with a whistling buzz, then glue them into silence.
That he’ll not hear music, except in the inner sanctum
neural pathways are preparing in his brain.
He knows he is different. He can do nothing about it
there is something inside
beyond the essential stirrings of the world.
Practising past midnight,
fingertips thickening, not noticing the cold,
what comes to him straight and true
as starlings flocking to a spill of corn
is how to dream new
when his fingers fly round a scale. He knows
what he can do is impossible for other people
but what’s easy for them –
he spots it at flash moments, faced
with something he wants to say and doesn’t know how –
is the gold caravanserai of the drawing-room.
Men in pigtails, women with high voices
speaking code he will never fathom.
It is all a dragon’s lair.
Something he cannot understand
passes between one person and another.
The only thing he wants is to get his hands on the keys and improvise
chord changes, clustering like the invisible core
of a galaxy whirling with planets.
Change key, swerve, change again,
make the piano sing to the heart of their nerves.
He holds
what he is given
forms of a chord progression
variation like a shining cloud.
He is sealed in himself, he is driven.
His hands are liquid. His hands are gold.
GROWING UP WITH BEETHOVEN
Sunday morning. My dad places crumbly sheets
of music on the stands. For the first time
we are meeting Beethoven. My eldest brother
with his cello, my sister on her violin –
she must be seven or eight – me on my viola.
But I’m mulish. I listen to Radio Luxembourg
under the bedclothes at night.
This music is inherited from Grandfather
who had to sign a document in the First World War
to say he wasn’t German though he mainly was,
whose father was a concert pianist, taught
by a pupil, a follower, of Beethoven.
When I go to stay, Grandfather makes me play the piano
blind, over velvet
laid on the keys to keep them white.
String Trio, G Major, Opus 9.
First time I hear my viola’s true clear voice,
more awkward for my stiff hand
than the free bird singing in my throat –
as if I were two beings, the soprano
soaring upward unafraid
and the shy voice of blending in –
but I can see Beethoven has given each of us
something different to say. Mischief and hope:
I like that. When we’ve stumbled through
our dad says this melody reminded Grandfather
of sunlight on green mountains. Today,
when I listen, I see my dad
ahead on a mountain slope, stopping to look at a map
or check out other mountains through his telescope.
Now so many people I love have died,
others lost in the wisps and fogs of Alzheimer’s,
I’d like to hold on to that
looking back
to us three struggling with the notes
and the other two listening, waiting their turn.
Here we are still, the five of us,
trying to get the counting right.
IN THE ORCHESTRA PIT
Who is waiting for us in the twilight?
I played viola in a student Magic Flute
and night after night
everyone laughed at the dragon I never saw.
Night after night from the orchestra pit
I heard the tenor crack the top note of his aria
as he swore to break the fetters
as a young man playing this part
but night after night I missed
the battle of light and dark,
the dragon of despair
when all stars shudder and go out,
and our need for magical thinking –
how music takes you through water and fire,
restores you to love.
MEETING MOZART
Never mind a three-week winter journey to Vienna
on your own. You’re sixteen, burning
to be taught by Mozart Mozart Mozart.
He looks like a fat little bird. Bug eyes, fidgety,
tapping his toes. When you play one of his sonatas
he’s unimpressed. But something makes him say,
All right then, improvise. And at last he’s caught.
Watch out for this boy. He’ll give the world
something to talk about. But a message from Bonn
skewers you back. Your mother’s ill.
Your dream of learning
from the one man you measure yourself against,
whose music drives your heart, is snatched away.
She waits till you return
to drown in the coughed-up dregs
of her own lungs. And for the one and only time
in what’s going to be a life of illness
you get asthma. As if her breath,
the breath she cannot catch, has stolen yours.
YOU RESCUE YOUR FATHER FROM JAIL
She passed away after much pain and suffering. Ah, who was happier than I, when I could still utter the sweet name of mother and it was heard?
Beethoven to Councillor von Schaden, Bonn, 15 July 1787
When your mother dies
it’s the end of something in you too.
Your playing has to keep the family.
Your father shameless, sodden in the street.
You argue in police stations at midnight
to save him from disgrace.
