The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  16

  Toward the end of her initiation through cancer, Marion and Ross were at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party. Everyone was dancing. Marion was glued to the couch. Doctor’s orders: fragile bones! Finally, she said to Ross, “Come on, Ross, let’s dance.”

  “Oh, Marion,” he says, “you know you can’t dance. You could break your back.”

  “I sit out the polka,” she writes in her journal, describing the exasperating moment, “can’t keep my feet still.”

  “A voice comes up from my perineum,” she writes with increasing fervor, “ ‘Marion, you can sit on this couch until you rot, but I am going to dance. I don’t care what Ross thinks … I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t care if you break your back. I don’t care if you drop down dead. I am going to dance! I am going to live!’ I feel the archetypal energy lifting me off the couch, propelling me across the room—I feel it pushing through my benumbed feet, legs, thighs, torso, arms, hands, through every cell into my head. It is TOTAL. I feel myself Gypsy—a twenty-four-year-old glowing woman. I am being danced. People are gazing at me aghast, probably thinking, ‘This old lady sat on the couch all evening; suddenly she’s transformed into a hands-in-the-air Gypsy. What’s she up to?’ Do I care?

  “Then a stranger—a Dutchman who has just arrived—catches my vision, jumps into my circle, and we dance a dance as fierce as I have ever danced before. If my back breaks, if I drop dead, it doesn’t matter. I am twenty-four. I am healthy. I am whole.”

  TEN

  Ludwig van Beethoven: Turn the Wound into Light

  My piano teacher, Douglas, noticed it right away: “You seem to have a special relationship with that piece of music,” he mused one evening during my weekly lesson.

  Douglas was referring to one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterful final three piano sonatas—the Sonata in A-flat, op. 110—which I was manifestly butchering in front of him at our lesson every Tuesday night. Who knows why he had given me this complex piece to study? I wasn’t technically ready for it. (Douglas told me later that he “just had a hunch.”) But I fell in love with this sonata almost immediately, and I soon determined—perversely, I guess—to master it. I never did.

  The first movement was easy going. The sonata starts with a tender theme and variations in A-flat—calm and bright, like a sunny day on a sparkling pond. Things soon get darker, however. After the sweetest of introductions comes an “Arioso Dolente”—a sorrowful song. It is inexpressibly sad. This song is followed by a complex fugue in which Beethoven seems to be struggling to come to terms with his sorrow—to master it. The fugue is wild, long, and fierce, and learning it just about drove me out of my mind. Beethoven works back and forth between the beautiful song and the groaning fugal structure, all the while becoming more and more impassioned. The theme of the fugue works against itself, at times coming a hairsbreadth from flying apart. There is no question: Beethoven is bringing everything he has to this effort. This is a life-and-death struggle of some kind. The fugue, insanely complex at its zenith, finally finds an ecstatic and harmonious conclusion. The performer collapses, exhausted.

  OK, I thought. This was crazy, wonderful stuff. I could feel Beethoven working away at something here—turning the theme upside down and inside out, breaking it apart in strange ways—fracturing it. This music was really getting under my skin, and I could feel my resolve to master it rise. I practiced this sonata intensively for months. I broke it down measure by measure; I studied its structure; I spent hours working out my own ham-handed fingerings for complex passages; I played it over and over again to Douglas’s withering critique.

  The more I got to know this piece, the more passionate I became about it, and the more I fell in love with Beethoven. Any time I dipped into this sonata, I felt Beethoven’s presence. There he was. When I was a kid, I had learned to play the piano by placing my small hands on top of my grandfather’s as he played his beautiful ballads. Now my hands were on Beethoven’s. Through Beethoven’s music, I knew him—in the Keatsean sense. This was not just music. It was transmission.

