The Black Spaniard
Page 13
Creativity kept the demons at bay, perhaps transforming them into art, which others in turn could access for inspiration as they engaged in psychological and spiritual warfare of their own.
In the spring, however, the Theater on the Wien, where Luis had been in residence, came under new management, and the composer had to move out. He found new lodgings in the southern part of the city. He was between projects, preparing for the publication of the Third Symphony, when Ries burst into the room in a state of agitation.
“Sir, you are not going to believe this!” exclaimed Ries, dashing to the piano where Luis sat. “It’s Bonaparte. He has declared himself Emperor!”
As a black storm cloud sweeps across a clear May sky, blotting out the sun, Luis’s face changed from a cheerful expression of friendly greeting to a dark and threatening squall of violent emotions.
“What are you saying?”
“I said, Bonaparte has declared himself Emperor! He has betrayed all who trusted in him. He who would end tyranny has himself become a tyrant!”
In his need to urgently communicate important news, Ries had not thought through the consequences of his announcement. No sooner had the words left his lips, than Ries was overcome with regret at his rashness. The composer looked like he was about to explode. And then he did.
“This can’t be true!” Luis roared, bounding from the bench, and dashing the score he was working on onto the floor. He walked back and forth briskly, holding his head in his hands, kicking inanimate objects out of his way, then stood facing the window, both fists pounding on the wall. “No, no, no!”
“Master, I’m sorry I was so abrupt. Here, sit down,” offered Ries, trying to calm his teacher and friend. Luis was now hitting his head against the windowpane, and Ries was attempting to pull him back. The servant ran in from the kitchen, but Ries shooed him away. “Sir, please calm down, the people will not stand for this. Austria, the German states, will not stand for this, it will not last for long, I am certain!”
“Where did you hear this?” fumed Luis, not moving.
“There is nothing else in the papers, nor on people’s lips,” said Ries, his voice rising so the master would hear each word. “It is a fact. But it will not be endured.”
Luis turned, his face flushed with rage, every muscle and tendon in his body tight with anger. “To think I was duped,” he said, his back to the wall. “To think I believed and trusted…that!” The composer’s eyes then fixed on a table across the room from the two men.
“Well,” he said, regaining some composure and trying to breathe deeply. “There is something I can do!” He strode across the room, walking right over scores, newspapers, and kicking a tray of dishes to the side.
He stood at the table where lay a single thick document. It was the autograph original of the Third Symphony. Ries, who was close behind him, looked down as Luis put both hands firmly on the table edge for support. “Sir, what are you thinking?” Ries asked fearfully, hoping to stop some dire action.
Luis reached down and lifted up the first section attached to the title page. Luis’s name was written on the bottom of the sheet. At the top, in large ornate script, was a single word. That word was Bonaparte.
Luis snatched the pages faster than Ries could react and tore them down the center and threw the pieces onto the floor. Ries gasped. Luis breathed out, hard and with a sense of finality. The student did not dare to pick up the pieces or even to move.
“It is over,” said Luis, returning to a kind of post-apocalyptic calm. “So he is no more than a common mortal!” Luis said, walking back to the window and speaking to himself rather than to Ries. “Now he, too, will tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition. Now he will think himself superior to all men. A tyrant!”
Ries had the cowering servant bring Luis a glass of Rhine wine, and mustered the nerve to lead his teacher to a comfortable chair.
“All my life,” Luis said, again to himself, “all my life, it has been a struggle. Why am I always the odd man out? What does it mean, Ries? Like all men, I seek a hero to show me the way. Here was one. And now we see he has feet of clay. Whom can we turn to?” He stopped and had a drink of wine, motioning to the servant to bring a glass for Ries.
“I think I know,” he said at last. “The answer isn’t there,” he pointed out the window, “but here,” he pointed to his heart and head, much as he had to Neefe so many years ago. “Knowledge and wisdom, reason and faith. But always, our own self-determination.” He was silent for a while, and Ries made no motion. “Ries, you may go, no lessons today. Well, no music lessons, at any rate!” patting the young man on the back, sending him out.