You now have to protect
the man who savaged you.
THE MEMENTO
Beethoven was always in love, and usually much affected by the love he was in.
Dr Franz Wegeler, Biographical Notes
I like to think of him suddenly slowing down
on the orchestra’s tour up the Rhine.
No lessons to give, no hustling. Three weeks under sail
against a current whirling north – to Paris
and the Elector’s sister, held in house arrest.
The Terror has not begun. No one on board,
or in castles on the banks, could dream
their world might be undone. But his whole mind
is revolution. The wind of it, blowing in his face.
He’s twenty, about to step into the fullness of his art.
Back home is loneliness and practice. Here
they all love him. Everyone’s an actor or musician.
Laughter. Water-dazzle. Rose-fly sunsets
light as smoke. The actor-king of the voyage
appoints his court. Ludwig is scullion, has to clean
the kitchen, wash up after thirty people twice a day.
When I was twenty, on tour in France, in the viola
section of an orchestra, it was Rhapsody in Blue
then rustles in the dark beneath the stars. On tour
with a choir, at the Europa Cantat Festival, Namur,
we’d rehearse all day, sing the concert,
let our hair down after like a fall of butterflies.
There must have been romance. Say it was that singer
Magdalena. Let’s put them in the palace grounds
after opera highlights for the nobles’ dinner
in a long green avenue
slowly becoming dawn. On the boat,
as they drift back to Bonn, he kisses her again.
Later, in Vienna, he’ll propose. She’ll turn him down –
but for now the actor-king
presents him with a seal of pitch
for diligent fulfilment of his duties
attached to a faux certificate by thread
from the ship’s rigging. He’ll keep this all his life,
his only honour for anything not music.
Treasure from a golden voyage, long ago.
THE BOY ON DRAGON ROCK
Beethoven on the peak of the Drachenfels…
Gerhard von Breuning, Memories of Beethoven, note
Sunlight on the Rhine. Europe about to shatter.
I’m following his steps up a red-lit path
through autumn woods. He’s one of the gods
and knows it. An arrow fletched with fire.
He’s raging to be gone, staring at this river
muscling north to France, detonating
in revolution. I’m standing where he stood
under a ruined tower, watching the silver
artery of Europe gleam-curve east
and south towards the Danube.
He’s grown up by this rip of water,
gagged on its ripeness, played in its mud,
clambered over roofs with his mother
to escape its flood. When he leaves
he’ll never see it again except in dreams.
VIRTUOSO
My compositions are bringing in a good sum, it is scarcely possible for me to execute the orders. Only that jealous demon, my bad health, has thrown obstacles in my way.
Beethoven to Dr Franz Wegeler, 16 November 1801
CITY OF MUSIC
Go careful in Vienna, Everyone ought to go careful in a city like this.
The Third Man (1949)
I recognise it and I don’t.
We all bring our own baggage
to the city Beethoven raced back to,
tipping the coachman
for galloping through armies mustering for war.
City of cover-up, selfie-sticks and autumn light
that sparkles on the pavement. Through a café door
I hear The Third Man’s zither, conjuring
a Ferris wheel, an Iron Curtain coming down.
I lived here years ago, on a German course
that didn’t take. When my dad visited
for a psychoanalytic conference
we met Anna Freud, looked into the face
of ancient myth. Now I’m back for Beethoven
I shut my eyes, blot out imperial façades, imagine
something lethal whiffing up between the cracks
of the city where psychoanalysis had to be born,
that twisted thread into the labyrinth, leading to
the violence at the core, inhuman at the heart
of the human. In a diner where they say
Beethoven once lived, we run into an office party.
What of the Minotaur, the rise of the far right?
You can’t tell, says my friend. In the 1960s
you’d have known. Today
you can’t make out who’s fascist and who isn’t.
I think of Beethoven, arriving on his own
with Europe on the brink. Battalions everywhere
between himself and home.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Wig-maker. Silk stockings, 1 florin 40 kreutzers…Chocolate and coffee for Haiden and me.
Beethoven, Memorandum Book, December 1792 and October 1793
Pension Mozart. Outside my room,
a poster of Joseph Haydn – long face,
bleached wig, quill in his hand, a frill
of perfect lace. I imagine scruffy little Beethoven
coming for a lesson. They don’t get on.