  Douglas’s hunch had been right: There was something important for me in this music. It took me on a journey into some untamed part of myself. It reminded me a little of Thoreau’s description of his discovery of “the Wild” after he climbed Mount Katahdin in Maine. This contact with “the Wild” changed Thoreau and his view of nature forever. He discovered nature to be rough, untamed, dangerous, relentlessly itself, and shockingly disdainful of human laws. Thoreau declared that human beings could not be fully human without “the Wild.” Beethoven, it seemed, was a Mount Katahdin experience for me.

  As a young poet, Emily Dickinson wrote to her soon-to-be mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and sent him several poems to examine. At the end of the letter, she queried: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Higginson was thunderstruck by her poems. “Your poetry lives!” he wrote back immediately. “It lives.” Just so with Beethoven’s music. It lives. Work performed in the thrall of dharma has a life of its own. It has an existence strangely independent of its author.

  2

  Ludwig van Beethoven is the apotheosis of the dharma project. If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If any man was ever saved by his dharma, it was surely Beethoven.

  Beethoven was an emotionally wounded, profoundly neurotic man, who was tortured by inner conflicts throughout his life. He suffered from the very kinds of internal divisions that Marion had described—split between his massive idealism about human nature on the one hand and the misanthropic, angry, spiteful man that he could be on the other. He was split between the ecstatic and spiritualized writer of the Missa Solemnis and the solitary man who wandered the streets of Vienna at night in search of prostitutes. And as with most neurotics, he was tortured by his own behavior. Beethoven was suicidal off and on for significant periods of time throughout his life. And even in his most stable periods, he could appear to be just on the brink of madness.

  Yet, split as he had been throughout life, as Beethoven lay on his deathbed he was a fulfilled man. Not a happy man, mind you. But a fulfilled man—certainly. (There can be a world of difference between happiness and fulfillment. Even as he lay dying, Beethoven purportedly raised a fist to heaven.) Beethoven was a man who had found his dharma, and had brought everything he had to it. “I have run the race,” said St. Paul toward the end of his long career as an Apostle. “I have kept the faith.” Beethoven might have made the same declaration.

  This fragile, driven, and tenderhearted man was, in the final analysis, a saved man. He had been saved by his work. In the midst of an almost unbearably painful life, God dropped Beethoven a lifeline: music. And Beethoven reached for it with everything he had.

  Beethoven was in love with his dharma. Unhappy as he was in life, he felt an urgent calling to fully express the gift that was in him. It was a reason to live. He several times wrote, in effect, I would have killed myself, but I had work to do. “Before my departure for the Elysian fields,” Beethoven wrote to a friend, midway through his life, “I must leave behind me what the Eternal Spirit has infused into my soul and bids me complete …”

  And now a surprise: Beethoven was deeply inspired by his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.

  (When I discovered this I almost fell off my chair. Beethoven knew about yoga? My worlds had collided. This discovery caused me to call a dharma buddy in Paris out of the blue—and practically in the middle of the night—to tell him this news.)

  In his search for psychological and spiritual survival, Beethoven had combed the world’s great literature. And perhaps not surprisingly, he had bumped into the Bhagavad Gita. He read it intensively. He made notes from it—and from other great Hindu scriptures—and kept these sacred phrases in plain view under glass on his desk.

  By the age of twenty-eight, Beethoven had discovered the idea of a holy dharma—a holy work that would save him. He realized that it was imper
ative that his life be spent manifesting his gift. He scribbled the following quote from the Bhagavad Gita into his personal diary: “Blessed is the man who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event … Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. Perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called yoga.” And, as we will see, in his quest to make meaning of his suffering, Beethoven enacted in his life virtually all the pillars of Krishna’s teaching.

  Most interesting to me in Beethoven’s particularly vivid dharma story is the way in which authentic dharma turns suffering into light. Dharma did not end Beethoven’s suffering. He suffered until the end of his life. I have at home a picture of him on his deathbed, a man utterly worn out by his suffering. But through his dharma, Beethoven transformed his suffering. By the middle of his life, he had learned to plumb the depths of his agony, and to use it. He had learned to open his many wounds—his deafness, his craziness, his paranoid suspicions—to the full view of humanity, and to let a strange light pour from them.

