Beethoven Variations Read online

  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

  of an imprisoned girl. I liked to imagine Beethoven

  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.