The Redacted Sherlock Holmes - Volume 4 Read online

  “You have given me much to think about,” said Elgar eventually, as he left us.

  After Elgar had gone, Holmes sat in his armchair in silence for some time before he stood up and took his violin out of its case. As I have commented to my readers elsewhere, when Holmes was left to himself, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognised air. Instead he would lean back in his armchair of an evening, close his eyes, and scrape carelessly at the fiddle as it lay thrown across his knee. On this morning, however, he stood at his shelves for some time and eventually pulled out a score which he propped against a coffee pot on the table. I could not recall when I had heard Holmes previously play from notes and I sat up to listen.

  Paying no attention to me, Holmes then put his fiddle under his chin and played music which sounded sweet and agreeable although, to my unmusical way of thinking, a little repetitive. One movement after another filled our room - I counted eight in all - before Holmes came to the last page of the score. He then went back and played one of the eight movements over and over again, from time to time interspersing his repetitions of this one movement with repetitions of some of the other movements. Between pieces, Holmes would occasionally return to his shelves and pull out from among his numerous works of reference French-English and French-French dictionaries before returning to his playing.

  The world of music was deprived of a master violinist when Holmes took the decision to focus his talents on detection. Nevertheless, I was not sorry, after I had finished my lunch while his remained untasted before him, when he finally laid down his bow and turned to address me, as I found the melodies pleasant but somewhat lacking distinction.

  “The music I am playing is a suite of pieces by the French master, François Couperin, and it was published in 1717. About ten years ago, a new edition of it was published, of which one of the editors was Johannes Brahms, the German of whom Mr Elgar has so often spoken, and who was deeply interested in music of previous eras. Each of Couperin’s suites, or ordres to use the French term, consists of a series of movements, all of which bear titles. The reason why it is of interest to us is that the piece you have heard me play over and over again is called Les Barricades Mystérieuses or The Mysterious Barricades and no one has ever been able to understand what this term meant.”[2]

  “And do this composer’s other pieces bear titles that no one can decrypt?” I asked.

  “They all bear titles, but all the titles have an obvious meaning, even though, as you saw, one sometimes has to leaf through a dictionary to find it out - Harvest Pickers, Gossip or The Gnat are the names of other pieces in the collection.”

  “This is of interest to a specialist,” I replied after some reflection, slightly at a loss as to where Holmes line of thought was taking us, “but surely does not have any relevance to Mr Elgar’s commission.”

  “Consider this, friend Watson,” replied Holmes. “French music of the early part of the eighteenth century is, as you say, a specialist interest. But that one movement, The Mysterious Barricades, has remained a staple part of the repertoire ever since it was first published, while the rest of Couperin’s pieces are only now being rediscovered after a long period of almost complete neglect. And copious quantities of scholars’ ink have been spilt trying to establish what the mysterious barricades mean. Solutions range from technical aspects of the music to impediments to the breaching of a lady’s chastity. In my view, it is lurid and unresolved speculation that has kept this piece in the public mind when the rest of Couperin’s output has slipped out of general consciousness, as I do not feel that this movement is of a significantly higher quality than the others.”

  “And does the music itself provide no clue?” I wondered.

  At my request, Holmes played the piece again.

  “It suggests to me, “I said after some thought, “the continued rotating of windmills, but that can have nothing to do with mysterious barricades.”

  “You have, I think, hit the mark with the second half of your remark,” said Holmes thoughtfully. “Music is the most non-referential of the arts and what one person may hear in a piece of music may be quite different from what another person may think. To my ear, The Mysterious Barricades calls to mind a train puffing steadily through fields in flat countryside, but this obviously cannot have been the intention of a composer writing in 1717 and is equally unhelpful in decrypting what Couperin meant - if he meant anything at all.”

  My friend returned to his music thereafter and we spoke no more that day.

  Over the next few weeks, several other cases arose, which meant that Elgar and his music slipped from my mind. It was on Wednesday, 22 February 1899, that Holmes received a bulky envelope in the post. He opened it and drew out a letter affixed to a musical score.

  “Mr Elgar has certainly taken my comment about the derivation of its theme from his name to heart,” he remarked and passed the letter to me.

  I looked at it and read out: “Dear Mr Holmes. I shall come to you at eleven o’clock on Saturday 25 February to discuss progress on my new Variations, of which I attach a first draft of the score. Sincerely,” - and rather than signing his name, Elgar had written the first four notes of his theme.

  “What do you make of the score?” I asked.

  “I shall have to go through it,” said Holmes, “although I note Mr Elgar’s financial position has not improved since we first saw him as he is still writing on hand-ruled staves.”

  As I or my reader might read a novel, so Holmes now settled down to study Elgar’s manuscript. Occasionally, he took up his violin and played some notes, which I took to be from the notes in front of him though, as far as I could see, he barely looked at the staves while he played. I watched and listened for a while, but I knew better than to disturb him and so betook myself to my club, where I spent the rest of the day. When I came back, Holmes did not even look around, as he was still poring over the score. Another two hours had passed, and I was contemplating retirement to bed when Holmes turned to me.