  Beethoven would abhor even the slightest hint of comparison to Christ—Beethoven, who seemed so very un-Christlike, and who eschewed much of Catholic doctrine and dogma. But in fact he was the very image of “the suffering servant” described by St. Paul in the New Testament. When I think of Beethoven as I have come to understand him, I cannot but see in my mind’s eye those vivid Catholic images of Christ with his palms and side oozing blood and light. Both blood and light, mind you. Beethoven’s relentless—and often bloody—pursuit of his dharma gave light to the world. It saved him. But it also saved the world. More about this strange fact later.

  Ultimately, as Beethoven’s great biographer, Maynard Solomon, has written, “Beethoven turned all of his defeats into victories.” This would be a good thing for each of us to learn. We each have wounds. Can a full performance of our dharma turn our wounds into light?

  3

  The few verifiable accounts of Beethoven’s childhood are devastating to read. Beethoven’s father, Johann, was a mediocre, insecure, and alcoholic court musician, who bullied his son (young “Louis,” as he was called) into musical training when he was only four or five years old. Johann’s instruction of Louis was brutal, willful, abusive, and demeaning. One family friend routinely “saw the little Louis van Beethoven in the house standing in front of the clavier and weeping.”

  As a child, Beethoven was used in the most cynical way. His father apparently viewed the boy’s talents as a significant source of income and also as a potential means of reflected glory. To make matters worse, there is no record that his mother, Maria Magdalena, defended her son from this ongoing abuse. Indeed, the accounts indicate that she was herself neglectful: “[The] Beethoven children were not delicately brought up,” recounts one witness. “They were often left with maids … and Beethoven himself was often dirty and [neglected].”

  What is perhaps most perverse is that Beethoven’s father attempted to willfully quash young Beethoven’s tremendous early inventiveness and creativity at the piano. From a very early age, Beethoven was brilliantly adept at improvisation—on both the clavier and the violin. This kind of improvisation was the hallmark of the great nineteenth century virtuosos and composers, so one would have thought a father who hoped to cash in would have helped to promote this incipient genius. Not, alas, the hapless, cruel, and bungling Johann.

  Interestingly, the adult Beethoven was absolutely mute on the subject of his early years. But it is clear that by our contemporary standards young Louis had suffered an abusive childhood, and could be expected to suffer lifelong symptoms of what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Indeed, that is exactly what happened: Young Beethoven became shy and reclusive; he was often monosyllabic; he was socially inept and maladroit; he had difficulty maintaining basic standards of self-care and cleanliness.

  But Beethoven had one thin lifeline to sanity and personal restitution: his music. However cruelly it was initially administered to him, music nonetheless came to provide him with a protected inner world into which he could retreat. His happiest hours were when the family was away, and he was free to practice and improvise at the clavier. From an early age he engaged in intensive practice, which was a kind of play that helped him reconstitute himself. Indeed, it was the only form of play open to him, and he gobbled it up hungrily.

  Intensive practice provided Beethoven with the tools to symbolically and energetically transform his experience. It gave him an increasing experience of self-efficacy and self-esteem, and provided him with an experience of fun. Finally, it came to provide him with a profound sense of purpose, accomplishment, and meaning. It turns out that these qualities of dharma can rescue even a life in peril.

  Later in his life, Beethoven (on rare occasions) shared memories of his early days with his student Carl Czerny. He described how he had practiced prodigiously—even at five, six, seven years old—usually until well past midnight. We can see now that Beethoven had begun at a very tender age to enter into the phase of mastery we have called “deliberate practice.” His early efforts had all of the hallmarks: He practiced in chunks of four hours; he practiced with the intention of improving his performance; he broke complex musical tasks down into their component parts; whenever he could, he used trainers and teachers—and all kinds of feedback—to improve. Young Beethoven hungered for instruction, and sought it out wherever he could find it.

