ALSO BY RUTH PADEL
POETRY
Alibi
Summer Snow
Angel
Fusewire
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
Voodoo Shop
The Soho Leopard
Darwin: A Life in Poems
The Mara Crossing / On Migration
Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth
Tidings: A Christmas Journey
Emerald
FICTION
Where the Serpent Lives
NONFICTION
In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self
Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness
I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ’n’ Roll
Tigers in Red Weather
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem
The Poem and the Journey
Silent Letters of the Alphabet
EDITING
Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Poems
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Poems with Introduction and Notes
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Ruth Padel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus, London, in 2020.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Padel, Ruth, [date] author.
Title: Beethoven variations : poems on a life / Ruth Padel.
Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020012437 (print) | LCCN 2020012438 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593317723 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593317730 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PR6066.A2739 B44 2020 (print) | LCC PR6066.A2739
(ebook) | DDC 821/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012437
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012438
Ebook ISBN 9780593317730
Cover images: (background) Topfoto; (music score and arms) Bridgeman Images; (center) Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Cover design by John Gall
ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
For the Endellion String Quartet—
Andrew Watkinson, Ralph de Souza, Garfield Jackson
and my kind friend David Waterman—
with thanks and love
The true artist is not proud. He unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.
Beethoven, letter to a young pianist, 17 July 1812
I found a music notebook full of musical notes written in fits and starts, additional staves drawn right across the margins. He said, ‘I always have a notebook with me. When an idea comes, I put it down at once, I even get up in the middle of the night, otherwise I might forget it.’
Gerhard von Breuning, Memories of Beethoven
If you want to think about order, or disruption of order, you have to know what that order was in the first place. Beethoven is a wonderful example. He never does what you think he’s going to do, the surprise is perpetual. You know the shape of the music and you think, how is he going to get out of that without a cliché? Then he does something brilliant. That’s his genius.
Harrison Birtwistle, composer
Contents
Listen
Music in the Dark of the Mind
Birthplace
Idealising the Unattainable Can Begin Very Early
If Your Father Damaged You
His Mother Warms His Feet on a Boat
Home Town
On Not Needing Other People
Growing Up with Beethoven
In the Orchestra Pit
Meeting Mozart
You Rescue Your Father from Jail
The Memento
The Boy on Dragon Rock
Virtuoso
City of Music
What Could Go Wrong?
Earthquake
Moonlight Sonata
The Jealous Demon
Julie
He Takes Rooms in a Country Village to Rest His Ears
Human Fire
Take This Cup from Me
A Flute of Lilac Wood
Until It Please the Fates to Break the Thread
Hero
Eroica
Letters to Josephine
The Shadow Behind the Door
Wine of the Heart
Stained Manuscript
On Cushioning Your Ears in a Bombardment
Therese
Looking Out of a Back Window
The Vulnerability of Violins
Meeting of the Waters
The Pencil
Forever Yours, Forever Mine, Forever Us
You Must Not Be Human
Prayer on Burying a Flame
Three Days
Girl on a Sofa
India Dreams
To the Distant Beloved
The Battle for Karl
First Entry in a Conversation Book
In the Lydian Mode
On Opening the Manuscript of Opus 131 in the Music Archive, Kraków
The Rauhenstein Ruins
Breaking Axle
Musica Humana
Life-Notes: A Coda
A Selection of His Works
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Page from autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Opus 131
LISTEN
Kindest regards to your wife; unfortunately I have none; I found only one who will probably never be mine.
Beethoven to Ferdinand Ries, 8 May 1816
They say the ear bone, shaped like the bowl
of a tiny spoon, lasts longest when we die.
The soul might be like this: hard, necessary,
almost nothing. My parents
got together at a music camp
in farmland of chalk hills. A clarinettist
dropped out of the orchestra, and my dad
queued for the village pay phone,
called a girl he’d just met, hired a tandem bike
and fetched her from the station.
I like to picture her on the edge of knowing,
legs whizzing round, her clarinet case
tied behind. He’d have done that for her,
he always took great pains with making safe.
Between hedgerows of early summer
she’s cycling into a lifetime with him.
Look
, there we are waiting
for her, five future string-players
hiding among the vetch and willowherb.
She played the piano too. At first
she accompanied him in duets. I can see them
working on Beethoven’s Cello Sonata Opus 69.
She’s listening to him, he’s listening to her.
Questions, answers, the all-you-can’t-say
stream to and fro. Angry, agonised, and tender
as the history of marriage. Then we arrived
and she didn’t have time to play. It gave me a notion
women do their music-making away from home.
Later she joined an orchestra. I remember her
practising trills from the Pastoral Symphony
where a clarinet alone
has to drop perfect sound into perfect silence,
suspend the world, then descend
to the waiting ear. The almost-nothing bone,
which brought the two of them together
and which Beethoven lost. So hard to discover
and make perfect, even half-perfect, in yourself.
MUSIC IN THE DARK OF THE MIND
A tiny boy, standing on a footstool in front of the clavier to which the implacable severities of his father had so early condemned him…Little Louis van Beethoven, in front of the clavier, weeping.
Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Life of Ludwig van Beethoven
BIRTHPLACE
Out of nowhere
a stranger appears in the clearing
a now-roped-off chamber
raked ceiling, bare floor
a mother delivered of two babies already
both dead, the last
after only six days
this is how longings arrive
in the world of the given
a gift that changes the balance
echoes of paradise
passion-fruit growing in the dark
the whole branch
dipping from the weight
then springing back
genetic chance
burning on the wick
thrusting to be born.
IDEALISING THE UNATTAINABLE CAN BEGIN VERY EARLY
Little Louis clung with great affection to his grandfather. Though he lost him so soon, he retained the most vivid impression of him.
Dr Franz Wegeler, Biographical Notes
It’s not the face that stays most truly naked
through a life. What jumps out from this court portrait
of your Flemish grandfather, whose name you bear –
the painting you will lash to a wagon every time you move
along with your manuscripts, piano, single bed
and writing-desk, all rumbling uncovered through city air
furred with floating particles of horse-dung –
is this V of bare chest, the open shirt
within the formal robes, the one soft patch of skin
where he might have cradled you. In all the debris
everywhere you live, jugs of red wine
always on the go, the fevers, smells and flies,
broken love-hopes, slamming doors,
you will find your heart shored up
by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes.
IF YOUR FATHER DAMAGED YOU
…the way meteorites
spin in, clustering on Antarctic ice
bare shields of glacier burnished by ferocious wind
because your father is magnetite
dragging all the iron in your soul
into his own force field:
you seal yourself in.
You need nothing but music.
Your answer to obstruction will be fire.
In the little hall
of the house where you were born
the one original surface
is darksilver flagstones
where you might have crawled.
Light falls in shallow hollows
of deciduous rubbed stone
clogged with spume of cleaning fluid
where I imagine your mother
carrying the shopping
your father staggering home drunk
up these stairs – their new-cut wood
now polished to the amber shine of a harvest moon –
to wake you in the middle of the night
stand you for hours on a bench
so you can reach the keys. You cry
as you play, slapped if you make a mistake.
In daylight, he hears you improvise.
Splashing around, he calls it, on a violin.
What rubbish are you scratching now?
Isn’t that beautiful? No!
You made it up. You’re not to do that.
Stop! Or I’ll box your ears.
If your father damaged you
the way fierce winds scour glacier ice
where meteorites have fallen from heaven
but he was the one who made you,
beat the notes into you on the clavier
viola, violin
your response to challenge ever after will be attack.
You will need no one. Only the relationship
of sound and key. You improvise.
HIS MOTHER WARMS HIS FEET ON A BOAT
What is marriage but a little joy and then a chain of sorrows?
Maria van Beethoven to Cäcilia Fischer
He goes to school dirty. They say his mother must be dead
call him Spaniard because he is dark
tease him about his name. He leaves school
to play the viola
in the briary tangle of an orchestra.
He wears a sea-green coat, a wig, a little sword.
At home he writes concertos
pitching the wonders of modulation
against his father’s blows.
Gliding north with her down the Rhine
on a winter concert tour, their one journey together,
she keeps him warm, holding his feet in her lap.
HOME TOWN
In the attic were two telescopes…That was Beethoven’s delight, for the Beethovens loved the Rhine.
Gottfried Fischer, Memories of Beethoven
Wherever you look in this town are painted casts
of the famous statue. One at my door
like a street performer,
silver mantle, silver eyes and skin.
In the Town Hall Information Zone
he is lapis lazuli. Face the colour of clear sky
after sunset, body scrawled with white crotchets,
a blizzard of musical snow.
At the end of a street he used to race up laughing,
leading the pack, I see the Rhine
flickering like departure. Chestnut trees
in a skirt of fallen leaves, and six immigrants asleep
in an arcade. Where the house once stood
are rows of little Beethovens, stamped on marzipan.
I see a small boy dashing through these alleys
to play for early mass. Then sullen, dragging his feet
towards some grand door, to teach
a rich child piano. His brothers are useless,
the new babies die. Father drinks his salary.
Mother has a temper. Dry bread and fury
snap through the kitchen. A boy in his bedroom,
seed in the ground. He’s strong but he’s little.
The heavy viola
bangs his knees as he runs.
ON NOT NEEDING OTHER PEOPLE
Asked why he was rude, he said, ‘O excuse me, I was occupied with such a lovely, deep thought I couldn’t bear to be disturbed.’
Gottfried Fischer, Memories of Beethoven
What is that sound you hear when everything is quiet?
The sun moves through its signs in a minor key
and by the time he’s seven he’s perfected some holy zone
of concentration, where he’s unreachable,
where three descending semitones
say there is answer in the world.
In the mansion on Cathedral Square
his patron tells the other kids to let him be,
in the solitude she calls raptus. She smiles
at his surly way of shouldering people off,
his fits of reverie, lost
in a re-tuning of the spheres.
I think of the flotation capsule, a time lapse
of dark water I paid good money to get shut into.
When the hatch came down
I heard nothing but my own heartbeat,
a ripple if I stirred
and rhythm patterns created by the mind.
This boy has no idea that before he’s thirty
some inflamed wet muddle of labyrinth and cochlea,
thin as a cicada wing, will clog his ears