  “A most interesting case,” he commented. “I confess that Mr Elgar has quite surpassed my musical expectations. When I heard his original theme, I am bound to say that I had no great expectations that anything of any great merit would come of it. But this music has melody, depth, charm and craftsmanship.”

  “And do you feel that with this piece Elgar avoids the charge of egotism that we levelled at him the last time he was here?”

  “Mr Elgar has remained true to his original decision to write a set of variations on his theme. The fact that his name so obviously lies behind its notes and rhythms would normally suggest that he could not, to use his phrase, be entirely absolved of the charge of self-obsession. But each variation seems to take on a personality of its own. We shall have to see what Mr Elgar has to say when he arrives on Saturday.”

  At the hour appointed on the Saturday, Elgar was at our threshold.

  “What think you,” he asked us, “of my piece? Since my last visit to London, I’ve written my variations and labelled each one with the initials of my friends. I’ve tried to imagine how each of my friends might have written their own variation if they were foolish enough to compose.”

  “And may I ask to whom the last variation relates? I note that it is more than twice as long as any other.”

  There was a pause. “It is actually my own variation,” said Elgar eventually in a quiet voice.

  “Your conception seems to me to be a most colourful one,” said Holmes serenely after another pause. “Your variations are indeed full of life. And your idea is an interesting variant of Diabelli’s idea of asking the leading composers of his day to write variations on the same theme, which is how Beethoven hit on the idea of writing thirty-three variations of his own. I am not sure that anyone has quite done before what you are doing now. There is indeed something we might make of this. What are your plans for your next steps to complete t
he piece?”

  “My favourite conductor for my music is Hans Richter. I will complete it and send it to him.”

  “And how will you handle questions about the provenance of your theme?”

  “I have decided to make my theme my calling card. Its similarity to the syllables of my name is, as you say, obvious so I shall seek to do something with it, rather than make pointless efforts to deny it.”

  “Have you decided on a dedicatee?”

  “I shall dedicate it, ‘To my friends pictured within.’ I have decided the initials of the friend pictured will precede the variation relating to him or her. I shall not provide more details as I would wish to preserve their incognitos.”

  “These all seem to be ideas that will pique the interest of the musical world and of the wider public,” remarked Holmes.

  There was a long pause.

  “And what was the other theme of which you made mention at my last visit?” asked Elgar at last.

  “My dear Mr Elgar,” said my friend, “if you wish to keep the world’s interest piqued, you must always hold something back. My friend Dr Watson here regularly refers to cases which he has had to hold back for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons is to leave my own public thirsty for more. We must not let the world see all your secrets. You should regard this piece as your progression to a new level of renown and you must leave the achievement of this progression to me.”

  I could see a light of excitement appear in the composer’s eyes and Holmes carried on. “When a composer achieves wide-scale recognition he must put his old ways behind him. Until now your efforts have been as though looking through a glass darkly, but now we are entering a new vision of light.”

  “My dear Mr Holmes!” exclaimed Elgar. “I do believe you are quoting from the epistle reading at the mass from two Sundays ago about putting these old ways behind us. Your quote –‘Until now I have been seeing though a glass darkly, but now we see each other face to face’ - is from the King James Bible, but of course we have the Tridentine mass at our Roman Catholic services.” He intoned, “‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem.’ It is one of my favourite texts as it is about Christian love and uses some rarely beautiful language.”

  The premiere of Mr Elgar’s work was scheduled for June at a concert at the St James’s Hall, where Holmes and I had heard Pablo de Sarasate play at the time of the Adventure of the Red-Headed League nine years earlier. Over the next few weeks, Elgar was often at the flat at Baker Street to seek advice as to how to build interest in his piece.

  Holmes urged him to release details of his piece only slowly and Elgar had his own ideas as well. When it was revealed that among the other works being played at the concert was Mozart’s Prague Symphony, he made amendments to his score.

  “I am fairly sure,” Elgar told us, “that Brahms knew that the piece on which he was writing his own variations was not in fact by Haydn. But he included six successive notes in two places in his variations that Haydn had used at the end of his Clock Symphony. I think I’ll add a few phrases from Mozart’s Prague Symphony as a tribute to a man on whose works I based my first juvenile attempt at a symphony. But I will confine knowledge of that to you two gentlemen.”

  I think Elgar regarded his disclosure of this insertion as a quid pro quo for inducing my friend to reveal the other theme that Holmes had said was the origin of the theme on which Elgar had written his variations. But Holmes remained adamant that he was not going to disclose what he had in mind. “To my ears it is obvious,” he said. “It is in the initial statement of the theme and in the final variation, which, Mr Elgar, you say is a description of yourself.”

  Elgar’s response was one of mild affront. “So why are you keeping this from me? Do you think there is something disreputable about the other melody so you don’t want me to realise it, or do you think that I have breached someone’s copyright and that by your keeping it back from me, I shall be able to plead ignorance if the matter comes to court?”

