Cornelia Mayer plays Karas

At the Civic Centre, Berkhamsted (UK), on the evening of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival, the celebrated Viennese zither teacher and player Cornelia Mayer entertained a large and appreciative audience, as she played a selection of compositions and arrangements by Anton Karas and other famous composers of zither music.

In the Hemel Hempstead Gazette the journalist Rita Knowles reviewed Cornelia’s performance with these words: “Throw away the impression that the zither is the instrument of choice for wine bars and parties. Cornelia showed us undreamed of nuances of sound, as she gave her recital of classical pieces, proving the zither truly an instrument of the salon or soirée.”

Peter Gieler, general secretary of the Anglo-Austrian Society, introduced the classical section of Cornelia’s concert. When the virtuoso musician progressed to the score of The Third Man, the historian and author, Dr. Brigitte Timmermann, (Vienna Walks and Talks) explained the development and variations of leitmotifs such as "The Harry Lime Theme" and "Anna Schmidt’s Music".

Though Anton Karas composed his film score without the aid of written music, playing as he watched the rushes of film, Cornelia has meticulously transcribed the notes to paper, and she hopes at some stage to record and to publish a complete musical score.

The Festival director Dermot Gilvary thanked the Anglo-Austrian Society for its generous sponsorship of Cornelia’s appearances.

Prof. François Gallix examines "The Empty Chair"

In a late addition to the programme on the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival in Berkhamsted (UK), Professor François Gallix (left) (University of the Sorbonne, Paris) gave a short talk on his fascinating discovery of Greene’s previously unknown, unfinished and unpublished manuscript, “The Empty Chair”.

Prof. Gallix informed the Festival that he had found fifty-six hand-written pages in Box 12, Folder 2 at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Austin, Texas (USA). After he had transcribed the 22,000 words to computer (creating seventy pages of typescript), he approached the author’s children, Francis Greene (who looks after his father’s literary estate) and Caroline Bourget for permission to publish.

In a literary game the first chapter was published anonymously on 12th December 2008, as readers of The Times (London, UK) were given the full chapter and this invitation: “An undisputed great of British literature wrote this newly discovered gem. Can you play literary detective, and work out who the author is?”

The game proved to be difficult, even for the experts, as “The Empty Chair” was written in the style of --- and as a tribute to --- Agatha Christie. There were only three readers who gave correct answers, and each was rewarded with a bottle of champagne!

Prof. Gallix revealed that the final sentence is unfinished, and that there are various possibilities about how the story might end. He also considered that readers can see how Greene’s writing strategy might develop with respect to his sense of dialogue, the gestures of his characters, the audacity of his comparisons, the many allusions to theatre and the references to the actor who played Macbeth. He noted that “The Empty Chair” was the title of the first chapter, that the novella itself has no title of its own, that there were some inconsistencies in the names or spellings of names of characters, and that Greene himself was only twenty-two when he wrote this story.

In mid-July 2009 the first chapter of “The Empty Chair” was published by Strand magazine, which will publish the other four chapters in successive quarterly editions.

The local journalist Louisa Felton (above, right) of the Hemel Hempstead Gazette, who contacted Prof. Gallix for some advance news in August, also recorded an interview with the French scholar, while he was in town during the Festival, and her text was published with photographs in her newspaper.