2 1
1 3 2

“If you read them in any direction – like your Sator Arepo palindrome – their sum is always 6.”

“And I don't think ‘stage’ is that ‘stage in life,’ I think he means a literal stage! And where around here do they perform operas?” Buzz pointed theatrically across the street: the Eastman Theater. “And on the stage, singers come down to the front – where you need to be careful about your lighting? To make things clearer to the audience?? Like an aside that the other characters can’t hear???” His dramatic over-acting increased exponentially with each question-mark.

“You’re saying ‘6' is a light cue?” Tony was skeptical but we had nothing else to go on.

“Hey, I’m on a roll! Work with me!” Buzz took off toward the front door. “Andale, andale, Arepo! Arepo! Yee-hah!” And in a flash he was speeding across the street.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Charles Leighton-Quackerly was not a man to be taken lightly, especially considering his ample girth. What was the point of having all this weight if he couldn’t throw it around a little? He delighted how, in London, artists quaked in their so-called fashionable boots awaiting his esteemed and knowledgeable opinions delivered in the morning paper like a personal edict from the Pope. A scathing review by Charles Leighton-Quackerly had had the power to put on hold if not actually destroy more than one promising career, especially if they were performing new music. He hated that term as much as he hated the music: what was so great about being “new”?

He had long arguments with people who complained that the world did not end in 1900, people he thought were simple-minded enough to be easily deluded by the Modern Music Guys into thinking their music had any relevance to Great Art. He blamed Arnold Schoenberg for destroying the beauty of music: to him, Beauty was everything. Oh, he could overlook the dissonance in Beethoven, maybe even in Mahler, because it always came back to something beautiful and thrilling as if to prove that this was the Right Stuff and all that ugliness that had gone before was the Wrong Stuff, losing out in the battle of Good versus Evil. With the exception of Rachmaninoff, anybody writing music after 1900 deserved to be forgotten and quickly, too. They were just a flash in the bedpan, as he often wrote: they would all disappear while Beethoven would survive and remain supreme. That, he felt, was his mission in life, spreading the Gospel of the Maestro. That was why he turned the Penguins of God onto a more activist path, seceding completely from the control of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. What was the point of having the musical equivalent of the Salvation Army if it didn’t actually behave like an army?

That was why he was in Rochester right now, this god-forsaken little town that had only two seasons – Winter and the 4th of July – with its piddly little music school that couldn’t hold a candle to any of the great schools of London: he was here to protect Beethoven. If he could find that stupid box of letters that had eluded Schindler’s grasp, he could destroy any proof that Beethoven had ever fallen to so human a level, this superhuman hero who had created the greatest music that had ever penetrated the ear of mere mortals.

Strutting into the front lobby of the Eastman Theater, he laughed his well-known high-pitched, nasal laugh, a braying outburst more than one musician thought sounded like the call of the Spheniscus demersus, more popularly known as the Jackass Penguin. He did not care for the reference, especially since he considered himself the Grand Emperor of the Penguins of God: “jackass” aside, he was more imposing than these popular little penguins that were, as far as he was concerned, just too cute for their own good.

The empty lobby reverberated as if he stood in the midst of a rookery full of penguins. But he had work to do. Surely Nepomuck must be around here somewhere! He sniffed the air with his beak-like nose, hoping to discover some tell-tale whiff of cheese, perhaps.

The concert hall was his favorite environment, the scene of many triumphs, squashing hopeful careers under the sharp-pointed foot of an impeccably turned phrase. The theater may have been empty but the stage was set up for a concert that evening – he had seen the lobby poster announcing the piano concerto of his despicable nemesis, Arnold Schoenberg. Perhaps he could manage to fit in a scathing review after all: who was this pianist named Klavdia Klangfarben that her career would not wither under his glare? And perhaps this young Russian conductor he’d been reading about, Samiel Skorishumnikov, too. Shostakovich and Schoenberg on the same program with just some token Mozart: how outrageous!

Perhaps there was still time to infiltrate the orchestra just like he had the Boston Symphony, where one of his most trusted agents surreptitiously tripped James Levine at the end of a concert – and they thought he fell, he added with a chortle. Though now it looked like Dear Jimmy would recover to conduct Elliott Carter another day. “Curses,” he thought: what was the first thing he was scheduled to perform after his recuperation? Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1! The same program from the night he “fell.” And the sacrilege of following it with Beethoven’s sublime Ninth! Next time, Leighton muttered, his agent will have to be more... thorough!

He shuffled through the empty theater and headed backstage. Pulling his black overcoat more tightly around him and straightening the mellifluous white cravat of his old-fashioned tuxedo, he hobbled up the steps and disappeared behind the curtain.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Running into the backstage hallways of the Eastman Theater, Nepomuck and Renfrew cursed their luck as they managed finally to get their breath.

“That was a close call!” Renfrew was still panting from his near-fatal experience. “The old man is around here somewhere... drat, the GPS is kind of vague in all this stone and marble. Can’t get a read on him. Let’s duck in here, shall we?”

Nepomuck hoisted the viola case down off his shoulder before pushing the door to the green room open. Standing in the middle of the room was a large ovoid figure in black. When he turned around, Nepomuck recognized him immediately.

“Ah, Nepomuck, welcome to my underground lair!”

“Master, it’s you! You made it!”

“AACK!” Renfrew’s blood ran cold. There, standing in front of him, was the largest, meanest, ugliest-looking penguin he had ever seen.

Leighton stuck his long pointy nose in Renfrew’s face. “What’s the matter with you, boy!?” He broke into a barrage of braying laughs. Renfrew stumbled back into the hallway.

All Renfrew could see was the starved gleam in the eyes and the gnashing of penguin teeth coming at him. “Don’t eat me, please don’t eat me,” he stammered over and over again as he slithered into unconsciousness.

“This one’s useless – truss him up with that gaffer’s tape there, will you, and stuff him into this locker.” Leighton didn’t want to get his tuxedo dirty. After all, he had more important work to do. Nepomuck looked like a little more dirt and sweat wouldn’t matter. “What happened to you, anyway?” he asked with little immediate sympathy.

“It has all gone very wrong, Master. I have failed you. But I think we may be very close to the end, soon.”

“God, I hope so, I don’t think I could stand another chapter!”

“No, no, I mean Dr. Dick is getting closer to finding the letters. I think they must be here”

“That would be good news, yes, and I think they are in the theater, now.” Leighton turned toward the stage.

“You can hear them?”

“I have the sharpest ears known to man, Nepomuck. That’s why I’m such a great critic. Now, get your viola ready. There’s dirty work afoot!”

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The stage was ready for that evening’s concert. The piano had been pushed back to the side, the chairs and stands all in place following the rehearsal of the Shostakovich 10th. A microphone stood by the podium in readiness. Everything awaited the musicians’ arrival: it was a magical moment when the hall was silent, before music would fill the air with its beauty, its drama, its ability to speak through the ages to the depths of the modern soul.

I walked briskly out to the front of the stage and looked around in the near darkness. No one had said a word yet. I always relished moments like this, especially with a theater this beautiful, the enormous chandelier barely visible above me. There was an amazing system of catwalks and crannies above this ceiling with its rosettes, much more delicate in real life than it looked, so I was told by students who’d been up there – like the friend of mine who claimed to have been one of the feather dumpers during an 1812 Overture performance that had become legendary. A box of letters – how big are we talking, here, I wondered – it could be hidden anywhere up there: lights and shadows, it almost made me dizzy thinking about it.

“Found it,” Buzz hollered from the back.

“Hit it,” I shouted back to him, and with a whir, the floor beneath me started to shake. “No, no, that’s not it, that’s the hydraulic lift for the orchestra pit.” I jumped back onto the main part of the stage just in time. Luckily, that was where the piano would go for the Schoenberg, so the whole apron was empty. Quietly and quickly, in a matter of seconds, the stage floor had descended all the way to the basement. It was quite a precipice.

“But that was No. 6 on the panel.”

“Are you sure that’s the lighting board? I can’t see anything else back here.” Tony was on the other side and I heard her kick something, maybe a wastebasket. The light on stage was fairly dim, but enough to see where you were going. Behind the stage wall was another matter.

From the direction of stage left, I heard a door squeak open. In the light from the lobby I could see the silhouette of a tall craggy man leaning on a cane. It was Teabag.

“Dr. Dick,” he said, his voice whining with annoyance, “have you forgotten you were to meet me in the lobby? I’ve been waiting ever so long for you!” He slowly climbed the wooden steps that had been placed at the side of the stage. “Did you find Buzz?”

“Yes – yes, in fact, we did, Lance, but something came up suddenly and I, uhm... thought... there was something in here that... you know,” I said, lamely peering around, “would help us find the next clue.”

