through processions of black trees
…but the ice is relaxing now,
plates of it jostle near the banks
riding the flow
of water dark and alive –
and now she is far enough away
your heart can break through, say
what it wants. The world is fluid
not fixed. It is as if she has died
carried on flowing all winter
and you can turn her into harmony
no matter if this is the flood
of remembered love
or the fire of making new.
THE BATTLE FOR KARL
The effort to save my dear nephew from his depraved mother was a heavy strain…The Queen of the Night must not be allowed to see him.
Beethoven to Countess Erdödy, May 1816, and to Giannattasio del Rio, schoolmaster, July 1816
You’re not working. You’re a mountain king
waylaid in your own black corridors.
You’ve quarrelled with old friends
horrified by your going to law
to tear your little nephew from his mother,
make him yours. This is a family romance
gone terribly wrong. You spend hours
writing to the court, to say
she is Queen of the Night, the mistress of pretence.
You are freezing over, going up in smoke, lost
in a labyrinth of fantasy
while a child waits backstage
for rescue. You are his true father. Your task
is to raise him to manhood. He shall be blest.
FIRST ENTRY IN A CONVERSATION BOOK
This doesn’t follow, that I should eat sausages the way you do.
Karl, Conversation Book, 27 February 1818
I love that the very first entry, Karl,
in the Conversation Book begun by your deaf uncle,
is you standing up for yourself. For a single man
who counts exactly sixty coffee beans, no more
no less, who has never lived with anyone without violent rows
and stormings out, it must be a shock
to see you say you won’t eat sausage his way.
There is more of his own father in him than he’d like.
You are his sweet boy,
a poisonous ungrateful scamp.
He adores you, hates you, shakes you,
pushes you over so your little hernia pops out.
But you, at least, will come out the other side, go on
to have a wife and children, although you too
will die of cirrhosis of the liver, which suggests
an alcoholic vein runs into you from your great-grandmother.
But maybe what will turn you to drink will be trying to forget
what happened to you as a child. How you were torn
from your mother aged nine, the minute your father died,
locked up in boarding school while lawyers argued,
forced to give evidence against them both.
He is learning that wanting something does not make it real,
that nothing in this world is more difficult than everyday love
and that confusing real with ideal never goes unpunished.
He is standing on a hill of evil counsel. But keep on, boy,
this is going to end in devastation but somehow,
through all this muddle, something close to divine
revelation through music will be given to the world.
IN THE LYDIAN MODE
Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode.
Beethoven, over third movement of String Quartet Opus 132, 1825
Cloud iridescence. Song like a book on optics
smuggled out of prison. The Milky Way
beyond a thatch of flame. Raw edges of a wound
coming together. God will find the pattern if you don’t.
Self-portrait in chorale. Intimacy smouldering to blaze.
Wave-shadow like mourning ribbon,
honeycombs spilling honey, antiparticles
in outer space. Five wild points of light
unstable as the men outside the window
dismantling scaffolding
they’ve spent their lives depending on.
Panther eyes in undergrowth. Ultraviolet ash,
melody like flying jewels. Lightning
connecting earth and sky. The hope of figuring
what to hope for and to live inside that hope.
A place to lay the feathers and dust of yesterday.
Memories of your earliest wish: a world
where every soul will have fair turns.
A hermitage, a ghost of sunrise
where the sky brushes a sea aglow with grace,
and calm as the mist above it, wakening
the newborn blue of heaven. Quiet as a wreath of sleep
for anyone in sorrow. The slow unfold at last
of a promise that everything will be laid to rest,
every falling cadence in its place. A holy city,
a halo of gold leaf, saying tomorrow
is a mystery, today is a gift from God.
Without the dark we’d never see the stars.
ON OPENING THE MANUSCRIPT OF OPUS 131 IN THE MUSIC ARCHIVE, KRAKÓW
While composing the three quartets such a wealth of new ideas flowed from his imagination that he had to write the Quartets in C sharp minor and F major too. ‘My dear fellow, I’ve just had another idea,’ he would say jocularly with glistening eyes, out walking, and write a few notes in his sketchbook.
Karl Holz, violinist
(I)
Blue placard in a leafy street. The ordinary trance
of morning light on flickering poplars, windblown jade.
Bentwood chairs with metal legs. Pine desks.
