My Night With Beethoven: Building an Arc/Ark of Triumph

Notes after a night spent listening to Dame Myra Hess play Beethoven's 30th and 31st Piano Sonatas, Opus 109 and 110, EMI CDH7 63787 2, released as part of the "Great Recordings of the Century" series in 1990:

The last three piano sonatas (Op. 109/10/11) of Ludwig Von Beethoven are perhaps the most private and intimate works of beauty in his life and require extraordinary interpretative skill to play. Only musicians with the same meditative depths as the composer--ones, in his case, forced upon him by circumstance of his deafness--can free this music from the page where the notes are otherwise indecipherable diary entries in what might be the most profound privacy in all musical history. To me, each note is gnostic--an incandescence emerging out of a silence so great it is the primal emptiness from which all comes and to which all returns. Ex nihilo is no longer a point of embarkation for creation but something even more extraordinary: the mouth of God. Beethoven shared a space beyond and before those inhabited by angels and spirits: the very place and possibility of immanence itself. In this music, the beauty that is the deepest reason for creation is experienced. God has no deeper or more selfless reason for Manifestation/Many-fest-ation than the beauty of doing so. Many-fest-ation is, as the word suggests at its most connotative, the festival of the many God's breath will inhabit. Beethoven finds within himself and the instinctive great chain (efflorescence?) of being that extends to his performers and listeners alike (if they accept the open invitation) the beauty that is itself the reason for their existence.

I'm inviting you this morning to listen to what I think is the greatest performance of the Fuga from Sonata No 31, Op. 110, that has ever been committed to record: Dame Myra Hess's peerless performance, recorded on October 1-2, 1953. If I could master the intricacies of uploading, there would be a link to this and the preceding Adagio which serves as prelude to the miracle that takes place in the Fuga (thankfully, its main theme is reprised in the middle of this fourth and final movement as recapitulation and re-enactment of the Genesis taking place).

Before I leave you to find Madame Hess's recording (try Amazon), let me tell you how I came to have my pre-dawn encounter with Beethoven. I have been spending the last week packing for a move from my much-too-expensive Narberth apartment to a far more affordable house in Ardmore. Because my CD collection numbers in the thousands, I find fugitive discs in corners, under papers and all sorts of other recesses. Yesterday afternoon, I found a CD with Myra's Beethoven recordings. Thanks to the fact that I have an iPod docking station next to my bed, I knew that if, as has been happening with regularity these past few expectant weeks, I couldn't sleep I would have the solace of music. Beethoven became my instant choice for solace should it be needed. It was. At 3 AM, I got into my diving bell and plunged into the deep seas of Beethoven's Op. 109 and 110 (Hess never recorded the Op. 111). The music instantly took me into depths that I rarely reach, except when listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, lots of Renaissance choral music and madrigals and some ragas. These are zazen depths gifted by the concentration this music requires as price of admission into its heartlands. I felt born to hear what I was hearing. I felt this was my particular key to an understanding that can only come through experience of complete absorption in it. I was at the place where the very prompting to be born, to be created, was found. This place is suffused in and circumscribed by what the mystics call "divinity." I felt afterwards that I had watched and even pitched in to help the building of what my inner punster much, much later called, after France's Arch of Triumph, "the arc of triumph, the ark of triumph." I invite you to share the wide opened spaces into which Beethoven was ushered by his divinity-drenched genius in late 1821. To complete and continue the astonishment, I discovered this morning that the completion date marked on the autograph score by the composer is Christmas Day of that year. What a gift of joy Beethoven brought to the world, the Christ(os) singing its way into being. Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!