But always that splinter of ice in the heart
protecting the work, and the safety of not
being loved. Not now. Maybe some day.
HE TAKES ROOMS IN A COUNTRY VILLAGE TO REST HIS EARS
I came here with the hope of being cured.
Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament, 6 October 1802
The omens are good. A spa, a place of healing. May.
Blossom bright as paint. The sparkling Danube canal.
Vineyards in bud, blue needle of distant mountains,
a narrow lane, a low arch to a bakery, the croissant sign –
and that yeast smell
like the house where he grew up, beside the Rhine.
Carters untie his piano. A sweet-herb wind
slips by like life, shaking the grass.
This is enough. His rooms look over misty fields.
Bring on the water cure and healing baths.
That’s how I imagine him arriving
as I get off the tram at the end of the line
in a sleepy suburb, browse my way
up Beethovengang
and follow his steps into the cobbled yard.
The past splits open. God invents curious
torture for his favourites. He’s thirty-one.
Fate has swung a wrecking ball.
I’m walking into his place of zero sum
where he must cast himself as victim or as hero.
HUMAN FIRE
Music should strike fire in the heart of man.
Beethoven to Bettina von Arnim, 1812
You spend mornings composing, tossing away
old drafts in crumpled balls, then plunge
into veins of forest. The notebook
swings in your pocket. Inspiration springs
from shadow, thistle-chandeliers,
red nipples of wild haws. You are Prometheus
the benefactor, stealing flame
to give to humans. A Shiva ray
creating and destroying. You are defiance,
a golden razor, a regatta. Lucifer
falling and flickering
with the discipline of firebreak.
Melody and rhythm flow from the molten blue
of summer hills.
But there’s a coppery stain
on the rising moon. You know creation comes
with pain. The stolen gift draws punishment in its wake
and ends in the rock, the vulture and the chain.
You stride on through the woods. You believe
in freedom. Human fire, created out of clay.
TAKE THIS CUP FROM ME
We all need a place to store the darkness.
Sitting in the garden of this bakery-
turned-museum, his Gethsemane,
I gaze up at his window.
Soft serif trees in golden shadow
and a wall of words he copied out from Kant.
The starry heavens above, the moral law within.
I’m still reeling from the piano
with a megaphone on the lid
like a prompter’s box, to amplify the sound,
a staff he held against a piano with his teeth
trying to hear through his cranial bone,
and headphones with buttons you can press
to monitor how much fainter he’d have heard
as the years went by. Plus the recipe for bread soup
he looked forward to on Thursdays, with ten eggs
he stirred in, throwing any that weren’t fresh
at the housekeeper. These cock-eyed
domestic details, of a man who plunged
head-first into work whatever was on his mind
made it more precise again and again,
writing new parts for trombone from his bed
the very morning of performance,
flash me back to a man who carved wood and stone
and showed me how to live a creating life.
I was young. He was twenty years older.
I stayed with him for ten. After the first night
I went to my desk, wondering what happened.
He came round in the evening, said
what a beautiful day’s work he’d done
because of me. I learned that creating comes
from need. Also surprise.
That you put yourself in the way of grace
and let the material lead. But there’s also risk.
You must have chaos in you
to give birth to a dancing star.
He was the ring of fire I had to break out from.
I cleared the bedroom, slipped away.
But here I am in Beethoven’s garden
still thinking about him today.
A FLUTE OF LILAC WOOD
For half an hour he could not hear anything at all and became extremely quiet and gloomy, though I repeatedly assured him that I did not hear anything any longer either (which was, however, not the case).
Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven Remembered
This summer drop from apple branches
could be from your heart, you’ve been here so long
and nothing’s changed. You watch August sun
blunt points of pears, darken grapes to amethyst.
Pigeons bulge and fan on the roof in silence
as if you’re seeing them through glass
then fly into evening mist. At night, the moon
blood-paints the sloping lane. Life against the odds.
