What if Beethoven had completed an undiscovered Tenth Symphony? That’s the question surrounding American author Richard Kluger’s novel Beethoven’s Tenth (Rare Bird Books, 2018).

It’s an entertaining read, and it poses genuine ethical, artistic and legal questions about what might happen if a long-lost masterpiece by a colossus of Western culture is discovered, of who actually owns, or should own, art or, more specifically, any creation produced by a great artist.

Interestingly, Kluger places the fictitious work in question as chronologically composed before the real Ninth, the famous Choral Symphony, thus placing that supreme work, in the novel, chronologically as number ten. Kluger, a Pulitzer prize-winner of non-fiction, imbues Beethoven’s Tenth with carefully researched historical detail, so that the premise of such a discovery becomes reasonably credible.

Kluger’s story goes like this. Jake Hassler, the assistant manager of a hardware store in New Jersey, becomes part-beneficiary of his Swiss grandfather’s estate. Amongst the deceased’s papers is, remarkably, a hitherto unknown work by Beethoven, William Tell: A Dramatic Symphony. Before the grandfather’s will has been probated, Jake spirits the manuscript back to the United States, much to the ire of the Swiss authorities and other parties who feel they also have a vested interest in the discovery.

Believing the work to be legally his, Jake secures the services of a leading Anglo-American auction house, Cubbage & Wakeham, tasking it to authenticate the symphony, and to auction it on Jake’s behalf. Assigned to lead the project is Cubbage’s young ambitious alpha male employee, Mitchell (Mitch) Emery, himself a qualified lawyer, assisted by his musicology-trained wife, the talented, beautiful, charming and outrageously wealthy Clara.

Apart from Beethoven himself, Mitch becomes the narrative’s hero, finding himself embroiled in a complex web of claims, counterclaims, politics, national identity, legal intricacies, suicides and murders, while at the same time trying to keep his colleagues, plus a group of highly-strung scholars, on side and on message.

Actually, it’s a cracking story, enhanced by Kluger’s eloquent powers of expression. He realistically weaves into the narrative historical figures who knew Beethoven: his occasional publisher Hans Georg Nägeli, Rossini, and the composer’s friend and patron Archduke Rudolf. Kluger even puts forward the convincing notion that the rediscovered opus was composed during a period when Beethoven seemed to have gone off-radar.

Essentially, however, one comes away thankful that one isn’t acquainted with any of the main characters. Mitch and Clara are, let’s face it, a little insipid in their Hello Magazine type Upper West Side existence. Jake Hassler is portrayed as an uncultured oik, the lawyers as hard-nosed wheeler-dealers, the Swiss as emotionally repressed, the Germans as aloof, the British as bores, the musicologists and musicians as full of their own pompous self-importance. The legal world, diplomatic corps, law-enforcers, the arts industry, auctioneers all come across as somewhat seedy. Yet perhaps this was Kluger’s intention, so that the only righteous person to emerge is Beethoven, the only noble thing his music.

Kluger’s description of the process of authenticating Beethoven’s manuscript is largely deftly handled and closely researched. There is some discussion about Beethoven’s compositional processes, and because these continue to be forensically researched, Kluger has ample material to build his narrative. There’s less discussion, though, of how Beethoven took embryonic sketches through numerous iterations in order to arrive at something definitive, even though there’s considerable evidence of the composer’s working habits.

We never get a feel from those musicians in Beethoven’s Tenth who believe the work to be the real deal, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent music. Whilst this group might feel that, yes, the work is by The Master, surely it’s up to such musicologists to assign value judgements on the music itself. For example, Beethoven did actually leave sketches for a tenth symphony, as he did for a sixth piano concerto. These have been realised and performed. They’re historical curios, but not all that engaging as pieces of music when compared with Beethoven’s established canon.

It’s clear to anyone who’s familiar with Beethoven’s approach, that these sketches would have been refined, honed, even discarded, had the composer decided to pursue them. But, there again, Beethoven’s Tenth is fiction, and my comments are observations, rather than criticisms.

Beethoven’s Tenth is far more believable than, say, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but it’s in the same vein of being an exciting, at times convoluted – some might say contrived – yarn, with a lead character who navigates a route through a labyrinthine web of turns and double-turns. As with Brown’s lead-character Robert Langdon, one might imagine Mitch Emery finding himself in other novels. Kluger plays a blinder with the final twist. I’ve given away too many spoilers, but it’s worth waiting for, and what remains is a recommendable and intriguing page-turner from a distinguished writer.