“Really?” By now he stood on the edge of the stage. “That is good news. Tell me where you think it is.”

“I’m not sure yet, it’s just a...” I was looking around trying to find some light but only found plenty of shadow.

Then there was a loud honking cackle from the opposite side of the stage. Charles Leighton-Quackerly waddled out into the pool of shadows on stage right. “Yes, Dr. Dick, tell us where it is, won’t you? We’d all love to know!”

I wheeled around. Who the hell was this?!

Other doors opened up as if on cue: Buzz appeared, back by the piano, and over on the opposite side, where the basses would be, I saw Tony steal on-stage. But then a door at the very back, behind the risers where the trombones would sit, opened slowly and I saw the big guy with the shredded tux, his whitish-blond hair glowing eerily in the half-light, creep out onto the stage, carrying a viola under his arm. Pausing a moment to tighten the hairs of his bow, he was getting ready to play.

Surely there must be an easier way to arrange an audition, I thought. I turned to face him as Tony, sounding alarmed, called out to me, “Look out, Dr. Dick – he’s got a viola!”

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 10

Continuing the saga of the search for information about Beethoven's Immortal Beloved, having successfully evaded the International Music Police, this latest installment of the serial novel The Schoenberg Code finds our heroes deep in the Eastman library with a haystackful of miscellaneous information about Beethoven, knowing that time is running out...

- - - - - - -

Renfrew sat on the roof of the Eastman Theater enjoying a cigarette when he heard a steady thumping from inside the Time Warp’s cargo bay. He didn’t mind staying behind since it was a much nicer day here than it had been in New York. Old Teabag hadn’t said anything but “watch” their guest; he didn’t say he couldn’t make things a little more comfortable for him. There were no plans about what to do with him, anyway: turn him over to the police? Hardly. Let him loose in Rochester and figure out his own way of getting home? That, at least, would be more fun. And by now, the big guy must be really hungry.

The mere mention of penguins had set his own nerves on edge. He decided to do the Samaritan thing and crawled into the back compartment.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Inspector Hemiola called in to Agent Mimi Solfege, asking her to track down some information about the Penguins of God.

“Funny you should mention that,” she piped cheerily. “Someone from the FBI had just called in asking for some information.”

“You mean about the Penguins of God?”

“No, about some crazy Brit music critic who’s apparently hijacked a plane about to land in New York and then diverted it to – of all places – Rochester.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it seems this guy calls himself... uhm...” - she paused to check her notes - “the Grand Emperor of the Penguins of God.”

“Really!” Hemiola almost dropped the phone. “And he’s going to Rochester? Why would he risk hijacking a plane rather than just pick up a connecting flight once he landed?”

“Well, sir, you know penguins are not used to flying, sir. Oh, and I just saw this come down over the Homeland Security secret alert news-wire a few minutes ago: there was a suspicious UFO-like object seen hovering over Manhattan but... uhm... here comes an update... hang on...”

Thinking back to the glint in the sky he’d seen from the cliff-hangar, he found himself momentarily distracted. “Wait, you have access to the secret news-wire from Homeland Security?” Hemiola was impressed. Even Gutrune Gebich was having trouble getting that clearance.

“Yes, sir, my son showed me how to find it. OK, here it is – that UFO-like object has now been reported nearing... Rochester, NY? How odd. But the agent’s response was to have someone check it out first thing in the morning. So apparently it’s nothing serious.”

“Rochester, eh? And the Grand Emperor of the Penguins of God is in a hurry to get to Rochester, too. Verrrrry interesting.” Hemiola thought not only might Dr. Dick have been abducted by aliens but now he had this grand poohbah guy after him as well. It just kept getting stranger and stranger.

“What is the big deal about Rochester,” Hemiola wondered out loud as they hurried down the walkway to the gate. Fortunately, it was all downhill from here.

“Well, sir, it IS a major center near the mouth of a north-flowing river,” Accelerando mentioned.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Sforzando sounded skeptical.

Libitum felt he may have been improvising on this one but remembered that other north-flowing rivers – the Nile, for example – were considered spiritual places, not unlike how people from around Boston considered the Concord River which also flowed north. There was a different kind of energy around rivers like that and, he pointed out to the gaping Hemiola, the Genesee River flowed north into Lake Ontario just beyond Rochester.

“Oh great, we’re going to run into a bunch of crystal-stroking New Age penguins celebrating Midsummer?”

“Hold on!” Fermata blurted out. “Look at that,” pointing ahead of them.

“What! I don’t see anything.” Hemiola peered toward the woods beyond the gate.

“Exactly.” Libitum was clearly bummed: the Ludwig Van was missing. Probably the three characters from the library had fled in it.

That left them with two options: the yellow taxi-like station wagon stuck off to the side of the road was deemed unreliable for a cross-country chase, so Hemiola decided the only thing they could do was to hot-wire Teabag’s helicopter. It would certainly be faster than the van and they needed to hurry. After they fueled up from the tank marked High Octave, and with Agent Accelerando placed in the pilot’s seat, they were off. Time was running out.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Time was indeed running out: as we approached the front desk to ask directions, the student warned us the library would be closing in about an hour. She looked at us cautiously until Teabag leaned over and whispered something to her which caused her to smile. She typed a few words into the computer, found a response, then typed a few more and then she printed it out for Lance, motioning us through without further concern. Soon, we were on our way to the rare manuscript collection.

“What was that sweet-talking the librarian all about,” Tony teased.

“Oh, just a little of the old British charm, you know.” He smiled back at her. “It got us in without setting off any alarms, didn’t it?”

“And no gatekeeper asking stupid stuff like what string quartet was based on an all-interval 12-tone row.” Buzz was still pretty miffed about that one.

“You mean Berg’s Lyric Suite?” Teabag asked flippantly as we headed toward the elevator. Buzz just scowled at him.

The “new” library had opened in 1989 but this was the first time I’d been back to the school since before then. This was a much grander affair built across the street from the main entrance, much more spacious than the dark and cramped warren of stacks and cubicles where I had spent so much of my grad-student life. Some people had complained the new facility was too spacious and too nice, not the image one always had of poor students and dusty old musicologists poring over poor and dusty old manuscripts and scores.

When we got to the section we were looking for, the man with the shaggy gray countenance seated at the desk, according to the name-plate, was Dr. Kerry Eliasson, whose name I had seen in various alumni magazines and who was noted for his research about late-18th Century Vienna, the city of Mozart, Haydn and a young man named Beethoven. His younger sister, Christine, had been a doctoral student here during my last year in residence and I remember meeting her in the old Swan Street library. How ironic to be meeting him the first time I’d be entering the “new” library.

“Ah, Dr. Eliasson, I presume,” Teabag began, jauntily proffering his hand, “allow me to introduce ourselves. I am musicologist Lance Teabag...” (he paused hoping for some sign of recognition that was not forthcoming) “...and this is Dr. Dick and...”

Immediately, Dr. Eliasson began to beam. “Dr. Dick, as I live and barely breathe!” He quickly stood up to his full imposing height and energetically shook my hand. “My sister Christie talked about you a great deal when she was studying here, how helpful you had been to her when she was trying to get her bearings. Just the other week, before she took off for Vienna, she was wondering where you were and how you were doing. Wait till I tell her you walked into my very own ‘office.’ There just aren’t enough people to go around in the world!”

I explained that we were on a tight schedule with the library closing soon and that I’d love to chat with him, perhaps over dinner somewhere nearby, later on. He told us he was just off for a meeting which might last past closing-time, so we could manage to stay till he’d get back, if we needed to. I quickly introduced Tony and Buzz and told him what we were hoping to find: some information about Beethoven that might be contained probably in miscellaneous files of contemporary letters and articles. Teabag, now reduced to an adjunct member of Dr. Dick’s posse, fairly steamed as we followed Dr. Eliasson back into the stacks.

There were, he explained, tons of material. Previous librarians here had been given the mandate to “buy everything” which is how the collection seemed to be expanding in geometrical proportions. When I was there, it had already doubled once since it became part of the school, and by the time the new building was under construction, it had more than doubled again. There was still much to catalog but, as Eliasson pointed out with a smile, “that will always leave something for another musicologist to discover in the future.”

We had reached a series of crowded shelves which he indicated with a wave of his hand as “The Miscellaneous Beethoven Section, mostly uncatalogued.” I looked at shelves and shelves full of “miscellany” and thought we have an hour: this could take days or even weeks to be even mildly thorough. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for. A very small needle, in all of this.

He left us to devise our own plan of attack. After a quick “walk-around,” I suggested Lance and I start at opposite ends on the one side and work towards the middle, with Buzz and Tony working together starting in the middle of the next shelf and then fanning out.

