The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [46]
“Throughout his career, Solomon Gold challenged this self-fulfilling prophecy by writing vibrant themes and symphonies that were modestly celebrated but still underappreciated in his lifetime. It is a tragedy that what might have been his masterpiece—evidence that the classical form can build a bridge between the glorious past and an even more glorious future—could be lost to us forever.”
There had also been plenty of skepticism. “On what basis can we describe the Gold Completion as a lost masterpiece?” asked another critic at The New Yorker magazine. “We have only Gold’s word for it, relayed to us as hearsay by his attorney. And these secondhand pronouncements about divine equations sound like madness far more than genius. Of course, a poseur is someone who thinks brilliance is anything he can’t understand, and that genius often sounds like madness. In reality it rarely does, fanciful an idea as that may be.”
Although the requiem had never been heard, there had been dozens of attempts to re-create the Gold Completion. A cottage industry of Solomon Gold scholarship had made great sport from the dissection and rein-terpretation of every word and note Solomon Gold had ever committed to paper. A forgery of the manuscript had been published with blustering hype and modest sales. As the only person known to have seen the original, Reggie issued a statement that the new work, allegedly discovered in Indianapolis among the effects of a notoriously disreputable dealer in rare books, “does not conform to my memory of the one shown to me by Solomon Gold.” The publisher advanced the possibility that the manuscript could be authentic, even as music critics decried the result as hackwork. Years later, the fake composition had been performed dozens of times by orchestras all over the world, including at the funerals of a European king and a celebrated film director.
Other than his initial deauthentication, Reggie refused to comment on the matter, allowing the mystery to persist. Truth was, the disappearance of the Gold Completion had been good for Reggie Vallentine’s business.
He removed the top six pages of the score—he had never been certain he had reassembled them in exactly the right order—and spread them across his desk. He ran the fingers of his left hand up and down the staffs, caressing the ridges of ink that formed the notes. The dots and lines and squiggles and circles undulating across the page were like Cyrillic to him. Reggie had just a few moments to dedicate to the Gold Completion each day and he was doomed to spend those moments only glaring at it in wonder and frustration.
He recalled Solomon’s invocation of God when he referred to the requiem. Reggie had always thought it curious that killers so often became religious in prison. Wouldn’t the best hope for a murderer like Solomon be no God at all? No final judgment? No one to say definitively that what he had done unto others had been wrong?
He supposed the guilty and the faithful were always looking for one more appeal.
In fact, since Reggie had become a murderer, he found time nearly every afternoon to run his hands over these pages, and what was he looking for if not God? In the presence of misfortune, the everyday bad—an illness in his family or an unsympathetic jury in deliberation—agnostic Reggie had nothing to pray to except for the mystery perhaps locked inside this score.
Sometimes, headphones on, he would listen to a performance of the original requiem—the Süssmayr Completion—while he tried to follow along with Solomon’s revised script, frequently relying on the Latin lyrics as place markers. He had even acquired a Süssmayr manuscript and tried to compare the places where Süssmayr and Gold parted ways on the page, but the differences meant nothing to him.
Of course, Solomon had claimed the manuscript’s real value was in the margins, but the composer’s notes were equally indecipherable. There were numbers and letters and sentences without verbs and elaborate