  Beethoven’s early practice was more than play. It was, indeed, as Robert Frost has written, “play for mortal stakes.” It allowed him to find his center—an inner bulwark that he would use to survive adulthood.

  4

  Young Louis was a bizarre, awkward kid. Strangely, for a musical prodigy, he was what we might call a klutz, both emotionally and physically. He was forever knocking things over, breaking things, inadvertently destroying things. He could, by all accounts, be hugely irritating to be around. But many saw underneath his awkward exterior a sweetness and tenderness.

  The boy had suffered. And so he was understandably touched by the sufferings of others. Throughout life, he identified with the misery of friends and acquaintances, and he felt called to help when he could. He saw his music as the best kind of help he could offer. In a letter of 1811, he writes: “From my earliest childhood my zeal to serve our poor suffering humanity in any way whatsoever by means of my art has made no compromise with any lower motive.” And he later wrote, “Since I was a child my greatest happiness and pleasure have been to be able to do something for others.”

  In addition to music, the gods sent young Beethoven another saving gift: a noble, trustworthy, and kind mentor. Christian Gottlob Neefe was Beethoven’s first real teacher, and he helped rescue him in many of the same ways that Charles Cowden Clarke rescued the young John Keats. Neefe was a good musician. But more important for Beethoven, he was a good man. Beethoven was starved for the kind of positive regard Neefe offered. For the first time in his life, Beethoven was seen. His talent, his genius, his strong determination, his resilience—these qualities were seen, appreciated, and reflected to him.

  In his late teens, and probably as a result of Neefe’s coaching, Beethoven began to read widely and voraciously. This is when he began to frame his life as a quest to understand. He read poetry, drama, philosophy of all kinds. “There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me,” he declared.

  Beethoven was not an intellectual. His quest was more urgent than that. He was grasping for psychological survival. “I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.” This was not a pose. Beethoven was never interested in high-blown metaphysics, but only in practical solutions to the problems of living. This quality of inquiry marks him
as a real yogi. He might have said, as Thoreau did, “even I am at times a yogi.”

  5

  As we have seen, Beethoven had begun his phase of deliberate practice by the time he was five or six. By the time he was fifteen he was a brilliant and virtuosic pianist. And by his late teens he was probably the greatest pianist in Europe—the successor to Mozart, who had been dead just twelve months when Beethoven arrived in Vienna. Beethoven was highly sought after in the palaces and salons of aristocratic connoisseurs. Some were offended by the sheer boldness and unconventionality of his musical style, but most describe his musical presence as positively astonishing. We have this eyewitness account written by Carl Czerny:

  “In whatever company he might chance to be, he knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break out into loud sobs; for there was something wonderful in his expression in addition to the beauty and originality of his ideas and his spirited style of rendering them.”

  No doubt about it: Beethoven was a wunderkind. And he knew it. He aimed to be the best. He took on all comers. He frequently participated in pianistic duels, in which he challenged other important European pianists of his day to public competitions. These were like great athletic competitions and they sometimes drew hundreds of spectators. Beethoven always won. (One sore loser, Abbé Joseph Gelinek, believed that Beethoven’s supernormal powers at the piano could only be explained as sorcery—and the good Abbé later described being “bested by that young fellow [Beethoven] who must be in league with the devil.”)

  Beethoven was by all accounts a commanding presence, though often in a positively unnerving fashion. Solomon gives us a description: “[He] was short of stature, with a large head, and thick black hair that framed a pock-marked face. His forehead was broad and heavily underlined by bushy eyebrows.” Many found him ugly. But everyone noticed the unusual beauty and expressiveness of his eyes, which were sometimes flashing with life, other times inexpressively sad. Solomon continues: “His mouth was small and delicately shaped. He had white teeth, which he habitually rubbed with a napkin or handkerchief … He was powerfully built, with wide shoulders, strong hands overgrown with hair, and short, thick fingers.”