most safely entered by music
and summed up in the black-and-white photo
of my dad with his sister, brothers, parents
sitting by their music stands. Granny
with her viola, which I inherited,
Grandfather with his violin. My dad is eight
pointing to the music with his bow
and a white bust of Beethoven
glowers on a pedestal above.
I picture my dad’s quartet at work
on Razumovsky 1.
He has the opening tune. I know he’s anxious
to play it well. Maybe I’m still
anxious for him, even now after he’s died,
as I stand in the evening light of old Vienna
looking up at the room where Beethoven tried
to knock a hole through the wall
and make a new window, so he could see the hills.
STAINED MANUSCRIPT
Prince! What you are, you are by circumstance and birth. What I am, I am through myself. There have been and will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven.
Beethoven, note to Prince Lichnowsky, 1806
A daylight moon, watermarked with grey dapple.
I stare at the façade of the White Chateau, Silesia.
The castle of Hradec nad Moravicí
where Beethoven will shatter a long relationship
with the prince who was like a father to him.
Tall trees above a river. Berries ripen in the wilderness.
Indoors, gilt ceilings glitter. Privilege! He hates all that.
His opera has failed, he’s lost his love,
he’s furious with his brother, jealous of his brother’s little son,
and deafer, always deafer. He will not play at dinner
for the enemy. I see him lift a chair
to strike his host, stamp away in a thunderstorm
through black salt of an October night
down this same gravel drive.
This is where it happened – eight miles
in shaking forest, lamé lightning, lashing rain.
He catches fever, shivers till the morning coach.
His bag, his manuscripts, are soaked.
Sometimes, in catastrophe, you have to slam the door
and save what you’ve made as best you can.
He shows his friends the music: waterstains
like scars on a country terrorised by war.
ON CUSHIONING YOUR EARS IN A BOMBARDMENT
Sun rises on a frightened city. Shadows gather
on high horizons. Those who can, leave.
The rest stay: night watchmen, sausage sellers,
men who sell mousetraps, women who sell herbs,
bakers, washerwomen – and Beethoven,
up there in the line of fire. Napoleon
has rolled up at the gate at last.
Beyond the walls are twenty howitzers.
It was said that people milled around the streets
swapping jokes to keep their spirits up, then went inside.
Waving shadows. Kingfishers in speckled light.
I’m walking the Napoleon Trail
where his soldiers camped
on floodplain of the Danube.
Dogwood, willow, scattered gold. A path
between black poplars, an obelisk furred by lichen
on the site of his powder magazine,
where thousands of his men prepared the cannon.
As the light dies, Napoleon opens fire.
Beethoven hammers on his brother’s door.
They take him to the cellar,
give him cushions to press over his ears.
There they stay, all night
and all next day. Brother Carl,
his wife Johanna and the baby,
two and a half. The little boy.
THERESE
Since I cannot see her today, remember me to her and all of them – I feel so happy with them, as though they might heal the wounds inflicted on me by wicked people. Thank you, kind G, for having taken me there. Farewell, love me, your Beethoven.
Beethoven to Baron Gleichenstein, 1810
I feel I’m seeing her in a rear-view mirror.
I know what it’s like to persuade yourself into love.
He’s desperate: in the silks of her father’s drawing-room,
a man of forty picturing his life turned round
by a beautiful rich girl of eighteen. He asks friends
to lend a looking-glass for the afternoon, send
his birth certificate from Bonn, buy him neckties
and fancy linen, which some top tailor can fashion into shirts.
He’s walking on air, picks out a piano for her,
gives her a copy of Goethe, writes her a tender bagatelle.
Friends worry he’s heading for a fall.
The evening he plans to propose – so sure he’s not alone,
she feels it too – he’s fumble-drunk. Incapable.
The family whisk her away to their country home.
LOOKING OUT OF A BACK WINDOW
Roar of Vienna traffic on the Ring. All day
I’ve been reprising last night’s dream
of the sculptor I once lived with.
I dreamed he felt bereft. Said he stopped being an artist
when I left. I held him in my arms, his heart
like hammer taps, chipping me from my world into his.
