The one time I visited the Vatican museums I stayed in the Sistine Chapel for nearly five hours, but before the famed Chapel Raphael, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and a beautiful Redon, always the delicate pastels, a cruel Max Ernst crucifixion, just like his slabs of meat, a stunning hall of cartography, but nothing, nothing like the Sistine Chapel, the scale the perspective the narrative sweep the wholeness of the space, but wandering in I first thought to myself, is this it? Is this all it is? Maybe I was looking for something familiar so I could say to myself, oh, this is God creating man, feeling that if I identified it I had seen it, or maybe I was surprised that it was a finite, contained space. Instead, I wandered, and hours later, was floating in a sea of perceptions, each one informed by the order and the framework that Michelangelo painted across the vault of the Chapel, giving us time to consider his art. If tasting wine is about allowing our taste buds to be receptive, to taste what we taste not what we want to or think we should, but to let the wine roll across our tongues, cheeks, throat, and just look, look, what do you see? Not what we know, not what someone has pointed out to us, although those bits of information can guide us at certain points, but first, or second, or at some point we have to pull up our anchor and let the winds push us, float across the deep blue sea and travel on fresh water and waves, not where someone else is leading us but alone, alone in the wind, the night, the dark sky the blazing sun, letting our own senses guide us as we look into the work before us, asking, what is that, and letting the work speak through its color, form, composition, narrative structure, and giving ourselves the freedom, the right, the responsibility to look at Michelangelo for the first time, to be alone with his art and say this is what I see, this is what unfolds hour after hour, as this arch and that takes form, as one panel leads to the next, the beginning of time to the creation of light and darkness, the creation of sun and moon and the glory of mankind, and always looking, looking, at aspects large and small, the overall scope and scale to the details of one look, the direct eye gaze of one African wise man staring right at us as only the one man on the altar wall, one hand covering half his face, Michelangelo himself, perhaps, gazing and gaping, is this all there is, is this the end, is this it, but the wise man with a kind, compassionate, intelligent and sophisticated plain look stares straight at us like no one else in the whole chapel and I wonder, who is this man, who is he? And down at the other end the Last Supper and I wondered where Judas was and I look and see a devil on his back, black and winged, whispering into his ear his heart his thoughts all the while sitting there with Christ and yesterday in St Peter’s a man talking below in a chapel in the crypt, evangelical almost but moved by the power of the place, and saying, god is there when you are broken, a failure, riddled with mistakes and half formed ideas, broken hopes and bad decisions as parents, spouses, humans, and we think about our glory when perhaps we should be more open to our frailty, our faults, our many almosts, and perhaps why the Church really survives, because God is God but we only know that when we’re weak and incomplete, filled with failure and regret, there’s the space where we’re receptive and open, willing to admit what is right before us and that’s our own shortcomings and failures and know that we’re only vessels for god’s word, God’s ability to – no, that’s not it, that’s not how I started, I meant to say to think to express that in our silence we can hear something besides our own voice, but that’s not it either, because – right before the Sistine Chapel a glorious delight of Matisse, a man filled with the joy of the Church – the pilgrim church on earth – long before Vatican II gave permission for joy; in 1950 or 1952 he made a vestment, simple crosses, a tree of life, a joy in creation and God, and a large Mother and Child and she is a vessel, a face of circles, the eternity of infinity, wise and joyous, a church that is procreative and open to happiness. Michelangelo is glorious. He praises God forever with his work, and the Pieta is the most sublime sculpture imaginable, a liquid, limpid, sensual, dignified, caressed piece of marble, coursing with the soft quiet of sorrow, the deep sadness of death of loss and the ultimate triumph of life after all.
After St Peter’s I thought, why are we what we are? How do we become this, and why, if we are expressive beings, are we who we are? Shouldn’t all life be a constant prayer of thanksgiving, a hymn of thanks for life for life itself? What exists except to praise God? All art is the magnification of God, the pushing of a boundary that gives voice to what could not be said or shown or thought or sung or read before we gave it that voice, those words, those thoughts. We are needed because each of us reflects the light of God a little differently, piece after piece of tessera/tesserae used in the many mosaics in the basilica, the Raphael one – not by him but a copy of one of his painting into a mosaic, with pieces so small that it looked like an oil painting. I returned to our hotel room near dinner time, the whole day having passed, and I was quiet with a full soul, having drunk in the glory of art celebrating creation, itself an act of creation.