  “My good Sir, you came to the world’s only consulting detective to consult,” replied Holmes after several further attempts by Elgar to induce him to divulge his thinking. “I would suggest you confine yourself to consulting. It is my brief to cast light where it is needed. It is not my brief to be transparent myself. If I am being enigmatic, I have my reasons.”

  At Holmes’s words, Elgar gave an exclamation.

  “What you have said ties in with the word ‘aenigmate’ in the Vulgate version of ‘Paul’s letter to the Corinthians’ and has the same rhythm as the first four notes of my theme. I shall insert the word ‘Enigma’ over the first few bars of this piece - partially in tribute to you, Mr Holmes and partially because the piece certainly has a dark secret if it contains something identified by someone else which its own creator is unable to spot.”

  The Enigma Variations were first performed on 19 June 1899 and the performance was an unqualified success. The concert program disclosed the initials of the dedicatees of each variation and this generated much interest during the concert. And among the critics there was much praise for the music itself. The Athenaeum wrote, “the Variations stand in no need of a program; as abstract music, they fully satisfy.” The work sparked off a veritable industry of people searching to unmask the identities of the characters referred to only by their initials in the score and to solve the “Enigma” of the title. Before the concert, Elgar had also attracted great interest by pointedly declining to explain the title of the work.

  Over time, Elgar revealed the full names of the friends pictured within. But, for reasons which will now be clear to my reader, he did not throw any light on the enigma itself. He limited himself to quoting Holmes - without attribution - by stating that it was a well-known tune, a dark secret that would remain unguessed, that it was obvious in the first six bars, and that it pervaded the work. Whether by design or by chance, the partial revelations were drawn out from him over many years and each time Elgar revealed some more information about the dedicatees, demand among the concert-going public for performances of the work increased.

  With this raised profile, Elgar was then able to produce the sorts of works that he felt a true composer should produce: two symphonies, concerti for violin and violoncello and three oratorios. But none of these - apart perhaps for the concerto for violoncello - quite achieved the success of the Enigma Variations.

  2. Through a Glass - Darkly

  Elgar continued to seek direction from Holmes in the years after the premiere of the Enigma Variations and initially asked him to play the solo part of the violin concerto in the première of that work. My friend had to decline the invitation because, as the clouds gathered over Europe at the end of the first decade of this twentieth century, he had received a number of commissions from the British Government. I am not sure I was ever privy to all the commissions received, but one, at least, was to carry out counter-espionage work against German spies, and another was to investigate various aspects of the Habsburg Empire.

  The counter-espionage work culminated in the matter narrated under the title His Last Bow, but the other has not been chronicled at all. Occasionally, I was called upon to provide a record of events. So it was that on 19 November 1910 - precisely the night of the first performance of Elgar’s violin concerto, ironically given by the Austrian, Fritz Kreisler - Holmes and I found ourselves on the train that runs from Vienna to Prague.

  With us in our compartment on that evening as we waited to leave Vienna’s Franz Josef Bahnhof, were two German speakers whom I took to be a father and a son. The father was a burly man with a bristling moustache. He was in his fifties - the same age as Holmes and I - while his son was in his mid-twenties, slight, had dark features and a pale skin. After an initial nod of greeting, I paid them little heed.

  I was aware of the risk of war gathering over Europe, but I was nevertheless surprised when Holm
es, leaning back in his seat as the train pulled out of the station, said, “It would have been the zenith of my musical career to have played that première tonight, but the matters that are afoot here in Central Europe are of such importance that we have no choice as to where to be.” He struck a match and lit his pipe. “You know, Watson, it is really time I told you about the giant rat of Sumatra. I have said previously that the world is not yet prepared for it, but in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, there is no further purpose to be served in holding it back.”

  The giant rat of Sumatra was a topic on which I was eager to write a story as I was anxious to add to my all-too-brief list of adventures that predated my acquaintance with Holmes. I sat bolt upright on my seat, put my notebook on my knee, and drew on my own pipe.

  As Holmes was about to start, he was interrupted by a furious argument which suddenly broke out between the father and son. The altercation continued at high volume with the younger man occasionally breaking into high-pitched derisive laughter that set my nerves on edge. Holmes sat back - I think he was waiting for the commotion to subside - but suddenly, to my great surprise, the elder man turned to Holmes.

  “I think, Sir,” he said in a halting English, “that I have recognised you. Are you Mr Sherlock Holmes and, opposite you, is that your companion and biographer, Dr Watson? Your adventures have a wide following in Prague.” Before Holmes could say anything, the man continued. “Could you, Sir, as a man whose expertise is valued across Europe, give your judgement on what we are talking about. My name is Hermann Kafka and this is my son Franz. We seem to have different views on everything.”

  The exchange that followed took place in a mixture of German and English which I have turned into normal English for the sake of clarity. As my reader will discover, the subject matter was completely bizarre, and I would further advise my reader that the exchanges really did take the form that I set out below.