Much of everything had been bundled into manila folders or envelopes clearly marked with a topic. How lucky would it be to find one marked “IMMORTAL BELOVED” but that would be unlikely. Teabag had been through the collection a few years ago, he explained, but found nothing that had caught his attention. Given Schnellenlauter’s clues, however, it was worth revisiting.

We were thinking there might be folders that would say “Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde,” which would be helpful, perhaps, but then if no one knew what the Academy dal Segno or the Knights Tempo were, they might put them anywhere: there were several unmarked files and several just labeled “misc,” stuck here and there among the shelves. It looked tedious to have to sort through all of them. Gradually we worked our way along and I wondered if perhaps Schnellenlauter’s nickname for musicologists shouldn’t have been “shelf duster.”

Even though there was no one in ear-shot, we maintained the habitual silence one feels necessary in a library, occasionally grunting after something that had some remote promise turned out to be nothing. This was more difficult for Buzz whose concentration was less involved in the search.

He was curious about this group called the “Penguins of God,” and Teabag explained that even though it was a fairly recent group by comparison to the Academy, it was an off-shoot of the Gesellschaft and primarily an independent performers’ society based in London.

“But why would they be trying to destroy evidence that Beethoven may have had a child – okay, I mean other than the fact his having an illegitimate daughter might be considered a scandal at the time. But today?”

“For some people,” Teabag said trying not to sound pedantic, “the idea that a genius like Beethoven could have had – well, moral failings like any mortal was more than they could bear. Perhaps they feared the trivialization of his music if the great monolithic image they wanted to maintain became too human. Here was a man who had suffered to create great art – they didn’t want to see him turned into... well, into a PBS cartoon series that would offer ‘Tickle Me Ludwig’ dolls as enticements to membership. That sort of thing.”

“Ludwig wants you to be his fwiend,” Buzz squeaked in a high sing-song voice. Tony poked him in the stomach with her elbow. “Ouch! Ludwig thinks maybe that chili was not such a gweat idea...”

Just as the recorded announcement was played that the library would be closing in a few minutes and it seemed finding anything was hopeless, I found something unexpected. Well, not really unexpected because somehow, considering how many musicologists, including Lance Teabag, had probably riffled through these folders over the years, it didn’t seem likely we’d find anything like a second letter from Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved, but probably something inserted into the folder by a more recent scholar, possibly by a member of the Academy dal Segno, maybe even by Schnellenlauter himself who, after all, had spent a good deal of time at Eastman years ago. I was half expecting to find another post-it note.

I held it up to Teabag who stood only a few feet away. His eyes widened considerably and then narrowed with the look of a predator who had just located his prey and was about to pounce.

A single sheet of old yellowed music paper which had various scribblings and doodlings on it, but clearly three ornate versions of the symbol musicians call “dal segno” – The Sign – one at the top center and again in each of the lower two corners, just like it had appeared on the post-it note found in the Lincoln Center copy of Schoenberg’s Trio. But the handwriting looked vaguely familiar. There were several signatures of Beethoven’s but they looked more like someone practicing to forge his signature rather than Beethoven writing his own name over and over again, like a child might do in a notebook. The paper didn’t appear to be that old, either. Opposite these were a few small grids almost obliterated in pencil but one was fairly clear: any student would immediately recognize it, even though it goes back to the days of ancient Rome.

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

A kind of “magic square,” the bottom line is the top line reversed; the second line reversed becomes the fourth line. The middle line is its own mirror. But in addition to reading the words across, as you’d normally do, you could read them down the side, backwards from the bottom up as well as up the other side from right to left.

It’s an involved Latin palindrome that no one quite agrees how to translate. “Sower Arepo Holds Works Wheel,” which didn't make a lot of sense no matter how free you were with the translation. It fascinated Schoenberg – and especially his student Webern: it’s actually engraved on his tombstone – and it led to the development of his own magic squares, the method he used to determine all the different forms of his 12-tone rows that became the basis of what we call, for better or worse, “Serial Music.” On paper, it looks academic and artificial, like a cross-word puzzle (not that people don’t find hours of satisfaction trying to figure them out) but it gave the composer all the basic forms of his musical material in its regular (or prime) form, its mirrored (or inverted) form, its backward (or retrograde) form and then its backwards-mirrored (or retrograde inverted) form.

There were also two measures of music, scratched out like a sketch on three lines as if for violin, viola (with its alto clef) and cello. There were four notes on each line, only two per measure – 12 notes in all: in fact, all 12 notes of the chromatic scale! How very un-Beethoven-like!

“Are you thinking that Beethoven actually had sketched something that was that far ahead of his time?” Teabag sounded both incredulous and skeptical.

That was when I recognized the handwriting. I had seen it earlier this morning – the musical calligraphy was the same as Schoenberg’s String Trio – and the two measures quoted were from the same piece, the section that started off with its B-A-C-H-like motif: what significance the music may have had, at this point, I had no idea, but now I understood why we were to look at Schoenberg’s sketch for the piece, not the printed copy. Perhaps the music itself had no significance on its own. Did Schnellenlauter just want me to be able to recognize the handwriting?

But why?

What significance would “Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas” have for the Immortal Beloved? I quickly scratched down the application of Schnellenlauter’s 'Rule of 12' and found this:

SETPA APTES TOERR OANAO RREOT

I had to agree with Buzz that it made no sense, but Teabag wasn’t so quick to give up on it.

“Look,” he pointed out, “there are five more palindromes created out of this. SETPA - APTES... TOERR - RREOT... and OANAO is its own mirror, just like TENET.” He was disappointed to find out, however, it would not form its own Magic Square and you’d have to start with APTES to make it even similar to the set-up of the famous SATOR square.

“But would could it mean? It’s not any language I can recognize,“ I offered as a Socratic roadblock. “It’s not Greek or Hebrew...”

“Perhaps it’s Egyptian, but we’re dealing with a secret society, here – you know, secret passwords, secret handshakes, secret codes, the whole bit.” Teabag was glowing with the possibilities of the discovery.

“All we need,” Buzz said, returning to his own folder, “is the Academy’s secret decoder ring and we’re all set.”

“Perhaps if I can figure out what language it is or what their code is, I can find the treasure of the Immortal Beloved’s letters!” Teabag looked practically transfixed, now that victory was in his grasp. “SETPA APTES TOERR OANAO RREOT,” he intoned like an ancient priest.

That was when it occurred to me perhaps he was not in this to help us but rather using us to lead him to something that was going to make him famous, make up for having had fame snatched away from him by others who’d found the Lyric Suite before he did. I decided I needed to perhaps give him less information, now, rather than more. But how could I “disinvolve” him: without him, we’d still be at Lincoln Center, or rather in some jail cell awaiting trial for the murder of three conductors.

I heard a noise down the narrow hallway and figured Dr. Eliasson was coming to tell us it was time to leave. It was already past 5:00.

That was when Buzz piped up. “Hey, I found Schindler’s List!”

“No, Buzz, we’re not interested in the movie right now,” I said mindlessly as I glanced at the back of the sheet Teabag was now gloating over. There it was: a post-it note stuck to the back. I had to get it before Teabag saw it and before Eliasson showed up.

“No, I mean it’s a list of names with stuff in German on top – on your Geezer-shaft der Music-froid’s stationary and signed ‘Anton Felix Schindler.’ Schubert’s name is crossed off.”

“What?!” This created the desired distraction as Teabag scurried as fast as he could to the other side of the shelf: what had Buzz found?

I quickly pocketed the post-it note – clearly another ‘fib’ and clearly in Schnellenlauter’s familiar handwriting. This was the clue we were looking for, but what, I wondered, was this list?

There it was – a handwritten list of maybe seven names, submitted by Anton Felix Schindler “Friend of Beethoven.” The first name was Schubert’s and it was crossed off with bold pen-strokes. The next two names were familiar, also: Karl Holz had been the second violinist in Schuppanzig’s quartet that played Beethoven’s last quartets in Vienna and who essentially replaced Schindler as Beethoven’s “amanuensis” when he was on the outs with the annoying Schindler; and Anton Herzog who had once “rescued” a disheveled Beethoven from the police after they found him wandering around lost and confused, arresting him as a vagrant, unable to believe this bum could possibly be the great composer until Herzog was able to identify him.

“Maybe these were people Schindler wanted blackballed from the Gesellschaft because they knew too much about Beethoven’s human side?” Teabag’s finger skimmed the rest of the list. On quick glance, none of them meant anything to me.

“But Schubert wasn’t voted out of the society,” I mentioned. “After he died, they even gave him a memorial concert.”