And then last December, shortly after a particularly good concert by the Heath Quartet, I realized that for all my love of Beethoven’s string quartets and symphonies I knew little of his other music and decided – essentially on a whim – to listen to the whole of his catalogued, published music, from Opus 1, a piano trio published in 1795 to the final string quartets that I thought I knew. Cataloging a musician’s work reminds me of the difficulty we sometimes encounter when we look at wine labels from an unfamiliar region. Beethoven’s music is catalogued using opus numbers, opus being Latin, meaning work or a work. The ordering of opus numbers is not strictly chronological and there are a few notable exceptions of early works being assigned a late opus number – like Op. 103, which was written in 1792/3 but not published and assigned an opus number until much later, but the chronology of opus numbers roughly matches the order of composition. However, many of his pieces, especially well known ones, are known by multiple names, like the Emperor Concerto, which is also known as Piano Concerto No.5, as well as Opus 73. Sometimes, an Opus number has several pieces in it, like Op. 59, which is comprised of three string quartets. Op. 59, No. 1 is also String Quartet No. 7, and Op. 59, No. 2 is String Quartet No. 8. All three pieces in the opus are also known as the Razumovsky Quartets, named after the patron to whom Beethoven dedicated the quartets. There also are pieces that were not published during Beethoven’s life, and were never assigned an opus number. They have a different numbering system, Without Opus, or WoO, but Beethoven’s WoO pieces were not part of my listening repertoire. Nearly a year later, all the way through the 250th anniversary of his birth in 1770 and the devastation of Covid-19 and the final year of Trump’s destructive, annihilating presidency, I’ve listened to one, two, sometimes six or more recordings of every piece of Beethoven’s catalogued works, and these last pieces, sometimes blistering and other times limpid with grace tremble on the edge of knowing, pushing sound and instruments to their limits, diving too into profoundly personal, soul-aching tenderness, and I struggle to find a framework even to begin to fashion a response to his call.
Haunt, v., n., from Middle English: to reside, inhabit, use; from old Norman: to go back home. Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European: village.
We all of us at times are haunted – the word has for the most part turned negative, except when we say someone visits their favorite haunts, and I’m thinking of a pull that was deep in him where phrases, tunes, melodies - kept returning, ones that he was always recapitulating, putting forth as a sonata here and then part of a trio later in life, but why do these phrases resonate with him the way they do, why do they become the foundation for an entire new piece again and again? And these notes, phrases find their way into so many pieces. He is returning home, going back home, and we are haunted – by a melody, a fragrance, a memory, a glance, or maybe a composition of the sky melting into the sea on a grey day cloudy with drizzle in November when color absolves itself of any role in the world and we for a moment live monochromatically with no differentiation between the elements of the world and it is hard too to avoid the dissolution of our own boundaries and these moments, remembered from childhood and lived through until now, these notes are my emotional repository for so many slow movements of Beethoven, falling first in love with the second movement of the 7th symphony in college in the 80s, and then I’m in 2020 and the scraping of a bow across a string, a vibration just barely willing itself into being and when I first heard David Oistrakh (violin) and Lev Oborin (piano) play Opus 30, No. 2 and its adagio – this, I thought, is the sound of two lovers who have over the course of their lives loved and fought and shed tears and laughed and still they held on and waited for the other and this, I thought, is where we begin to hear the emergence of Beethoven as a mature artist, writing voices for instruments that meld seamlessly into one another, the vast differences between the piano and violin diminished as they engage in a hushed conversation we are privileged to be welcomed into, and the human, deeply personal articulation of emotions, thoughts, and feelings that are so visible and present in the three sonatas of Opus 30 disarm us with gentleness. We listen to these pieces vulnerable, open, tender. Here is Beethoven so empathetic, human.