Wistful faces of white stars. By day the hill glows green,
dapple-darkens in cloud-shadow, glows again.
Cat’s-paws of wind on summer barley.
But leaves don’t rustle, birds forget to sing.
Your friend hears a shepherd in the forest play
a flute of lilac wood. When he sees you can’t hear
he pretends it’s stopped, like an executioner
balancing the axe on a prisoner’s neck
without breaking the skin.
You know he’s lying. In your mind
you hear Papageno’s pipes
before he tries to hang himself. Go closer.
Still no sound. Only the rushing stream –
or is this eardrum rubbish, a chaos in your brain?
UNTIL IT PLEASE THE FATES TO BREAK THE THREAD
O you men who think or say I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way. For six years I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement. I must face this is for ever. Doomed to loneliness, deficient in the one sense which should be more perfect in me than anyone. I would have put an end. Only my art – impossible to leave the world until I have composed all I feel called to make. So I endure, wretched until it please the Fates to break the thread.
Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament, 6 October 1802
Five full moons. Five waning moons.
Touches of chill in the autumn night.
Dying vine-leaves, purple
as the pulse vein in his wrist.
The woods yellow, then black and bare.
The candle trembles in a draught,
shutters swing in silence
like the sea breathing through glass.
He cannot hear the driving rain.
But he’s sketching a funeral march,
a symphony. I have taken a new path.
&nbs
p; HERO
Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned with what we play, so – if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public – we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.
Beethoven, Sketchbook, 1809
EROICA
All night I’ve been thinking of you careening down
to the underworld. Now, with the resilience of a dervish,
you rage back up from the depths and get a job
as composer in a theatre. The man you hoped to be
is disappearing into the horizon like a creature of sea-ice
but you are fire-dust, gold-flight
winching upwards into pure light, Napoleon
the liberator, conqueror of the Alps. Battles are being won
smashing windows all over the city
making old Vienna and the Hapsburg Empire
look like a study of life on the ocean floor
while you drive forward into a new-world dawn
thrilling with dissonance, calling up wild-steel angels
no one has met before, looking down
on volutes of the foyer as on a dying fire.
You are havoc on the brink, a jackhammer
shattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow.
Against everything that can happen
to you or anyone, you pitch experiment
and the next new key, ever more remote.
LETTERS TO JOSEPHINE
Dear, beloved, only J! A thousand voices whisper you alone are my beloved – I am no longer – oh beloved J let us walk again on that path where we were often so happy…Tomorrow I will see you, may heaven send an undisturbed hour when my heart and soul meet yours.
Beethoven to Josephine Brunsvik, 1805
You are all the colours of his sky.
When your aristocratic mother
hustles you and your sisters up his stairs
and tells him to teach you all piano
he takes one look at your heart-of-anemone eyes
and promises himself no spark of desire
is going to bloom.
You are astonishingly beautiful
but that doesn’t always make for happiness. At twenty
you marry a count your mother thinks is rich.
You have three children in three years. He dies –
and here’s Beethoven at your door. You venerate
his music, but how can a countess live
with a commoner who is going deaf
and keeps an unemptied chamber pot under his desk?
I can hardly bear to read his letters to you
pouring out his heart, not knowing
that in two hundred years
everyone will be able to share this lightly, online.
He is tearing Napoleon’s name
out of the title page of a symphony
because his hero, this man of the people,
has crowned himself Emperor,
he is writing an opera
and seeing it performed
to an audience only of French soldiers
who have just captured a city
and who walk out when they discover
this is not only the story of a loving wife
rescuing her man
but a dream, a dark mirror, of freedom,
and all this time he is on fire for you.
This is when Napoleon first occupies Vienna
thousands of soldiers dead in the battle at Austerlitz,
mutilated veterans begging in the streets –
and brother Carl has to marry a pregnant girl.
Jealousy, disguised as moral outrage.
She will sully the name of Beethoven!
He writes the Appassionata, whose pain
may express his agony at going deaf
but you are in it too. He writes you a song –
‘To Hope’. And a piano piece, his declaration of love.
