Ruth Padel - Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life

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. | LCGFT : Poetry. | LCGFT : Poetry.

Classification: LCC PR 6066. A 2739 B 44 2020 (print) | LCC PR 6066. A 2739 (ebook) | DDC 821/.914dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012437 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012438 Ebook ISBN9780593317730 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 hes 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 clich? Then he does something brilliant.

Thats his genius. Harrison Birtwistle, composer

Page from autograph manuscript of Beethovens 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 hed 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.

Hed have done that for her, he always took great pains with making safe. Between hedgerows of early summer shes 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 Beethovens Cello Sonata Opus 69.

Shes listening to him, hes listening to her. Questions, answers, the all-you-cant-say stream to and fro. Angry, agonised, and tender as the history of marriage. Then we arrived and she didnt 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 himLittle 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 Its 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.