Beethoven Variations Read online

  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

  Beethoven loved. The rooms

  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