Week IV
On November 1 1962, at St John’s parish church in London’s Hampstead, the funeral took place of a seventy-two-year-old woman, the retired civil servant Miss Emily Anderson. She had lived in the Hampstead area for almost forty years, ‘a rather solitary figure, and was rather shy’, a neighbour remarked, ‘very self contained, and very discreet, very pleasant to meet, and not interested in useless chatter’.
Among the congregation, however, were the cream of London’s musical community, including some of the best-known classical musicians and opera singers, a number of whom performed during the service. Others there included a number of Anderson’s Jewish friends, international booksellers and academics, as well as a high ranking official from the German embassy.
Finally, among the mourners, and known to no one but each other, were some of the most senior figures in the world of British intelligence, going back decades. Emily Anderson was a woman who lived two distinct yet parallel lives - one, her public life as an internationally respected music scholar; * and the second, her scrupulously guarded professional life, as a codebreaker at the most senior level of British intelligence for nearly forty years.
Yet even a stranger could see there was something exceptional about the woman being honoured. Side by side on her coffin, in velvet-lined boxes, were the two significant awards she had received during her lifetime. One box contained the OBE, conferred on her by King George V in 1943, and the Order of Merit, First Class, the highest honour the Federal Republic of Germany could bestow, conferred on her only a year previously, in 1961.
The first had been awarded ‘For services to the forces and in connection with Military operations…GHQ Middle East’. The second was for her significant contribution to Beethoven scholarship, as a result of her groundbreaking translation of the great German composer’s letters into English.
‘Very difficult’
Despite ‘scrupulously guarding’ her earlier life as a successful codebreaker in two world wars, she almost unintentionally revealed the art of codebreaking during an interview on how she had tackled Beethoven’s nortoriously indecipherable handwriting. Shortly following the publication of Beethoven’s letters she agreed to a BBC radio interview with Denis Stevens, a former RAF codebreaker, neither of them knew each other’s war background. Stevens asked how she approached Beethoven’s handwriting which was ‘very difficult’ as he used Gothic script, mixed with Latin, and sometimes scribbling coded messages to himself.
Anderson explained that she was brought up in the west of Ireland by a father who was a scientist and a very keen linguist at the same time. He had learned German at Cambridge, and had made up his mind that his children should know modern languages.
‘He used to take my sister and I to Germany when I was about fourteen and she was sixteen. We detested it, but we were put into German families, and they spoke German…’
Yet despite her fluency in German when it came to Beethoven’s letters, it took Anderson ‘years of working with a magnifying glass’, initially using his autograph as a guide to some letters, building a ‘crib’ of known words, looking for a pattern to emerge. When it came to Beethoven’s use of punctuation, the rules of which she noted he ignored with ‘great effrontery’.
‘As you go over and over the words, that it can’t be that, you go back to it again and again and again and it suddenly comes like a flash what the word is. It is rather like dealing with papyri (Egyptian hieroglyphics ) I should think…you have to fit them together.’ Using the skills of a codebreaker she sought patterns and repetitions in the same material over and over again, until she recognised letters, words and phrases.
It would have been immediately clear to Stevens that his interviewee was a codebreaker of some standing.
‘Wild boisterous talk’
Previously we can imagine Anderson’s delight when she discovered that the letters between Mozart and his family were often in code, which fell easily into Anderson’s codebreaking skills. In addition to translating and annotating over nine hundred letters, the work necessitated travel to, and correspondence with, archives, manuscript dealers and private collectors around the world. She had not only translated but given the context for each one.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who could pick up tunes on the piano from the age of three, and began composing by the following year. By the time he was twelve he had written and performed 10 symphonies and performed for royalty. Before he died at only thirty-five years, he had composed more than 800 works in virtually every genre of his time. He is considered the greatest composer in the history of Western music, and would have enjoyed full employment with a comfortable salary with space to compose, except for his total contempt for authority.
Despite being employed by the all-powerful Archbishop of Salzburg, who became obsessed with the thought that Mozart was slandering him in his letters which were passing with rapidity between the Mozart family members.
The Archbishop ordered all the Mozart correspondence to be seized, and whether he was able to read them or not, he assumed the worst. Mozart was unceremoniously kicked (literally ) out of his court. Mozart and his family, mother, father, and daughter, were notoriously scatological in their language to each other as Mozart was in his wild, boisterous talk to his cousin Maria, Constanze, his wife, and others.
Mozart remained on in Vienna where he achieved fame but little financial security. However, despite his hardships and near poverty, the joy he drew from life is infectious. Shortly before his death in October 1791 writing to his wife Constanze with no ideas he would be dead before Christmas: ‘ I played two games of billiards …then I had Joseph fetch me some black coffee with which I smoked a glorious pipe of tobacco’, he writes, ‘then I orchestrated almost the entire Rondo of the Stadler concerto’, in other words the Clarinet Concerto: the sensuous, bittersweet masterpiece that we are far too ready to call the swansong of a man who was enjoying life intensely.**
Characteristics she shared
Anderson’s three volumes of Beethoven’s letters, which took her 15 years to complete, containing more than 1,570 letters (230 of which had never been published before ), 2,900 pages in all, shed new insights into the complicated mind and personality of a great genius. Anderson regarded her translations of Beethoven’s letters as her great work. It allowed her travel to Germany and Austria, to meet scholars, collectors of Beethoven’s music scores, librarians and archivists, and to form close and lasting friendships with admirers of the great composer, all of whom were only too pleased to share their knowledge with her, and rejoiced when the work was lauded by critics across the world.
The more Anderson learned about Beethoven the more she admired his prodigious work ethic, his resilience, his ability to overcome adversity, his determination to be himself, no matter what anyone else thought, were all characteristics she shared with the great composer.
Like Beethoven, Anderson was inherently shy, but had always lived her life as she wished without compromise. It is hardly surprising then that she brought not just scholarly precision but personal insights into her translations of his letters.
In a letter to her friend Dagmar von Busch, following the publication of the Beethoven letters, Anderson wrote: ‘For years we have attempted to climb the Mount Everest of Beethoven.’
Now finally Emily Anderson had reached the summit, and that towering achievement, and the approbation it generated worldwide, would sustain her for the to rest of her life.
NOTES: * She had singlehandedly collected and translated the correspondence of Mozart and his family (published 1938 ), and later performed the same monumental task for Beethoven (published 1961 ). This combined work, published in six large volumes, were immediately acclaimed as works of great scholarship, unlikely to be ever equalled.
** The Marvel of Mozart’s Letters (translated by Emily Anderson ), from The Spectator, April 18 2020, by Michael Bratby.
Diary taken from Queen of Codes - The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest Female Codebreaker, by Jackie Uí Chionna, Headline Books, €18.
