Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life

by Ruth Padel

Overview

“Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

A fascinating poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, from the author of the celebrated Darwin: A Life in Poems

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly sixty beans. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood: Her great-grandfather, who studied in Leipzig with a pupil of Beethoven's, became a concert pianist before migrating to Britain; her parents met making music; and Padel grew up playing the viola, Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593317723
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	643,349
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

RUTH PADEL has written twelve collections of poetry, including the best-selling Darwin: A Life in Poems. She was the first resident writer at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the first money she ever earned—five pounds—was as a student playing viola in Westminster Abbey. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Poetry at King's College London.

Table of Contents

Listen 1

Music in the Dart of the Mind

Birthplace 5

Idealising the Unattainable Can Begin Very Early 6

If Your Father Damaged You 7

His Mother Warms His Feet on a Boat 9

Home Town 10

On Not Needing Other People 12

Growing Up with Beethoven 15

In the Orchestra Pit 17

Meeting Mozart 18

You Rescue Your Father from Jail 19

The Memento 20

The Boy on Dragon Rock 22

Virtuoso

City of Music 25

What Could Go Wrong? 27

Earthquake 28

To Be Played with the Utmost Delicacy 29

Moonlight Sonata 31

The Jealous Demon 32

Julie 33

He Takes Rooms in a Country Village to Rest His Ears 34

Human Fire 35

Take This Cup from Me 36

A Flute of Lilac Wood 38

Until It Please the Fates to Break the Thread 39

Hero

Eroica 43

Letters to Josephine 44

The Shadow Behind the Door 48

Wine of the Heart 51

Stained Manuscript 54

On Cushioning Your Ears in a Bombardment 55

Therese 56

Looking Out of a Back Window 57

The Vulnerability of Violins 59

Meeting of the Waters 61

The Pencil 62

Forever Yours, Forever Mine, Forever Us 63

You Must Not Be Human

Prayer on Burying a Flame 67

Three Days 69

Girl on a Sofa 70

India Dreams 71

To the Distant Beloved 72

The Battle for Karl 74

First Entry in a Conversation Book 75

In the Lydian Mode 77

On Opening the Manuscript of Opus 131 In the Music Archive, Krakow 79

The Rauhenstein Ruins 81

Breaking Axle 83

Musica Humana 86

Life-Notes: A Coda 89

A Selection of His Works 123

Further Reading 127

Acknowledgements 128

Editorial Reviews

03/22/2021

Balancing a historian’s fidelity to archives and a musician’s passion for composition, Padel (Alibi) offers a lavish poetic biography of Beethoven from his birth in 1770 to his death in 1827. The psychological and musical effects of the composer’s deafness are sensitively rendered: “The almost-nothing bone,/ that little house of hearing... the new/ shocked calm of Is it true. Is this/ what it sounds like, going deaf?” Drawing on letters, diaries, and the handmade “Conversation Books” (in which those Beethoven encountered wrote notes to him once he lost his hearing), Padel tracks “the domestic minutiae against which his late style—introspective, cosmic, radical—evolved.” The tumultuous inventiveness of his late style (“havoc on the brink, a jackhammer shattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow”) emerges in the contexts of Napoleon’s violent rise to power and Beethoven’s own illnesses, lost loves, and legal battle with his sister-in-law (whom he called the Queen of the Night) over custody of his late brother’s son, Karl. Padel grows increasingly intimate with her subject, often addressing him directly, and even attempting to intervene in his self-destructive spiral, “trying to cancel/ the mathematics of strain.” Aficionados of classical music may draw inspiration from this ambitiously conceived and realized reconsideration of Beethoven’s genius. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read . . . [The] poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble . . . Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

“With a conversational intimacy, much like the composer’s chamber works, it is the orchestration of one life through the prism of another, structured around Padel’s expansive empathy. Padel’s light touch recharges the reader’s perception of the unfolding drama of the composer’s life.” –Los Angeles Review of Books

“As fine a distillation of Beethoven’s biography as can be imagined: beautifully written, factual but elegant, touching, and funny too . . . Padel also includes a list of selected musical works, and it could serve perfectly for anyone wanting to listen to Beethoven’s most enduring pieces and to encounter, as she puts it in a poem, ‘the unquenchable spirit / that powers every note he [wrote].’” —Bruce Whiteman, The Hudson Review

“Two lives drawn beneath the lens, the composer’s and her own, interacting in ways that can be bold and, finally, breathtaking. On the Eroica Padel is spectacular. The composer is ‘fire-dust, gold-flight / winching upwards into pure light’ as he drives ‘forward into a new-world dawn / thrilling with dissonance, calling up wild-steel angels.’” –Paul Griffiths, Times Literary Supplement

“Profound reflections on Beethoven’s life and music.” —Catholic New York

“Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection, a tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music” –Tatler (Best Books of 2020)

“Balancing a historian’s fidelity to archives and a musician’s passion for composition, Padel offers a lavish poetic biography of Beethoven . . . Aficionados of classical music may draw inspiration from this ambitiously conceived and realized reconsideration of Beethoven’s genius.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“How to uncover from biographical details the mystery that is music? With precision,
heart-breaking beauty and lyric insight, Ruth Padel performs a miracle: Beethoven comes alive before us, the son of a drunk, who became a genius, and lost everything,
and found his way back to the center. And here we are, following Padel's own genius for composing the music of a story via lyrical means. You will find your heart shored up
/ by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes, she writes. Indeed.” —Ilya Kaminsky,
author of Deaf Republic
 
“Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection from Ruth
Padel . . . A tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music, and most of all the profound ways it affects listeners and performers.” —Francesca Carington, Tatler
 
“What a wonderful and unusual idea. Ruth Padel writes with true passion; her love for,
and understanding of, the man and his music shine through each poem.” —Steven
Isserlis, cellist
 
“Beethoven Variations is absolutely wonderful! Steeped in the music, and in aspects of his life we maybe never think about—a fascinating summation of Beethoven!” —Sean Rafferty, In Tune, Radio 3
 
“Beethoven’s music encompasses the entire blinding spectrum of human thought and emotion, from violent to ethereal, from chaos to sublimity. Ruth Padel’s poems encompass that uncontainable spirit to an astounding degree, and preserve the primal shock of our first hearing.” —Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise, music critic of The New Yorker

From the Publisher

09/01/2020

As her subtitle suggests, poet/scholar Padel focuses less on Beethoven's grandly thunderous music than on the experiences and psyche of Beethoven himself, much as she did with Darwin: A Life in Poems. (Interestingly, she is a descendant of Darwin, and her great-grandfather studied with one of Beethoven's pupils.) Padel opens with Beethoven's unpropitious upbringing, as he "writes concertos/ pitching the wonders of modulation/ against his father's blows"; later, savvy Mozart is indifferent to the young man's playing until he improvises: "Watch out for this boy. He'll give the world/ something to talk about." The writing deepens with the story, as Beethoven's rise to heroic stature intensifies his world-wariness ("always that splinter of ice in the heart/ protecting the work, and the safety of not/ being loved") and brings the tragedy of hearing loss ("If you can't hear what you're doing/ … where does the newness go?"). Significantly, Padel weaves in her experiences of playing Beethoven with her family, a gracious reminder that his music keeps ringing through our lives. VERDICT A solidly appealing work for fans of poetry, classical music, and biography.

Library Journal