Beethoven Variations Read online

  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

  To Be Played with the Utmost Delicacy

  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,

  that little house of hearing

  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