What do we look for when we walk in the woods? Do we try to spot that migratory warbler, identify the spring ephemerals that gild the forest floor, forage for ramps and morels, or just smell the perfume of spring, the ripeness of August, the November earth? I did not know I would have to reckon with nearly a century of recordings, traditions passed from one pianist to the next generation of students, orchestras with conductors whose careers spanned both sides of WWII, as well as contemporary musicians who eschew the well wrought, finely tuned instruments of today and choose to play with gut strings on period instruments, studying manuscripts and striving for historically informed performances, recognizing as well that their ears and ours cannot unhear Philip Glass, Frozen 2, and Straight Outta Compton. My early exposure to Beethoven was pretty standard for a kid from Buffalo who grew up listening to Yes, Grateful Dead and other rock and prog rock combos. One of my mom’s parenting regrets was that none of us ever learned how to play a musical instrument. She did all the cooking, driving, clothes washing, shopping, and sewing, and if she added music lessons for eight kids she would have walked out on us one Tuesday afternoon and never returned, so I’m glad she stuck around and instead instilled in us a love for learning, and her many years of listening to Peter Allen’s Texaco-sponsored broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera eventually rubbed off, too, because one of the best jobs I ever had was as an usher for the 1987 Metropolitan Opera season at Lincoln Center. I got paid pretty well to direct people to their seats and then stand by the door and listen to the best opera in the world. Some years later I was the assistant director at Greater Buffalo Opera Co.’s production of Il Pagliacciand had to be onstage, in costume, for a scene change with all the union stagehands during the performance and once, because I couldn’t read music and still don’t know what the second measure after C-sharp means, I walked onstage during the middle of a singer’s aria and, halfway onto the stage, realized I was about three minutes too early and had to stand there like I belonged, with 3000 audience members and one director looking at me. That being said, my permanent– in the same way that Jamestown was the colonists’ first permanent settlement in the Americas – love for classical music, especially opera, began while painting houses in the summer and getting tired of the three-minute rock and roll songs when we had a ten hour day in front of us, so I started listening to operas and suddenly The Magic Flute helped the time go quickly, and Rigoletto’sdramatic arc made sense when I had the patience to listen and nowhere else to go. But, I got started with all of this as a fourteen or fifteen-year old because a friend’s older brother would wow us with his great stereo and sometimes after a few bong hits would play Pachelbel’s Canonor Beethoven’s 9th, which he discovered watching A Clockwork Orange, and I guess it stuck with me. With virtually no musical knowledge or training I was more than a little lost when I started listening last December, thinking this journey would be an interesting exercise of listening to one or two recordings of each piece, checking it off, and moving on. I wrote notes from the beginning, quick half sentences and sentence fragments documenting the performers and year of recording, but by the time I got to Op. 5 added in my notes that I didn’t know how to listen to the piano and cello playing together and knew I had little context to assess what I was hearing.
In the beginning I listened to recordings on YouTube and read much of the accompanying commentary, written by aficionados, musicians, crackpots, and casual listeners who shared sometimes-poignant stories about a significant encounter with the piece of music, and these comments led me to other recordings I hadn’t heard before. Before I knew it I was listening to multiple recordings of a single piece of music, mesmerized and sometimes confused or enthralled by the differences between performers playing the same piece. I was learning to listen, and realized that an interpretation of Beethoven in the 1940s can be as different from one today as the difference between episodes of I Love Lucy and Giri/Haji. So many traditions and styles are handed down and passed on while others are rejected or changed or evolve into something altogether new. Interpretations and recordings of music bear just as much a mark of their time as other mediums. I didn’t expect that and so discovering new ensembles and quartets and conductors became just as significant as hearing a piece of the Beethoven repertoire for the first time and falling in love with it. First, this happened with pianists and his piano sonatas because everything was new. I had to learn how to listen to the piano for the first time, really listen to it and over time I began to notice the differences between Brendel and Perahia and Barenboim and Annie Fischer and Ashkenazy and Sviatoslav Richter and Goode and Paul Lewis and Gulda and Emil Gilels and Fazil Say and Maurizio Pollini and then I heard Ronald Brautigam, a Dutch pianist who plays the fortepiano, which Beethoven used and played on because the big-ass Steinway Concert Grand pianos that we hear today every time we go to a concert didn’t exist and when I heard the Waldstein Sonata, Sonata No. 21, op. 53, I listened to it again and again, enjoying Vladimir Ashkenazy’s 1988 recording and wavering between the intensity – which does not lose its clarity – of Annie Fischer, and the timing, beauty, and phrasing of Ashkenazy, whose second movement reduces the universe to one quivering string, a single vibration left alone in the universe and it is from that simple, profound beginning that all life, all energy springs – a single vibration. Fischer pours all her feelings into every note as though it’s the one time she will ever play this note, this piece, and she wants us to know how much it matters - she is the Bruce Springsteen of the piano. But listening to Ronald Brautigam playing on a period fortepiano, there is a clarity that isn’t heard on modern instruments – beautiful, and in the space of several notes in the 2nd movement, an adagio, we witness
the dissolution of time and space,
the world reduced to silence, a world without vibrations,
time with nothing to mark it, resignation. And in that silence
posits life as the alternative to that silence, and in one, two, ten, twenty notes – sound, music
again swells in its life affirming majestic triumph – life and sound and music and friction and vibrations will regenerate this barren world. And he does this with a piano.
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