Beethoven Variations Page 5

  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

  and I don’t want him to have screwed it up completely.

  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.