Teabag stood back with an evil grin on his lips. “True, but he did die about a year-and-a-half after Beethoven died, you know...”

“That’s ominous,” Tony said, moving in for a closer look. “Check out the date.” The paper was dated September 11th, 1828, a little over two months before Schubert died.

I looked closer at the paper. “Could that mean that... that Schubert was murdered?”

“Poisoned by Schindler?” Teabag also leaned in closer. “Hmmm, I wonder...”

That’s when Tony saw something which by its very suddenness, seeing it out of the corner of her eye, peeled her attention away from the list: a large hand reached around from the stack behind us.

And in a flash, Buzz was gone.

To be... continued...

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Dr. Dick
The Schoenberg Code is a musical parody of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code. The photo in the header is one of Schoenberg's more expressionistic self-portraits.
© 2009

Tosca opens the Met's HD Broadcast Season

This Saturday afternoon, the Metropolitan Opera begins its High-Definition Broadcast Season in movie theaters around the world with a live performance of Puccini's Tosca beginning at 1pm. The new production by Luc Bondy features Karita Mattila as Tosca, Marcelo Álvarez as Cavaradossi, George Gagnidze as Scarpia and Paul Plishka as the Sacristan. Joseph Colaneri will conduct.

To find a theater near you, click on THIS LINK and enter your zip code in the BUY TICKETS box – click on “buy tickets” for more information and to find directions as well as purchase advance tickets.

In the Central Pennsylvania region, the HD transmissions are being shown at the following theaters:

Susquehanna 14 Harrisburg / 1500 CAUGHEY DR / HARRISBURG, PA 17110

The Penn Cinema / 541 AIRPORT RD / LITITZ, PA 17543

Majestic Theatre / 25 CARLISLE ST / GETTYSBURG, PA 17325

You can read more about the opera in my pre-concert post at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog when they performed a concert-version of the complete opera at the Forum in April, 2009.

Other operas in the coming weeks will also include Verdi's Aida and Puccini's Turandot.

With these first three performances, I'm doing presentations at the Harrisburg Area Community College on the Thursday nights before each broadcast – a kind of “pre-concert talk” for those who've never seen the operas before and plan on attending the movie-version of what, for generations, had only been available on radio broadcasts unless you could make it to New York's Metropolitan Opera House in person or catch them when they used to tour.

You can still register for the individual classes on-line or call (717) 780-2414 or (717) 780-2616:

Tosca – October 8th, 2009

Aida – October 22nd, 2009

Turandot – November 5, 2009

(Note: the radio broadcasts will begin December 12th, 2009, with Puccini's Il Trittico.)

Locally, you can experience opera LIVE in Central Pennsylvania with these up-coming performances, including an evening called Paris 1959 featuring Puccini's Il Tabarro (from Il Trittico) along with a Jazz Quintet, a "cross-over evening" with the Harrisburg Opera Association, at Whitaker Center October 15th & 17th at 7:30.

Capital Opera Harrisburg presents Saint-Saens' Samson & Delilah in November with performances on the 12th, 13th & 14th (all at 7:30) at the St. Thomas Room, 5901 Linglestown Rd, in the east-shore suburbs of Harrisburg and Sunday the 15th (at 3pm) at the auditorium of the William Penn Campus Auditorium. They will be presenting two one-act operas from Puccini's Il Trittico - Il Tabarro & Suor Angelica - in April, 2010.

Center Stage Opera presents Puccini's Madame Butterfly in November as well with perfomances the 5th & 7th at 7:30 & 8th at 3pm at Camp Hill United Methodist Church, again Nov. 13th at Hanover's Eichelberger Arts Center and on Nov. 14th at the Women's Club of York on E. Market Street, each at 7:30.

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You can read a plot synopsis of Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera's website.

Much loved by audiences around the world, it has been dismissed by some critics, like Joseph Kerman who famously referred to it as "a shabby little shocker." George Bernard Shaw, as a critic, didn't care for the plot contrivances in Sardou's play and dismissed it as "Sardoodledom." That hasn't kept it from being one of the most popular operas of all time.

Based on Victorien Sardou's drama, La Tosca, and on historical events, Puccini's opera is set on June 14th, 1800, when the city of Rome is gripped by political turmoil, in the years following the French Revolution, with the impending arrival of French troops who are intent on setting up a French-style Republic in Rome.

Cast of Characters (not necessarily in order of appearance):

Cesare Angelotti (bass) – the brother of the Countess Attavanti, an escaped political prisoner who goes to hide at the family chapel at the Cathedral of Sant'Andrea della valle where his sister has left him a disguise; there, he meets his friend

Mario Cavaradossi (tenor) – a painter who is working on a painting of Mary Magdalen (which is really a portrait of Countess Attavanti) for the chapel at the time Angelotti has escaped; Mario, also a Republican sympathizer, is in love with

Floria Tosca (soprano) – a famous opera singer in Rome, a true Diva and easily jealous, who is in love with Cavaradossi and lusted after by one of her biggest (and certainly “most powerful”) fans,

Baron Scarpia (baritone) – the Chief of Police in Rome who, with his network of spies, has been given the task to root out the Republican sympathizers in the city.

A Sacristan at the Cathedral (bass), usually depicted as a bumbling old priest in Act I who watches over Cavaradossi as he paints (he disapproves) and prepares the choirboys for the Te Deum that is soon to be celebrated upon receiving the news of the monarchist victory over the French troops of Napoleon.

Spoletta (tenor) – one of Scarpia's spies
Sciarrone (bass) – a police officer
A Young Shepherd Boy (boy soprano) – in Act III
A Jailer (bass) – in Act III

(Non-speaking appearances by a Cardinal, an executioner, a judge & various police agents)

The Met's cast includes Finnish soprano Karita Mattila as Tosca, Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, and George Gagnidze as Scarpia. Paul Plishka sings the role of the Sacristan.


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Act I takes place at the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle (St. Andrew of the Valley), a church begun in 1591 that was then in a suburban park but is now part of a congested area opposite the vast Victor Emanuel Monument. This view was photographed from the monument toward the church with the dome of the Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica in the background. Its dome is the 2nd largest in Rome after St. Peter's and the inside (seen here) is vast and ornate.

Act II takes place at the Farnese Palace, not far away. Here, you can see some of the ceiling frescos from 1602.

Act III takes place on the roof of the Castel Sant'Angelo, once a Vatican fortress, and it is from here that Tosca is supposed to jump to her death, landing in the Tiber below, though she'd also have to jump several hundred yards to the side to be able to actually do that...

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Here is a clip with two great singers from the mid-20th Century, Maria Callas & George London in the final scene from Act II, part of a 1956 TV broadcast (on the Ed Sullivan Show, no less!) with Dmitri Mitropoulous conducting.

At the Farnese Palace, Tosca has sung a special performance of a cantata celebrating the victory over the French, where Scarpia is having a “poor little dinner.” In this video clip, Tosca arrives and the Chief of Police proposes to release her lover, Cavaradossi – not for money (too venal) but the implication is clear: he has had a passion for Tosca for some time now. A military escort is heard from the street below and he reminds her that it is her choice, now, whether or not Mario has only another hour to live. She sings the aria “Vissi d'arte” (I have lived for art and for love and have never done any living creature harm). In this cut version (eliminating the scene where Scarpia explains to his henchman how Cavaradossi's execution is to be faked), Tosca, agreeing to Scarpia's demands, asks for a safe conduct for her and Mario. As he writes out the paper, she finds a knife on the table. When Scarpia goes to take her in his arms, Tosca stabs him - “suffocate on your own blood! Die!” - and as he dies, he falls to the floor, his arms outstretched. “Before him, all Rome trembled!” She is about to leave but then places two candles on either side of him, a crucifix on his chest before she hurries out of the room.

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Watch Tosca in Music | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
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The newest Met production by Luc Bondy was not well received by the Met's opening night audience last month (in fact, the director was booed off the stage). It replaces the traditional Zeferelli production which has been playing in New York for over 20 years and has been viewed by most traditionalists as untouchable. You can read a review from England's “The Guardian” here:

“There was some egregious silliness to the Bondy version, which no doubt goes some way to explain the cat calls. Cavaradossi's painting of Mary Magdalene upon which he is working at the start of the opera looks like a Mills & Boon cover portrait – all soft edges and flowing hair, and, horror of horrors, her left breast is showing. In act two Scarpia is being pleasured by a courtesan kneeling between his legs, a wholly gratuitous addition to Puccini's portrayal of an evil torturer who exudes suppressed sexuality in any case.”