Bound manuscripts with marbled covers.
I never believed I’d meet him here. Still less
that my fingers could touch his touch on the page.
(II)
Another chance to be new again.
Does being deaf break the chains?
Could he have written this otherwise?
Fugue and variation lead
to rebirth, regeneration,
the initial theme transformed
into a thousand petioles and branches
all carrying the DNA of the first seed.
(III)
Black cobweb crossings out. Five sharps
like wriggling insects. I can’t imagine
how any player could read this
but I recognise the voices. First solo,
then together. Now angry and loud,
now gentle. I remember my father
saying you could tell from this
everything of the human.
Yearning, loving, in despair – then calm.
Amused and jokey, sotto voce, beyond loss.
Three bars slashed out. The way he wrote
espressivo. Here, over pale lines of the stave,
the famous tortured entries one by one.
When the librarian isn’t looking
I kiss the corner of the page.
THE RAUHENSTEIN RUINS
I did it because my uncle harassed me.
Karl, report to police, Vienna hospital, July 1826
He’s never climbed these battlements alone.
Only with his uncle, whom he refuses to call Father
but who insists on calling him his son, and sets a crazy pace
up these broken steps as if he owns the place.
In autumn these trees cascade like blood
from pinnacles of rock. He’s never been here
in winter. He’d love to see the damn thing
smothered in snow. Sometimes they’ve come in spring
when the fortress ring is spotted with green buds,
but mostly in summer, like today
when the ruined windows stare unbroken blue.
He used to think if he did what Uncle said
he would be safe. But nothing’s safe
around his uncle. Everything’s a fight.
Uncle shouts for hours saying what he’s done wrong.
He shouts back the suspicions are not true.
The letters that come after, saying my sweet boy,
don’t make any difference. Just the same next time.
He’s a prisoner in Uncle’s dungeon, a broken
castle in himself. Blood of the sun,
blood of the moon. He’ll never get away
except like this. When Uncle finds,
as he soon will, how a father damages a son, he’ll cry.
He’ll be sorry the rest of his life, and serve him right.
BREAKING AXLE
Why are you making such a scene today? Will you not let me go a little now? I only want to go to my room. You must realise other people are human too.
Karl to Beethoven, Gneixendorf, Conversation Book, October 1826
On my screen is the château
where Beethoven is finishing his last quartet
staying with his brother
and the sister-in-law he hates
near a village whose name,
he says, sounds like a breaking axle.
Here he is, dropsical, all diarrhoea
and swollen feet, holding in his gut
with a truss, at his desk
above the garden
looking down on a sundial
inscribed Memento Mori
and I’m there with him, plummeting into the past
to find some blessing in it. When he plays duets
with his nephew, I make sure
he enjoys it. I want him to glide
through his only close relationships
like a falling star
and not accuse Karl of sex with his sister-in-law
just because the boy plays duets with her too.
I am trying to cancel
the mathematics of strain,
and give his brother enough money to pay the mortgage
so he does not press Beethoven for rent.
If Beethoven looks like flying into a temper,
ordering a servant to drag out
an open milk-wagon
and take him and Karl back to Vienna –
a two-day December journey
staying the night in an unheated inn
falling so ill he’ll have to be lifted on the cart next day –
I shall make this not happen. And if it does
I’ll call out in the forest
from dark lanes dusted with snow
for them to keep each other warm, he and Karl,
heads on each other’s shoulders,
two hearts tilting into each other
like drips of light in a breaking rainbow
for there is love here, this is the last time
they will be alone, Karl is the one
person he has tried to live with and love long term
I will take a shot of him not screwing it up
on my phone. And before they leave
in a midnight blur of recriminations
here is a shot of him in that house
in his last months of active life,
the ghosts of grief
in caverns of his psyche
letting him down lightly. But no,
I see him drinking even more heavily
and nagging – he will not let his nephew be,
even for a second – so I call his name.
Ludwig! Herr Beethoven! Bitte!
He turns, he smiles. He says, Ruth,
will you take the parts I have just copied out
of my new quartet, with a joke in them
about accepting mortality, to my publisher in Vienna?
He hands them over. I think I probably bow
and I say, It will be an honour.
MUSICA HUMANA
I still hope to create a few great works and then, like an old child, finish my earthly course somewhere among kind people.
