‘Celebrating the music, and humanity, of Beethoven’

When I first thought about writing this piece, I was sure it would be focused on the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. It wasn’t that Beethoven meant so much to me — which he does — but rather because his name seemed to be swirling around the airwaves whenever I tuned into my preferred radio station.

Perplexed, I checked good old Wikipedia and, once again, it did not fail — the probable reason why Ludwig seemed to be saturating the available bandwidth was that the first performance of his epic Ninth or Choral Symphony (‘The Ode to Joy’) was in May 1824, as good an anniversary as any to reflect on the impact he made on the world we inherited from him. A perfect topic for a blog, you might think.

As indeed it is. Because anyone who comes within cooee of the great heritage of Western music understands that the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is so stratospheric that I for one, can find no adequate words to describe it, let alone explain it.

Which brings me to Beethoven. To my untrained layman’s ear, what makes the magic of Beethoven’s music so accessible, compared with the Olympian gulf between us and Mozart, is that the introduction of an underlying bass line makes his work so different from what went before. It is as though the addition of that musical part injects an empathetic understanding that hits plebeians like ourselves right in the heart of the matter. In the heart, that is.

And so, I thought, what better subject to write about than the profound humanity of Ludwig van Beethoven, a man whose music could respond to the hope generated by the French revolution, and, in due course, reject its logical consequence, the autocracy of Napoleon Bonaparte. But it was not that simple.

For the first port of call in plumbing the Beethoven archive, was my 1980 visit to the Beethovenhaus, the composer’s birthplace museum in Bonn, Germany while I was on an overseas study program. Twenty years ago, when I first wrote about that visit, I had virtually instant recall, right down to the pieces of music that were being piped through the Beethovenhaus.

But now, much like the Christmas sleigh bell in Tom Hanks’s Polar Express, I can no longer hear that music. What I do remember, however, and will never forget, is leaving the Beethovenhaus and walking to Bonn’s main square where I was confronted with one of the strangest sights imaginable on a sunny summer afternoon anywhere.

There were scores of elderly women about, in their 60s and 70s, dressed in their shabby finest, walking into bakeries and cake shops, to emerge carrying white cardboard boxes. What could an outsider from the other side of the world make of this, I wondered.

My confusion must have been obvious because, not realising I had company, an elderly man sitting on the same bench turned to me and said, quite calmly, in perfect, accented English: “The war.” I nodded dumbly. “In Germany, we have a huge demographic black hole of men who would have been in their 20s in the early 1940s. Husbands, brothers and husbands-that-never-were, of all these lonely women. Every day, they visit each other with a large, rich cake. Comfort food over coffee. What a tragedy.” And then he vanished.

I had visited other sites of interest while in Germany, such as Karl Marx’s birthplace in Trier, but his harsh scholasticism always left me cold so the only memory I retain of that day in the Moselle river valley was of the huge Roman gate in Trier, all that remains of an omnipotent empire’s difficulties in establishing a permanent presence in the Rhineland.

In this regard, I had also visited the now forgotten Herman’s Denkmal, the embarrassingly stupendous monument unveiled by the Kaiser in the 1870s to celebrate the crushing defeat the German tribes inflicted on the Roman armies of Emperor Augustus in 9CE.

Yet as much as I learned from it, I think I was glad to leave Germany at the end of the program, the whole atmosphere being so pervasive of the remnants of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Right down to the institute where I was studying, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (named after the first post-Kaiser head of government in republican Germany), being guarded, day and night, by a manned armoured car with a menacing cannon protruding from its turret.

As I scribbled facetiously on the back of a photo I posted to Australia at the time, “the Germans are clearly determined to defend the gains of democracy”. Well, really!

When I reached England, there was only one place of pilgrimage I was determined to visit (apart from watching Spurs play football at White Hart Lane and Wasps play rugby at Sudbury) and it was the DH Lawrence Birthplace Museum at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire.

Lawrence was also a genius in his own way, but unlike Beethoven, he was deeply flawed and uneven in his creativity. Some works, like The Rainbow, embrace sublime descriptions of rural England under the pressure of industrialisation while others, notably the short stories, carry an uneasy lack of restraint that has been capitalised on by unkind critics to claim that Lawrence was, at heart, a blood-and-soil crypto-fascist, obsessed with a maypole-dancing peasant culture that was not only gone for good, but good riddance to it as well.

They were not my thoughts as I wandered around the tiny miner’s cottage, with the furniture exactly as it was when Lawrence was a boy. You could feel his presence everywhere around you, in a way that was not imaginable in the heights of the Beethovenhaus.

Eventually, I settled myself in front of a television monitor that was playing a video of Lawrence’s life. Some of it was new, most of it was familiar, but the overpowering impact on me came not from the man’s writing, as it was quoted by voice over, but from the sound track. There were no lush, sentimental strings evoking a backward-looking evocation of the Victorian age, jerking tears from the eyes.

No, it was much more prosaic than that. And entirely in keeping with the real, hard-edged world in which Lawrence’s eyes were opened: an old-fashioned colliery brass band, playing all the familiar tunes of the 1890s. It was like a performance of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band straight from the soundtrack of Brassed Off. Modern, certainly, but almost childlike in its simplicity.

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