For another thing, according to the New York Times review by Anthony Tommasini, two important bits of traditional staging are tampered with:

“Mr. Bondy’s high-concept staging featured stark, spare, cold sets and dispensed entirely with many of the familiar theatrical touches that audiences count on: Tosca placed no candles by the body of the villain Scarpia after murdering him, and did not exactly leap to her death at the end.”

That said, critic Ed Pilkington of the Guardian continues:

“The singing was mostly glorious. Karita Mattila, the Finnish soprano, captured the coquettish jealousy of the diva Tosca as well as her passion, though in the later acts she struggled a bit on the higher notes. Marcelo Álvarez, a tenor from Argentina, was a fine Cavaradossi who rendered a sweet and sublime E lucevan le stelle; and George Ganidze [sic - it's spelled Gagnidze], a baritone from Georgia, was a very accomplished and dark Scarpia, particularly as he stepped in at short notice due to sickness.”

Basically, I've described Bondy's production, without apologies to Joseph Kerman, as “a shabby little shocker”...

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Here is a great video of the complete Second Act of Franco Zeferelli's traditional presentation of Tosca filmed at London's Covent Garden with Maria Callas as Tosca and Tito Gobbi as Scarpia, recorded in 1962.

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Even in a concert version, Scarpia's evil is obvious at the end of Act I, lusting after Tosca while the choir performs a Te Deum in the background. Here, Samuel Ramey sings the Te Deum in a 2000 Richard Tucker Memorial Concert. The photo (left) is of Jean-Pierre Ponelle's realistic set for the Te Deum that concludes Act I.

- Dr. Dick

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 9

Following their escape in the Time Warp, Dr. Dick & Friends have now arrived at a new destination on the verge of new discoveries as the next installment of this serial novel - a musical parody of “The Da Vinci Code” - continues...

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Buzz snorted into consciousness. “Are we there yet?” Shaking himself awake, he said, “Man, I had some of that Schoenberg Trio stuck in my head. Ugh! That’s really scary!”

“Buzz, my dear boy,” Teabag purred, “you just had an attack of what I call Homelikomousikephobia.”

“A fear of home-made moussaka?”

“No, no,” he said, trying to keep the snobbery out of his tone, “the fear of music from your own time – every generation has it: Frederick the Great thought Mozart sounded like caterwauling and that Haydn lacked melody, all because it didn’t sound as familiar as all those decidedly mediocre concertos his beloved Quantz churned out for him. Ludwig Spohr thought Beethoven was an indecipherable horror and most people had no idea what Mahler was doing. It happens in every generation.”

“I prefer the term Neoteuktomousikaphobia,” I added, “the fear of newly-written music – or maybe just Neoteuktophobia, the fear of anything new.” I was surprised how easily these terms popped out. If I’d been in front of a class at the time, my tongue would’ve seized up and I’d have stumbled a dozen times trying to get it right, no matter how much I’d practice them before walking into the class-room.

One could argue that something written 33 years before Buzz was born was hardly music “of his own time,” nor was it exactly “newly made.” But we generically think anything written outside the familiar language of the 19th Century is “contemporary” even if two of the major works of the last century – Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – were close to celebrating their own centennials, too.

Whenever anyone said Schoenberg was triskaidekaphobic, it reminded Buzz he may have Luposlipophobia – the fear of running around the kitchen table in stocking feet on a newly waxed floor being chased by a timber wolf – one of his favorite Gary Larson cartoons from ‘The Far Side.’

“Now, Renfrew, here, suffers from Aptenodytephobia,” Teabag said, pointing toward our otherwise silent pilot. “Odd that a man who, as a valet, often dresses in a tuxedo, should have a fear of penguins.”

“Oh definitely, sir,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t sleep if I think there’s a penguin lurking in my room. I have to stay awake: ‘Can’t sleep – penguins will eat me!’...”

There was a thump from the plane’s cargo hold.

“It appears our terrorist is getting restless, Rennie. It’s good we’re about to land. That looks like Rochester up ahead?”

Renfrew agreed. I could see nothing but a blur with what could’ve been blue blotches in front of us. Oh, of course – Lake Ontario. I recalled from the top of the school’s practice room annex you could see the lake not far away. Not that ‘On a Clear Day, You Can See Toronto’ would ever have made a hit song.

“Land this on the roof of Eastman Theater, Rennie.”

In a moment, with hardly a bump, Renfrew announced “Next stop, the Eastman School of Music.”

I was feeling pretty confident we’d be able to find the clue we were looking for, free from nagging concerns about the IMP and my erstwhile nemesis, Inspector Hemiola. What I hadn’t anticipated was everything else we were about to find as well!

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Agent Al Rovescio, a long-time member of the International Music Police team, had been known for doggedly going back and forth over the crime scene, finding clues that other, less-experienced eyes might miss. At the dressing room’s murder scene, he found a couple of whitish-blonde hairs and some rosin dust near the bathroom door. Walking out around the stage door, he found a makeshift homeless shelter of cardboard boxes by the dumpster, but no one nearby who might know who occupied it last night. Perhaps he had seen someone suspicious leaving the hall late at night.

That was when he heard the whisky voice of a tenor wannabe warbling out in front of the hall. He was medium tall, medium weight, medium disheveled with a medium vocal range, belting out opera faves for passers-by who might, on occasion, drop some loose change or an odd bill or two into his well-rumpled hat. Though his voice had been ruined by drink and hard living on the streets of New York, he might still land a recording contract, Rovescio thought, with the right gimmick. By the time Rovescio walked up to him, the man had worked his way through a medley of Puccini and Verdi melodies. He’d need to get back a few high notes but it had worked for Michael Bolton and – well, no, actually, it hadn’t, come to think of it, but what the heck? There was an old Italian singing teacher in his neighborhood who might be able to help this guy but at the moment the only kind of singing Rovescio had in mind was of the stool-pigeon kind. Rovescio waited until he had finished and casually asked him a few questions. The guy said his name was Dorma – Nelson Dorma.

At first, the tenor just figured it was going to be a plain-clothes cop telling him to move on: no matter, he’d be back in an hour or two. But when the guy introduced himself as the International Music Police, perhaps it was more than just a panhandling issue. It wasn’t like it was in the old days: now, you practically needed a license to be a bum. It had improved the look of the city but robbed it of much of its color. There were those who thought that was not a bad thing.

But Rovescio just wanted to talk and even offered to buy him lunch. What could the harm be in that? He cautiously picked up his battered hat, quickly counted out the takings – not bad, so far – and pocketed them without looking at the policeman. Then they walked off toward 7th Avenue: Rovescio had suggested a little Italian place around the corner, Gioacchino’s Trattoria. They hadn’t been sitting long in their window booth when Rovescio noticed a couple of strange whitish-blonde hairs stuck in the cracked countertop. He put them in a small plastic baggy and labeled them ("force of habit," he explained) before their plates of lasagna arrived. With some food lubricating his voice, now, Nelson Dorma sang like a canary.

He had just settled down in his cardboard box by the stage door dumpster when this large guy came out. It was very late, well after 11:00. Everybody else had already left a long time ago and the only reason he knew it was safe to settle down for the night was he’d already seen the last security guard leave for the night.

“What did the guy look like?” Rovescio was waiting for him to say “a dumpy, middle-aged, gray-haired guy with a bushy mustache” but he rattled off something very different: a large-built guy – big-boned, he reconsidered, not fat – well over 6 feet tall and maybe 250-to-275 pounds, wearing a tuxedo, maybe in his late-20s. He had spiky whitish-blonde hair, somewhere between being punked-up and just unkempt – Rovescio thought of the hairs he’d found in the dressing room, in fact at this very booth – and he carried a large violin case or maybe it was a viola.

Dorma continued. Up until then, he’d thought it was just an odd-looking guy leaving the building later than anyone else. But then he stood there in the shadows just beyond the doorway, he looked ominous, the twinkling of the almost useless streetlight from the piercing in his eyebrow gave him an evil look. He took off his jacket and patted the case as if it were a colleague, saying “Good job, Wolf,” or something like that, adding “and now, with three conductors down, it’s time to eat.” He thought it sounded like he was hypnotized. Then the guy shuffled off toward 7th Avenue.

That was when Rovescio decided he’d better call Hemiola.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

“The guy in the video playing the viola,” Libitum pointed out.

Accelerando remembered he had read something years ago about a killer viola called the White Wolf, a famous musical mystery from back in the 1920s that had never been solved. Perhaps Agent Solfege could track it down in the database?

Sforzando blurted out, “Penguins!” When everybody looked at him wondering what that was all about, he continued. “Remember? All over the room? Penguins everywhere! In the video! I think New York has been infiltrated by... the Penguins of God.”

“Riiiiiiight...” Fermata stretched it out thoughtfully. “They’re a small group of British musicians out to rid classical music of all that is ugly – and we’re dealing with...” – he paused – “the murder of three conductors who specialized in contemporary music, each killed the night before three big modern music programs!”