I told him that I see, I shall always see,
with the eyes he gave, and that he hadn’t stopped,
he wouldn’t, ever. When I woke
I remembered he was buried yesterday.
I hear three downward notes, Beethoven’s goodbye
to his patron leaving the city
and to his teacher, dead after the shelling.
I’m staring, as maybe Beethoven did too,
out of the back window
in the apartment where he wrote
Quartetto Serioso – lightning-struck,
angry, almost a joke
about confronting, about going on whatever.
Abrupt, experimental, as all of us are
in the end, as we face the end.
I look into the ravine of the inner court,
see the building’s shadow on the opposite wall
and over my head a hawk in a sky of milk.
THE VULNERABILITY OF VIOLINS
Berlin. Winter, 1970. We’re playing the Pastoral
Symphony and my bow skids across the strings
without a sound. I think I’m going mad. A luthier
in an old violin shop says the back is coming off,
sticks the viola together, tells me his father fixed
the violin Menuhin played
for his Berlin debut, 1929. I take my viola to Prague.
This is after the Soviet invasion: a second boy
has burned himself to death. I stay with a family,
the apartment could be bugged,
we speak the language of quartets,
Haydn Mozart Beethoven,
till they walk me round the city in the open.
Bridges, smoke, a river of fear –
where today
it’s Beethoven Luxury Suites for a Romantic Getaway
and an ad for Prague Stag Parties. A girl,
black-leather buttocks, handcuffed wrists.
I walk past iron gates to the famous alley
where three stone violins on a carved cartouche
join their necks in a drunken kiss, above a door
Beethoven walked through
aged twenty-five on a concert tour
with a violin that needed mending.
But I’m thinking of him later, forty-one,
in Prague for the last time.
1812. July. A beginning and an ending.
Napoleon marching to Moscow. Beethoven
checking in to Zum Schwarzen Ross,
‘At the Black Steed’, on the Graben. His last shot at love.
MEETING OF THE WATERS
While still in bed, thoughts thrust themselves toward you, my immortal beloved. I can only live wholly with you or not at all…O continue to love me – never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved L.
Beethoven, Teplitz, 6–7 July 1812
It is unlike anything else. Wild swimming. The nub
of selves meeting, a conflux of two rivers,
black and gold. Nerve-ends, twisting together
underground. Each name touched and forgotten
in a time-really-can-stand-still
that shivers to the bone. Moralities dissolve
in each other’s dark. The two of them
are a shaman’s journey, a quest to the interior.
The kiss. A promise that may never be fulfilled
but is complete, each moment, in itself.
THE PENCIL
My angel, my all, my own self – only a few words today, and that with pencil (yours!)…Can our love persist otherwise than through sacrifice? Can you change the fact that you are not entirely mine, I not entirely yours?
Beethoven, Teplitz, 6–7 July 1812
She left it behind. It stayed
in the room, on the table
buried in the earth
of songs, manuscripts
unanswered mail
the hotel bill
his only piece of her
camouflaged
like a guilty secret
in the air of every day.
It travelled beside his heart
through the falling rain
and breakdown in the forest. It says
Never cease to love me. It says Apart.
FOREVER YOURS, FOREVER MINE, FOREVER US
Never can another own my heart, never – never – O God why have to separate oneself from what one loves – my life in Vienna is a miserable life – Your love makes me at once the happiest and most unhappy. Only through quiet contemplation…can we reach our goal to live together – be patient – love me…What longing with tears for you – you – you my love – my all – farewell –
Beethoven, Teplitz, 6–7 July 1812
Sometimes giving up what you love leads on
to everything you wanted in your life
but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t loss.
What remains is an echo, an afterglow
from a night with a woman he loves
maybe the only night he ever spent with anyone –
a letter from a man who broke down
on a midnight dash through a forest.
He was warned. He ignored the warning
he always does. A letter he maybe never sent
and nobody saw until he died
and it was found in a secret drawer.
A promise of eternal togetherness
a wishbone about to break
a letter of goodbye
from a man aching to be touched
walking away from what means most to him
except his art. Who wrote long after
to his publisher, Farewell
is said only from the heart
and when you’re alone.
YOU MUST NOT BE HUMAN
You must not be human, not for yourself, only for others. There can be no more happiness for you except within yourself, for your art.