Beethoven to Dr Franz Wegeler, December 1825
The auditory canal
covered in glutinous scales
shining throughout the autopsy
the auditory arteries
thick and cartilaginous
as if stretched over a raven’s quill
and the auditory nerve
withered
to a pure white strand.
But reading the last page
in the book of his life on earth
how he joked
to the doctor who lanced his belly,
gallons of fluid gushing across the floor,
You remind me of Moses striking the rock with his staff
how he laughed, when he could, how he read
and re-read – with great joy, he said – a final gift,
a forty-volume set of all the works of Handel
and how he died
lifting his fist
as if it held a bird he would release into the storm
pelting Vienna with snow
like the reckless feathers driving all our lives
to seek the fullest experience of the air,
I listen to Cello Sonata Opus 69
and hear the unquenchable spirit
that powers every note he writes
and lives on
dancing, dancing
in you, me, everyone.
LIFE-NOTES:
A CODA
Music in the Dark of the Mind
Beethoven was born in 1770 on 16 or 17 December. In Bonn, in an attic on Bonngasse, a street of tradespeople – which meant musicians, too. The landlord was a lace-maker who lived on the lower floors. The house is now the Beethoven-Haus, a study centre and museum. His mother Maria had two more boys, Beethoven’s brothers Caspar Carl and Nikolaus Johann. Of her seven children, these three were the only ones to survive.
The person Beethoven most adored early on was the Flemish grandfather he was named after. Louis, or Ludwig, van Beethoven was Music Director at the Bonn Elector’s palace, a singer who traded wine on the side. When his wife became alcoholic, he placed her in an asylum. He was critical of his son, Johann, but proud of his little grandson, and died when Beethoven was three.
Johann, a court singer like his father, though not as talented, became alcoholic like his mother. He pawned his father’s court portrait; Beethoven later rescued it and put it on the wall everywhere he lived.
When Beethoven’s grandfather died, the family moved into his apartment in a house belonging to a baker’s family, the Fischers. The boys played with the Fischer children. The house has gone, but the Rhine is still at the bottom of the street. One year it flooded; Maria led the children to safety over the roofs. One Fischer child wrote a memoir remembering Beethoven laughing, getting up to mischief, looking through a telescope at the hills be
yond the Rhine, especially the Drachenfels, which he later climbed (his love of country walks began early), and staring into space in a trance of concentration.
Johann recognised his son’s gift, started him on violin, viola and keyboard at four, then hired better teachers. When Beethoven was around ten, Johann took him out of school and put him to work in the Elector’s court orchestra playing viola, middle member of the violin family. In the Beethoven-Haus, you can see the viola he played. Many composers have played the viola. It does not have the brilliance of the violin or power of the cello, but when playing it you hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It is a writer’s instrument, inward and between.
But Beethoven’s great instrument was the keyboard. (Not quite a ‘piano’ yet: keyboards were changing and he himself later contributed to the evolution of the fortepiano.) His teacher was Christian Gottlob Neefe, court organist, head of the Bonn lodge of Illuminati, a Mason-like society whose humanist ideals fired Beethoven all his life. Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was often set to music at their meetings.
By twelve, Beethoven was a keyboard virtuoso, renowned for doing exactly what his father reputedly punished him for, early on: improvising. Close to his improvising genius lay his insight into variation. One form of variation, constant development of a theme, would become a central feature of all his work.
His life changed at thirteen when Franz Wegeler, a medical student friend, introduced him to the von Breunings, a rich and cultured family. He taught piano to several of the children, became a favourite there, and sometimes stayed the night. He later called the whole family ‘guardian angels of my youth’. One son, Stephan, became a lifelong friend. The widowed mother, Helene von Breuning, tried to teach Beethoven good manners and labelled his intermittent trance of concentration his ‘raptus’. She introduced him to poetry, to other houses where he could earn money by teaching piano, and to people who helped his career, above all a well-connected young aristocrat, Count von Waldstein.
When Beethoven was fourteen, the Bonn Elector died. The Elector usually belonged to the Austrian Emperor’s family and the new one was a friend of Waldstein’s: in 1787 he gave permission for Beethoven to go to Vienna, to study with Mozart. But within a few weeks Beethoven had to return to his dying mother. Johann went to pieces when Maria died and Beethoven, now aged sixteen, had to keep the family by his playing and teaching.