After a bit of silence, Ed Libitum spoke up cautiously. “So... you thinking what I’m thinking? That we’ve been after the wrong guy?”

Hemiola waved the thought away. He could see his career going up in flames like Valhalla as they slowly marched back up to the house. This would not go over well with his boss, Chief Inspector Salome Della Maledizione, the one everybody called “Gutrune Gebich” though she preferred being called Della.

“I mean, you don’t think he could sue us or anything, do you?” Accelerando thought perhaps he had been the first one to point out Dr. Dick was the only name in the clues.

“Aside from the fact it’s been all over New York City radio and TV news, and probably in the ‘Post’ by now, how would he know he was being hunted down as a suspect?” The others weren’t sure whether Hemiola was being hopeful or just ironic. “At least, it’s not like he’s going to see it here – after all, no one’s reading this, it’s just a blog...”

When they got back to the library, the room was empty and just as much a mess as it had been before. “That’s the kind of help you get these days,” Hemiola pondered. It was very quiet.

Until Sforzando shouted, “OMG!” Standing by the broken window, looking out, he had noticed something: stuck against a piece of glass, several whitish-blonde hairs and some black threads. “You know what this means?”

“It means... Dr. Dick is in more serious trouble than we thought. We’re not the only ones after him. Apparently the real killer is, too.” He began pacing again. “Now what?!”

His boss would have his head on a platter for this: he thought he heard The Dance of the Seven Veils in the background before he realized it was Agent Libitum’s cell phone. “NOW what!?”

“Wrong number,” Libitum said, putting the phone away.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The FBI had meanwhile called the IMP on a routine matter, informing them that a New-York-bound plane had been hijacked by, as far as they could tell, a music critic on his way from London to review a concert there, then suddenly demanded the pilot fly the plane to, of all places, Rochester, NY. The agent was wondering if the IMP knew anything that might help them with this case: the alleged hijacker’s name was Charles Leighton-Quackerly. Did he have any particular history, beyond the usual critic stuff?

Agent Mimi Solfege immediately started checking things out and discovered some interesting facts, most of which she passed on to the FBI agent. She didn’t think the fact he was the head of a group calling themselves the “Penguins of God” would be of much interest to them. Her father-in-law had been a Shriner which she thought was quaint: what kind of hats do these guys wear, she wondered? And no, she had no idea why he would suddenly need to go to Rochester. She apologized for not being able to be of more help, but it was Saturday.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The problem with the Penguins of God, Sforzando had been telling his colleagues, was they may have gone from being a secret organization that essentially lobbied against new music – “how hard could that be,” Hemiola huffed into the coffee that Libitum had managed to scare up in the kitchen (and not bad coffee, at that) – to maybe taking on a more sinister campaign as long feared. Perhaps these murders were part of a new scheme to take action against those who programmed too much contemporary music? After all, this was kind of a big day – three world-famous conductors in the city, each a specialist in new music, performing bold programs of modern music all on the same night: what better way of announcing to the world their hatred of this music they view as a threat to the masterpieces of the past?

“But there are lots of musicians dressed in tuxedos performing classical music all over the world,” Accelerando whined. “How are we going to tell who’s just another musician who’ll play anything for a gig versus the bad penguins who’ve become terrorists?”

“I don’t think it’s so much terrorism as it is someone trying to get some crucial information at any cost,” Libitum was thinking. “With all these clues, it’s like the victim’s telling us to locate something, perhaps before his killer does. Like Dr. Dick said, maybe this conductor was killed because of something he knew, and he’s trying to tell us what that was?”

*** ***** ******* ***** ***

Meanwhile, in Rochester, Renfrew had been left back at the Time Warp to look after their visitor who remained trussed up in the plane’s luggage compartment while Lance Teabag joined Dr. Dick and his friends for a quick lunch break. They headed to Eastman’s basement student lounge known as Fingal’s Internet Café which for years had been a fairly dark but friendly snack bar known appropriately as Fingal’s Cave.

“I’m not sure I like the improvements,” I said, looking around with some nostalgia for the old haunts, “but it is different.” I could remember sitting in that corner, there, on a cold winter morning watching my plastic spoon melt as I stirred my hot chocolate. We tried to see who could get the most interesting bends and twists in their spoons: it was all in the wrist. Now it was certainly... well, more respectable than the old hang-out but that was in a different age, when “not respectable” was expected. It didn’t seem all that long ago.

Time was, after all, deceptive. We had left Chez Teabag overlooking Manhattan about a half hour ago, so we felt we had the whole afternoon ahead of us before anybody – much less the IMP – could catch up with us. We decided to collect our thoughts and perhaps come up with a plan over coffee and a sandwich. Buzz of course ordered the Roast Beef Rondo – thick slabs of meat alternating with various fillings and sauces – and then Mahler-sized it. It looked like enough to feed all four of us.

Since it was summer and a Saturday, no one had noticed us. Buzz and Tony could pass for students and Lance and I could have been guest teachers or even guest performers during the summer session, for all they knew. We didn’t need to keep a low profile. The place was, as usual, busy, and I’d noticed signs in the lobby for a concert that night which would include Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with the acclaimed soloist Klavdia Klangfarben in between Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture and Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. We were moving too quickly through the early-afternoon crowd, so I didn’t notice who the conductor was. I nudged Tony to point out Mozart’s Masonic symbolism in the one, Shostakovich’s name game in the other. We wondered if there’d be time to catch part of the rehearsal, but they were all leaving the theater as we arrived. Too bad: it sounded like a great concert. Sadly, I thought how my friend, Hans-Heinz Schnellenlauter, would have liked it. Ah well, maybe there’d be time that evening.

“You had mentioned the Academy dal Segno, Dr. Teabag, and who you thought were some of the Grand Maestros. What else do you know about it?” Tony was helping me place the various clues out on the table. She tried to keep them far away from Buzz’s rather messy sandwich.

“Like many secret organizations,” Teabag continued, “there’s a lot that’s difficult to discover. Beyond protecting the identity of the Immortal Beloved, I’m not really sure. I know there was also a group of them who called themselves the Knights Tempo, a more select governing committee, perhaps. There were annual rituals they would hold, hoping to maintain some direct connection to Beethoven’s legacy.”

“And that would be... his music?” Buzz said between munches.

“I was thinking more perhaps his descendants,” Teabag resumed. “Every musician claims some kind of personal insight into Beethoven’s music – how Beethoven speaks through them, you know – but I’m thinking that possibly it’s more than just protecting the identity of the woman with whom Beethoven was in love and who bore his child. And your latest clue, there, has proven it to me.”

I looked at the “look back” clue and realized we had been saying “The Immortal Beloved’s Quest” when in fact it’s written “AN Immortal Beloved’s Quest.”

“So the fact it says ‘AN’ instead of ‘THE’ implies there’s more than one?” I meant it to sound more matter-of-fact than dubious.

“But hadn’t he been in love with lots of women? Maybe they’re talking about all of them collectively?” Buzz licked his fingers after downing the last bite of his Rondo.

“I don’t think so, Buzz – there was only ONE Immortal Beloved, so I imagine they’re looking after her, her daughter and her descendants. It would be a rather exclusive club, most likely.” I pulled the odd bits of paper back toward me. “The problem is, like many secret organizations, they need secrecy because they have something to hide from others more powerful. Who is likely to be the power the Academy is hiding from? A power that would be willing to kill to find it?”

“That would be easy, now,” Teabag said, leaning forward. “Anton Schindler’s friends were able to get control of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and essentially railroad out anyone who disagreed with them. It was clear they needed to suppress her existence to maintain the image of a genius untainted by mere human emotions and this essentially drove her protectors underground as well. I’m sure somewhere there must also be a copy of this list.”

Buzz had just returned to the table with a large red bag of barbecue-flavored chips and some chili – the Auto-da-Fe Special. “Schindler’s List? Yeah, I saw it on sale at Amazon last week – good movie! Man, these are spicy!” He held the bag out for the others to try but we all shook our heads for various reasons. “What...!”

“But if I am to seek... The Sign... how am I going to find it?” I thought we’d better get started and preferably before Buzz started in on the chili.

“We are at one of the finest music libraries in the country, Dr. Dick. Perhaps we should check out the Sibley – and soon.” Teabag pushed his chair back and, using his cane, pushed himself up to his full height. He seemed in pain. “But I must tell you – if the police are after you, that is one thing. But it’s very possible, if others were to know what you’re in search of, you might have someone else on your tail.”

“Such as?”

