Below is the second of the much-anticipated, highly debated 13-part series of why I decided to write. Picking up where I left off, I continue on the music theme. Though Three Dog Night is nowhere to be found.
There is probably as much Beethoven apocrypha as there are famous compositions by him: his meeting with Goethe when he dissed the local royalty, giving a 12-year-old Franz Liszt a kiss of approval, famously ripping out the dedication page of the "Eroica" symphony after Napoleon crowned himself emperor, proclaiming, "So he is no more than a common mortal!"
My favorite Beethoven story is a true anecdote that has nothing to do with the man at all. One Saturday afternoon when I was in my early 20s, I was riding in a car with some friends, when the driver, tooling around with the radio, landed upon a piano and violin piece of almost painful beauty.
We wondered who wrote it: one ignoramus, trying to sound cultured, quickly said, "Well, I know it’s not Beethoven." It was an opinion the other passengers quickly validated; for, if we knew anything at all about classical music, Beethoven was all thunder and bombast. He didn’t have a exuberant or joyous note in him.
The piece ended on a note that was filled with such happiness you could have sworn it was written by an eight-year-old, and the announcer said, "That Beethoven’s sonata for violin and piano number 5…"
This was shocking to me, since I was the one who so confidently proclaimed that a Beethoven work was far too radiant to have actually been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. After that embarrassment, I set upon learning about him. And the more I learned about Beethoven, the more amazing he became, as both a person and composer — which has made me want to write.
My admiration for his work has few equals. There was no classical form that Beethoven could not master: sonatas, quartets, contertos, and the symphony, which he basically invented as we know it. The comparison is unfair at any level, but it’s as if Shakespeare, in addition to being the greatest playwright and poet of the English language, wrote groundbreaking novels and short stories.
Though I’m no musicologist, and somebody is bound to disagree with my opinion (especially one of the snotrag, self-styled aesthetes who review classical CDs on Amazon), it’s hard to disagree that Beethoven was one of the giants. And, as discovered in my wrong initial opinion, he wrote music that is in equal measure joyous and beautiful as it is loud and bombastic.
That Beethoven wrote all this while being famously depressive and cranky to a fault is part of his attraction. He’s probably the quintessential tortured artist; he never married, his only love being his never-identified Immortal Beloved. He was also unwavering in his beliefs, politically and morally, and was a true believer in freedom when such an idea was still forming on the Continent.
OK, there’s a point to all this hero worship. It’s not only that such a person as Beethoven existed — that one person could master so many forms is mind-boggling to begin with — but that he was able to create despite his disdain for himself and the world. Everybody knows Beethoven went deaf, and that he went into an extended depression that lasted the rest of his life.
After he started to lose his hearing, he composed some of the most ground-breaking works in the history of music. It doesn’t only amaze me he did it while deaf, but that he did it while he was basically bummed out 24/7.
Time to rock
I complain too much about my problems, minimize others’, and will find a reason to procrastinate in the air. Beethoven had more talent in one day’s nail clippings than I will ever have in my entire being, but what truly made him special was he did not surrender, he did not quit, he never stopped making music though he had a million legit reasons to do so.
Listening to Beethoven puts me in the mood to write, but the idea of Beethoven makes me want to write, and though I will never write a work of fiction as remotely sublime and inspiring as the Triple Concerto, I want to try.
This is very, very inspiring, as I, too, am a notorious whiner…OK you didn’t call yourself a whiner, but at least a complainer. Beethoven was the Entein of music. Or maybe greater. Greater even that Steven Hawking who lost every sense and function but his marvelous brain which is all he needed for physics, though the physical limitations, as you noted with Beethoven, could have discouraged him from doing anything at all. Most people would just wait to die.
So yes, this post propels me to my writing desk. Really my writing be. Or my writing couch, with my notebook nearby, Goddamn computer-with-the-Internet off, battery dead, recharger hidden from myself in a towel in a box in a drawe in the basement.
But back to your opening: 13-parts? Really? Will this appear on Masterpiece Theatre?
P.S. Typo corrections: Einstein of Music, not his cousin Entein, whose name was screwed up by the immigration officials at Ellis Island. And I don’t have a Writing Be, or Bee for that matter. It’s my Writing Bed, where I basically live when I’m at home, snuggled up alternately with my husband or my Muse. Never both at once.
what about tchaikovsky
I’ve played the same guessing game, and made the same mistake: Beethoven has so many moods, and just so damned much work, it’s hard to believe. You think you know it all, recognize his habits, think, He doesn’t do THAT… but he does.
I find a lot of classical music inspiring. Chopin is probably my favorite, but also Debussy, Satie, and Scriabin, and of course Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Mendelssohn, etc, etc.
the most interesting, strange and somehow exciting to me is Beethoven’s deafness.