Beethoven, Diary, 1812
We have arrested someone who will give us no peace. He keeps yelling that he is Beethoven but he’s a ragamuffin. No hat, and an old coat.
Constable to police commissioner, Baden, 1821
PRAYER ON BURYING A FLAME
Winter evening. All Souls’ Night
in St Ignatius Old Cathedral, Linz,
where he wrote his ‘Equal’ fanfares for the dead.
White walls, gold leaf, dark wood.
I’m thinking of him beneath these vaulted ceilings,
seeing these same fingerprints of light.
The town’s façades – rose, turquoise, jade –
hair salons, pizza takeaways and little pharmacies
are all shut out. No one left except himself and God.
He’s said goodbye to happiness. He’s rushed down here
to stop this brother marrying. You can be the moon,
bright as you like, but still be jealous of the stars.
Alone in this fluent dark, I imagine four
gold voices, a family of trombones
sliding against each other
to purify souls in purgatory,
mark his funeral of love. Sorrow beyond despair,
calm as rays of sunlight in a wood.
This music will be played at his own funeral.
Shining instruments of the dead:
no more heroic fight
but resignation, sacred light. He’s bereft,
heartbroken, aground,
pouring everything into pure carnelian of sound.
THREE DAYS
O God give me strength to conquer myself. Nothing at all must fetter me to life…O terrible circumstances that do not suppress my feeling for domesticity but prevent its realisation. O God, God, look down upon this unhappy B, do not let it go on much longer in this way!
We shouldn’t be reading this. A self-help diary,
the voice of loneliness and struggle.
Nothing can stop him tipping into the abyss
afraid that everything he could create
will stay locked in for ever.
He doesn’t know where to go or what to write.
He stays with a friend outside the city,
a paradise of elm and oak, cool mosses, sun,
and at night the blowing net of stars.
But he vanishes without a word.
They think he’s left. Three days go by
and the music master tracks him down
to a corner of the grounds
huddling like a wolf crawled off to lick its wounds.
Trying, he explains, to starve himself to death.
GIRL ON A SOFA
Sensual gratification without a spiritual union is bestial, afterwards one has no trace of noble feeling but rather remorse.
Beethoven, Diary, 1816
Brothels? Probably. Everyone did.
His assistant once came for a lesson
and found him on the sofa with a woman.
He was backing out, but Beethoven
waved him to the piano –
Play something romantic! He played,
not looking at the sofa. Something passionate.
He played on, flowing the world to its end,
suspended cadence, slow trill, presto –
till the girl departed.
The master had no idea who she was.
She knocked on the door, asking to see him.
He said it happened often. He was prudish
but enquired about a book on syphilis
and had a running joke with a friend
about storming the fortress.
INDIA DREAMS
You are even more alone. Ear trumpets
don’t help but you pretend they do.
Glass filled with the moon’s dry wine,
your shadow soft on the ceiling,
a moment when every silence in the world
conspires with every other
you write out notes of the Indian scale, read Hindu
mystics and Shakuntala, copy advice
given to a faithful wife, searching for
a husband cursed to forget her, on how to endure.
On your journey through this earth
your path will be now high, now low.
The traces of your feet will be uneven.
Virtue will drive you on.
Giving up on Eros and his blindness
you cleave to Brahma, the one bright eye,
a single coin of light opening in the dark
of pagodas you picture on mountain peaks, in India.
What we forget makes us who we are.
Most of our life vanishes in the swirls
of the brain’s mysterious mirror
but you can’t stop looking back. At scarlet pearls
strewn through the desert, footprints of blood,
your journey away from love.
TO THE DISTANT BELOVED
…a woman he would have considered union with the greatest happiness of his life. It was not to be. He said he could not get it out of his mind…The new song, ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, drew tears from my eyes. This can only have been written from the heart!
Fanny Giannattasio del Rio, schoolmaster’s daughter, Diary, 1816
Now she is far enough away
your heart can say what it wants.
Just as the winding stream
meltwater starless rivers
carried on flowing all winter
under whistling silks of snow
when everything was a frozen dream
though when random flurries stirred
you could imagine soft little paw-prints
a feather imping the surface
white on white