Here’s your – your – Andante,
says his smudgy writing
telling you how to play it. No one could wish
his delusion away, it is gold dust –
we might not have Fidelio without it –
but what was it like for you, Josephine,
reading this torrent? I walk past the green door
he passed through daily at Theater an der Wien,
and read the way you try to cool him. Words like esteem –
I recognise that moment when you have to say
Let’s just be friends. But we have all been
on the receiving end, too. Your servant
will not let him in. He writes to you about his Mass in C –
suffering humanity, yearning for fatherly love,
something he never knew but can imagine
and when he’s creating no one can hurt him,
not his father, not you. He doesn’t say
he fell ill after, alone in his lodgings.
The wound of you will take time to heal.
He still dreams of knocking on your door
while you disappear from his biographies
like fog from a mirror.
You marry a no-good baron, have more children –
he takes them away. You have another child
with a maths teacher. By the end
you will have had, I make it, seven. Your mother
says these disasters are your fault. You battle
to get your children back, but die alone aged forty-two
the year Beethoven writes his last piano sonata
which some people hear as your requiem.
You are lost in the milky blues of history.
So many men loved you, condemned you, wrote
books supporting or opposing your claim –
though you didn’t claim –
to be Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved.
Your life was a song to hope
and the dark crystal of desire.
What can we say to a firefly lost in the fire?
THE SHADOW BEHIND THE DOOR
Ramparts of Vienna. An airy view
where he wrote the Archduke Trio
and re-wrote Fidelio.
Nothing gave him such trouble.
I once asked a professional
singer what it was like
singing the First Act quartet on stage.
She said, The earth moves if you get it right.
On display, a showcase all to itself,
the canister that held his salt and pepper
rescued at an auction of his things.
Separate lids, delicately hinged
for each gilded compartment, like tiny harpsichords
opening side by side. Amazing this survived.
He rarely picked up anything without dropping it.
Every domestic item knocked and broken.
In shadow behind the door, a sign
says this museum was set up
in 1941.
Newspapers complained –
Jews, living in the house of Beethoven! –
and the family living here
was sent to Theresienstadt,
then Auschwitz.
I think of fallen stones, a Jewish cemetery
in forest overgrown by fern,
and the story of a cantor’s son I heard
in Sejny, Poland. Twelve. Fastest runner
in the scho
ol. When the Nazis came
his father said Run, he ran the stretch
marked out on sports day, from
the synagogue steps to the forest edge.
The only one in town who got away.
This sign behind the door is Europe too.
We are all Vienna, the beautiful
city you cannot trust.
We know it now, know it again,
creatures of division, evil and good
blown off course by a bitter wind
and lost in a haunted wood.
We are the dark. Rift in the lute,
fault in the bone, the light
of enlightenment driven away
by monsters at the heart
and fallen feathers in the dirt like warnings.
But earth still moves if you get it right.
WINE OF THE HEART
When I was small I was sometimes allowed
to stay up when my father played quartets.
He gave his friends a glass of sherry first.
I remember him wiping little glasses,
opening music stands, opening the door
to the Iraqi violinist he played with before we were born
who was weak now, had to prop his elbow
to hold a violin. My dad put cushions under his arm,
offered a little wine. He couldn’t drink, he said.
Wine of the heart, he said, gazing up with his dark
burnt eyes. The names of where these players came from,
Ljubljana Hungary Germany Iraq,
were as much a part of the grown-up world
as the peppermints my father kept
in the glove pocket of our first car,
a fawn Ford Popular, to help him give up cigarettes.
I learned that music comes from everywhere.
That it takes strength to hold a violin,
that music crosses languages
and is mysteriously connected
to what we feel
and never say, because my father worked
in hospitals of the mind
and was often away.
I remember sitting on the floor
watching his face as he played his cello.
I learned that music is love,
an echolocation
which falters or explores
across a cave of unknown distances