“The Penguins of God.” He nodded rather matter-of-factly and turned away. It was expected we should follow him. And without delay. Buzz looked longingly at his half-finished bowl of chili.

Tony felt a chill, wondering if the air conditioning wasn’t perhaps a little too much. Little did she know things would soon get considerably hotter and I'm not just thinking about Buzz and his chili...

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 8

In the previous installment, our heroes found out that their plans, such as the were, were going to be changing: instead of tracking down Schoenberg's secret, it looked like it was Beethoven's secret, now. Was this, like, some weird reality game show? Eventually, today's installment will end with the ultimate cliff hanger. (Maybe the penultimate one... give or take a couple.)

- - - - - - -

In the ruins of Teabag’s library, Hemiola was having no luck questioning Heliotrope and the butler, Riff-Raff. The guy at the piano, when they finally got him to stop, apparently had a severe case of amnesia, like he’d just been washed up on the beach. All he kept saying was something that sounded like “Horror show,” and that - no doubt about it - it was. Hemiola felt he was getting nowhere presto agitato.

Agent Accelerando, out of breath as usual, reported no sign of Dr. Dick and his cronies or of Lance Teabag. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air. Agent Sforzando, punctuating his report with sharp blasts of sneezes – “dust, no doubt... from the cleaning accident,” Heliotrope pointed out – could find nothing, either.

Agent Fermata brought everything to a screeching halt when he went to help Heliotrope straighten up the mess on the piano, picking up the over-sized bust of Beethoven, much to Riff-Raff’s dismay. It seemed “the Master” never wanted them to touch it: it was very valuable and...

That’s when they heard the voices of Sforzando and Hemiola coming from the bust – something about a stupid professor, a stupid clue and then a stupid joke about erectile dysfunction which Hemiola declared he had yet to have any concerns about.

“Shut that thing off! Jeez,” Hemiola said, his face reddening as if he knew where this was going and didn’t need anybody else to hear it. Fermata put it back down and it stopped. “Where did that come from!?”

Sforzando said, “that was us talking back at the Carnegie Hall dressing room” – [insert sneeze here] – “remember? It must be” – [another sneeze] – “a listening device.”

Fermata picked it up to examine it again when it played another sound-byte, this time a man who had a speech impediment like a hissing snake.

“Sssssso, Nepomuck... you have your sssspecial viola ready for your big ssssssssolo thissss evening?”

“Yes, Master.” The second voice sounded deep but dumb, almost as if hypnotized. “I have practiced for hours.”

“You will visit firsssst the Polish woman... then the French guy... and by then, Sssschnellenlauter will be done with his rehearsssssal?”

Just then, the laptop on the fireplace mantle clicked into action and, after a little bit of whirring, started to play a video, opening a page from YouTube. When Fermata put the bust down to go look at it himself, the film froze.

“Keep that up,” Hemiola demanded. Accelerando tried to stifle a chuckle. “Okay then, just hold it, Fermata!” He glared at Accelerando who hummed a few bars of “Fools rush in” and looked away.

The video resumed. It looked like it had been recorded on a cheap phone. A large-built guy in a tuxedo was playing a viola. He had blondish-white spiky hair and his right eyebrow was pierced. His viola, slightly larger than the typical instrument, was also odd: it was almost pure white but with the grainy picture or a cheap camera, there was no way to know for sure. In the background, practically every inch of space was filled with a vast array of stuffed toys of various sizes and shapes, all penguins. Easily hundreds of them.

When the violist paused to take a full attack on a note on the lowest string, he stopped and turned toward the cam with an evil grin.

“And this, master, is where I start playing the wolf-tone.”

“Sssssplendid, ssssplendid. That should do more than knock their sssssocks off.” And then the video cut off. It had nearly 1,400 hits already.

Hemiola leaned against the mantle in disbelief. Just then, a side panel opened up and there stood a very confused looking Agent Libitum.

“Ha! I was wondering where this one led to!” He had been able to trail their suspects easily enough, after discovering another passage way in an adjacent room. “Follow me,” he said, and with that, they were off.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

“What do you mean, Rochester,” he said in disbelief. “I’m supposed to land any minute now in New York City! Why would anyone be going to Rochester!?” Charles Leighton-Quackerly was not amused.

“I can’t talk much,” Nepomuck whispered, telling him he was supposed to be bound and gagged but since it was government regulation duct-tape, it had been easy to extricate himself. “The clue we seek is at Eastman. I need your help.”

“Alright, alright, since you put it that way. Just wrap yourself back up and play dumb.” That shouldn’t be too hard, he thought. “Why couldn’t it have been at Juilliard? Aargh!”

While the in-flight movie, “Catch Me If You Can,” was nearing completion, he approached a flight attendant and whispered in her ear. She took him to the cockpit and told the pilot this man had a bomb. Leighton told the pilot to reroute the flight to Rochester, NY.

“I can’t do that, sir: against regulations.”

Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a DVD box and said menacingly, “I have a copy of Ben Affleck’s ‘Gigli’ and I know how to play it!”

With that, the plane immediately started to climb.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

“It's not really a code, I know, but it certainly must give you some clue to what was going on in the composer's mind when he wrote it, some association. I mean, why did he choose, of all the tunes he could have used, 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'?”

Tony looked at me as if to say, “Yeah, what's that all about!?”

Buzz, starting on his second drink, looked back and said to me, “Yeah, what's that all about, anyway!?”

“Do you know what the song means, Buzz?”

“Well, no – it's a children's song, probably nonsense, I guess.”

“Not exactly – the refrain, 'Alles ist hin,' means 'All is gone.' What's gone? Well, one verse says the money's gone, the girlfriend's gone.”

There was a glimmer of understanding from Tony who sat up when she mentioned lines from the poem Schoenberg set as the next movement of his ground-breaking 2nd String Quartet – “lines about killing longing, closing the wound, taking away love and granting him peace. What was going on in his life when he wrote it? Everybody talks about how important the piece is, how the last movement is, like, the first truly atonal piece – what's the opening line, 'I feel the air of a different planet'? But I've never heard it live and I have no idea where it fits in to his biography.”

I explained how Schoenberg had taken up painting a couple years earlier and was working with a guy named Richard Gerstl who ended up painting several portraits of Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde.

“To make a long story not quite so long,” I began to explain in my typically verbose fashion, “basically she and the painter started having an affair. In June, she took the children off to the town where they were going to have their summer vacation – Schoenberg would join them later, along with some of his students and some other friends... including Gerstl. He'd already known about the affair and had already confronted his wife about it. I mean, in two or three weeks, she wrote him some twenty letters about it, how he was always brow-beating her and so on.”

“No wonder she had an affair...” Tony shook her head.

“Yeah, Schoenberg was no easy guy to live with, I'd be pretty sure of that. Anyway, he arrived at their holiday retreat about the same time Gerstl did. Then a week later, he gets a copy of a new volume of Stefan George's poems and he decides to pick up the sketches he'd started the year before of this unfinished string quartet. The first movement was done; the scherzo, not quite. So knowing what was going on in his life...”

My voice trailed off and Tony finished the sentence. “Maybe 'Alles ist hin' was running through his mind like one of those ear-worms you can't get out of your head?”

“Could be. He never explained why it was there and it makes perfect sense to me. Then he wrote the two songs that conclude the quartet, something so unexpected, just like that weird-sounding quotation of a seemingly innocent children's song.”

After a thoughtful silence as the plane sped high over the landscape of upstate New York, I continued the story, how he had finished the quartet probably by August and then caught his wife and Gerstl in flagrante delicto not long afterwards. “Mathilde left with Gerstl; Schoenberg went back to Vienna; his student Webern talked her into going back to her husband which she did, though reluctantly. So, in early November, Gerstl burned several of his paintings and sketches, stabbed himself and then finally hung himself, naked, in front of a mirror.

“So he could watch himself die? Ewwww...” Buzz sank uncomfortably lower in his seat.

“The quartet was premiered a few days before Christmas – another disaster: everybody started laughing when they heard 'Ach, du lieber Augustin' – and then in February the work was published with a dedication, 'To my wife'...”

“Sweet,” Buzz said with dripping irony. Tony glared at him.

“Do you think there's any kind of secret musical message buried in the pitches – motives built on names or a place where he describes... oh, I don't know...” Tony was trying to think of any one of those events or emotions the composer must have experienced.

“You mean, a passage that sounds like his wife and his friend going... uhm...” But Buzz realized it was not the time to make a rude joke. I missed the glare Tony threw his way but figured it was dark enough to stop him in his tracks. Sheepishly, Buzz continued nursing his bitten foot for some time, after that.

“But now, take Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, his first major work after Stalin’s death,” I continued, “Not only does he use his own ‘monogram’ in the last movement – D. SCH. – there’s also another person represented in the slow movement.”