Haydn’s nickname for him is Grand Mughul.
He won’t write ‘Haydn’s pupil’ on any title page.
He ditches the wig, has his hair cut short
and choppy like a Republican,
gets a name as a bewitching pianist,
the new bright star,
beats everyone in improvising contests.
People stare at his whirling fingers, tufts of hair.
He goes on tour – Leipzig Dresden Prague Berlin –
composes cello sonatas for the Prussian king,
returns with a gold snuff-box, writes a song
everyone wants to sing. He’s flirting,
writing lines of Schiller
in girls’ journals. He is a meteor,
glowing. What can possibly go wrong?
EARTHQUAKE
A temblor, a slow-slip earthquake,
an undetectable assault
on the ground beneath your feet.
You can’t feel it. No one knows
a tectonic plate
is sliding miles below along a fault.
TO BE PLAYED WITH THE UTMOST DELICACY
I have found out how to write quartets…But your Beethoven lives most unhappily, in discord with nature and the Creator. The finest part of me, my hearing, has greatly deteriorated.
Beethoven to violinist Karl Amenda, 1 July 1801
My first quartet concert. I’m nervous as a foal.
I know nothing about Beethoven, have no idea
his first quartet is such a deal for him.
I don’t know he’s picturing the vault scene:
Romeo, when he finds Juliet dead.
Now I find
he wrote in his sketchbook, over the slow
movement, He’s getting near
the tomb. He kills himself. Last sighs.
Four voices, each on their own wild ride.
A to-and-fro, an either-or, a yes-and-no.
A family conversation
like his father, brothers and himself
after his mother died. No one must know
his ears whistle, buzz, and sometimes block
all sound. Writing for four
has released him to the dark
mysteries of melancholy
as if sitting at the tavern, no one
knowing, has sparked
a slow-drip solitude
he will refuse, at first, to go down into
yearning for something more
than the alone he’s made. Four
as a country dance. Funny, playful,
jaunty as a shot of vodka
savage as devil-jugglers in a cave.
Loneliness at the core
of con brio. Night vision
searching for a key, a theme, a door.
MOONLIGHT SONATA
We make the life we need.
The city’s bells are muffled,
the sky is frozen copper.
You still can hear, sometimes.
Still win the impr
ovising contests.
A sonata in C-sharp minor,
quasi fantasia, like a blind girl
lit by moonlight she cannot see.
New melodies unfold from tiny seeds.
Euphoria, then presto agitato, manic rage.
The music of loss, of losing. Bass clef.
High treble only once
and in despair. Then the new
shocked calm of Is it true. Is this
what it sounds like, going deaf?
THE JEALOUS DEMON
My hearing has become weaker in the last three years – this infirmity was caused by my bowels which, as you know, were already in a wretched state. I was often in despair. The humming in my ears continues day and night…
Beethoven to Dr Franz Wegeler, 29 June 1801
Wondering about Beethoven’s brain,
the improviser, the variations man,
I stare at diagrams of research
on rappers and jazz artists.
If you can’t hear what you’re doing
how do you make the darkness echo,
where does the newness go?
Doctors pour oil in his ears
bind poisonous bark around his arms
raise angry blisters to lance and drain
imaginary toxins. His shoulders
run with pus. He dreams
of galvanism and electric wire. He asks
for his grandfather’s portrait
to be sent from Bonn.
May the dead protect him.
JULIE
My life is a little more pleasant, I’m out and about again, among people – you can hardly believe how desolate, how sad my life has been these last two years. This change was caused by a sweet enchanting girl who loves me and whom I love. After two years, I am again enjoying some moments of bliss. For the first time I feel that marriage could make me happy. Unfortunately she is not of my station – and – and now – I certainly could not marry now.
Beethoven to Dr Franz Wegeler, 16 November 1801
Like waking up with a diamond in your palm
and seeing the world through a veil of love.
He’s thirty, she’s his pupil. Eighteen. A countess.
Soft fingers brush his on the keys.
He is a midnight beekeeper gathering a swarm.