“You mean that horn call? I’ve wondered about that: it sounds like something with a special meaning,“ Tony felt. “It never changes and it’s repeated constantly.”

By now, Buzz was starting to sleep off the affects of his second Dominant 7th. Teabag watched out the window impatiently, listening only half-heartedly.

“It’s a five-note figure – E-A-E-D-A – and sounds like something out of Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth’ – from ‘The Drunken Man in Spring,’ in fact,” I added, looking over at Buzz, “but then everybody knew what an influence Mahler’s music was on Shostakovich so nobody paid any more attention to it. Until...” I said, pausing for effect, “some letters were made public about 15 years after he died. The woman who had kept them a secret almost forty years finally showed a student of hers the letters Shostakovich had written to her around the time he was writing... the 10th. Love letters.”

“They were lovers?” This was a composer she admired and it was just a surprise that great composers could be human, too.

“Not sure if that’s the right word: she was in Baku, in Azerbaijan, he was in Moscow most of this time, but she was clearly some kind of muse. Her name was Elmira.”

“How do you get E-A-E-D-A out of E-L-M-I-R-A?”

“In this case, a different way of translating letters into pitches, using Italian solfege – those do-re-mi syllables – where “la” would be A, “mi” would be E and “re” would be D. So he substitutes A for the L for “la,” then uses another E for the M-I... and finally, the pitch D or “re” instead of R. It’s all very simple. And then this is where he introduces his DSCH motive as well, intertwining his name with hers.”

“Oh.” Her thoughts were full of romantic notions: how sweet. “But what is the significance of that? I mean, for the whole symphony? To me, it sounds like the whole point was his celebrating having survived the Stalin years.”

“Well, since nobody’s found anything in Shostakovich’s own handwriting to explain it, anything would be just conjecture,” I said, looking sidelong at Teabag who’s made a career of such leaps of imagination in the past. He was clearly bored by all this talk: been there/done that.

“However,” I continued, “there’s another quote that most people are not aware of, even if you read the program notes about the two musical signatures. The dark brooding opening of the symphony is based on a theme he quoted from one of his own songs written years earlier, setting a poem by Pushkin, ‘What is in my name?’ The title alone implies these signatures would have some significance.”

“But what?”

“If you figure years – decades – from now, your little secret was to be forgotten, or you yourself would be forgotten, your music buried somewhere, how important is your name? The last lines of the poem are something like ‘Say my name quietly to yourself so my memory doesn’t vanish... that in one heart, I am still alive.’ Something to that affect...”

“Wow...” She was deep in thought.

“Speaking of names, Tony...”

“Ah, yes... well...” She took a deep breath and looked out her side of the plane as it sped across the countryside toward Rochester. “My mother named me Philomel which I always hated: I mean, who else is named Philomel? When I was in school, kids started calling me Phil or – worse – Mel... I built up a secret fantasy world where I was named something exotic and I liked the sound of Antoinette, for some reason, even after I found out about the Queen of France. So when I was old enough to move away from home and go off to music school, I changed my name legally. My last name, too – I just wanted to break away from Mom and Dad.”

Her momentary silence indicated some wistful memories, perhaps not unpleasant after all the years of estrangement.

“I mean, Andy and Fern Geliebter – what a pair, you know?” There was some pain in her voice. “You knew Mom in school: you knew what her dreams were. They were both frustrated musicians... I used to think ‘failed musicians’ – they just never realized their dreams and I imagine it was painful enough for them without me mucking it up. They just didn’t want me to go off and become a musician, too, and have to deal with the same problems they’d had, not being good enough or having to sacrifice so much to make a living and then, I guess, just shelving it to do something more practical. There really wasn’t much else I wanted to do – I felt I had music in my blood, I guess. Their final curse, after all, wasn’t it? So yeah, I did the whole math major thing, since I was good at it in school – I even chose my last name, Avoirdupois, not just because it sounded sexy but if they were failed musicians, I wanted to be a failed mathematician with a mathematical name...”

“It beats Antoinette Tetrahedron...”

She smiled, turning to look at me. “Yeah, one of my friends actually suggested that one.” Then she wrinkled her nose. I hadn’t realized how cute she looked, or how her eyes could be such a deep blue.

“Are you happy? I mean, now that you’re a musician?” I could sense we were becoming more intimate on this level. In the distance, I could hear the big tune from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. Buzz, in his stupor, began clearing his throat.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I play in a really cool orchestra which I help manage – the math actually comes in handy with operating the budget and all that (musicians are so totally helpless when it comes to things like that), so yeah, I’m happy. For now. And I love my viola.”

“Philomel, though... think about it. I mean, the name is both mathematical and musical.”

“It is?” She looked at me quizzically. This apparently had never occurred to her.

“We’ve been talking so much about the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section. You know the Greek symbol for the Golden Section is ‘Phi’?”

“Of course – oh, wait! The first three letters of my name!”

“And the last three letters – M-E-L – is short for Melody. In all, eight letters – PHI plus LO plus MEL – which is 5 (or 3+2) + 3. So I’d say it’s almost a perfect name, wouldn’t you?” How much of a geek must you be to find the Fibonacci numbers such a fascination?

“Except,” she hesitated, “what does L-O stand for?”

“Well, I said almost perfect...” It would be pretty difficult to turn it into a musical motif, though, if I wanted to enshrine her in a piece I could compose, maybe a viola sonata. Now, if I had her social security number, I could turn that into a theme, translating pitches into numbers. If C is 0 and C-sharp is 1 and so on, all the way up the chromatic scale to B which becomes 11, that could be easy enough. I could use her phone number, I guess, but she might change that and then I’d have to rewrite my sonata.

Buzz was practically convulsed in an attack of throat-clearing. He awoke with a snort.

“Bad dream, Buzzie?” Teabag leaned forward, sounding very solicitous.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

After breathlessly running through dark and winding corridors that led further and further down, the policemen found themselves standing in a large room, something between a garage and a... well, Libitum thought it looked like an airport hangar. There was a pile of duct tape to the one side, a tank and some boxes, large strange-looking drums and a wall full of tools and strange-looking parts on the other, not that a musician would know anything about tools and auto-parts anyway.

Fermata was the first to speak up. “Wait – what’s that?”

Sforzando had stopped sneezing, thankfully – with his allergies, he was getting to be almost as bad as one of the older agents, Inspector Hockett, who had to retire while still middle aged because of his severe hiccups – and pointed to the light switch he saw at the opposite end of the room.

“Guys, I hate to ask this again but...” Hemiola looked around at his men. “Who stayed behind with those three characters back in the library?” Just then, he could hear the faint strain of the Ride of the Valkyries: his cell-phone was receiving a call. “Great – they could lock the secret entrance and we’ll be stuck in here forever. Good goin’!” He started his trademark nervous pacing again as he answered his phone. He could barely hear who was on the other end.

“We can always get out through the garage door, here, sir.” Accelerando flipped the switch they’d all been looking at and suddenly – and very quietly – a great doorway opened up in front of them. Hemiola by then was only a few steps away from the entrance and started to walk out onto the runway to find better reception for his phone when he realized there was, in fact, no runway: it was a sheer drop down the cliff!

“Can you hear me NOWWWW?” He almost dropped the phone trying to correct his balance.

It was Agent Al Rovescio who had been walking his beat around the crime scene when he made a discovery. While patrolling from the front of Carnegie Hall around to the back and then studiously retracing his steps, he stumbled upon something of a witness.

Meanwhile, the others were gazing in awe over Manhattan and the Hudson River below them, wondering what manner of vehicle Dr. Dick could have escaped in: even a small private plane would need some kind of runway and another helicopter would have been audible even over the pounding pianist in the library. Accelerando imagined some kind of pterodactyl-like air-craft that just fell of the cliff-face before gliding out into the air-currents but Libitum laughed that he’d been reading too much Calvin and Hobbes lately. Fermata held up his hand for silence when Hemiola impatiently waved his arm at them to shut up.

Libitum tried to follow Hemiola’s side of the conversation but was distracted by an odd glint off in the distance, like the sun reflecting off a skyscraper’s windows except this was high over the city. There couldn’t be anything there that high, could there?

“Great news, Agent Rovescio! Tell me more.” But as he relayed the report to Sforzando, who was hurriedly scribbling it down in the casebook, their jaws dropped.

Then he noticed an odd glint of sunlight over Manhattan swiftly darting off to the northwest: it was gone in a flash.

With no idea what could possibly happen next, they just stood there in the cliff-hangar.

To be continued...

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Dr. Dick
Author's note: “The Schoenberg Code” is a musical parody by Dick Strawser of Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code.”
© 2009