Luis sat alone on this beautiful May morning, his hearing more than half gone, but his other senses sharp and alert. The world made a peculiar sense, for the first time. He realized with utter clarity that one could not put their trust entirely in man, any man. His thoughts drifted from the world of politics to his own life.
Why was I Black in a White world? Why did I have typhus and small pox, and why did I survive and others not? Why was I short and smaller than others? Why was everything destroyed in the fire and the flood? Why did I have a cruel father who beat me? Why did my mother die? Why was I gifted when others were not?
What does it mean to be alien in one’s own land, by an accident of birth and then, no accident, but deliberate ostracism and sometimes persecution and sometimes abandonment into the incomparable aloneness of the Self?
When I stood in the woods beyond the vineyards, when I stood and thought how simple it would be to lie down—never to rise, to let starvation and thirst remove me from the torments of a life of difference—when I had in that manner considered ending my life, it was not because of deafness, it was because I had given up the struggle to overcome the sense of otherness that followed me since birth.
The whispers about an earlier child born with the same name, the racial ambiguity, the lies about my age. An infant has no defense against a judging world and all its creatures pass judgment and want to block out this oddity from the predictable flow of things, the natural order. A mother, or midwife, intervenes, but the other does not disappear. Indeed, the only recourse is to embrace the alien Self.
I have been shipwrecked in a foreign land, and it was the land of my birth and the land to which I fled. Estranged from man, from God, from all Creation, I am cast out in unfamiliar waters to fend for myself, and, despite the best efforts of all, I have not failed. I have not failed!
Like the master of a martial art, I have turned the force of my opponents back upon themselves until it is the status quo that trembles. Has this occurred before? I would be self-centered to think so. But for me—no, it has not occurred before—and so this is something entirely new—the strangeness of my music, of this particular symphony, of my own identity.
For now I see who I am, I see it written on these sounds I can barely hear but which will ring out for all eternity. I am engraved on every invisible note and encoded in every silent chord. And still it is a kind of heroism, but not in the realm of politics or art: it embodies the moment when the odd man out confronts his destiny and says to the legion of those who would obstruct him, “I have taken Fate by the throat! It will not bend and crush me.”
And with this, and with a new name, the name of the disenfranchised rather than a self-proclaimed ruler of men, the name “Eroica,” heroic, I rededicate this symphony and light the flame, not for one fallible man, but for the hope of all, for all Eternity.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment does not suggest that the individuals who have assisted or inspired me necessarily support this project or endorse this novel, which blends fact with fiction. However, they were kind and generous in sharing resources and providing insight (and in some cases, inspiration) regarding the life, community, and music of Beethoven. I am deeply grateful to:
The University of Bonn Archives, Thomas Becker, director
The Ira F. Brilliant Center for B
eethoven Studies at San José State,
William Meredith, director and scholar-in-residence, and
Patricia Stroh, curator
The Beethoven-Haus Bibliothek, Bonn, Germany, Dorothea Geffert, librarian
Sarada Holt Johnson for her encouragement, patience, and understanding
Readers Marguerite Auerbacher and Julia Pillard for their keen powers of observation, invaluable critical review, and warm support.
The Burlington County, New Jersey, Public Library System
Alan Morrison, the Haas Charitable Trust Chair in Organ Studies, the Curtis Institute of Music
Terry Melanson, author, The Perfectibilists, Trine Day (January 31, 2009)
Londa Schwiebinger, the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Stanford University, author of "The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Science," Eighteenth-Century Studies, Summer 1990
Jonathan Biss, pianist, author, and educator, The Curtis Institute of Music, whom I met through a Coursera course on Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas
An expression of deepest gratitude to the late Susanne Zantop, author of the incomparable essay, “The Beautiful, the Ugly, and the German Race: Gender and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century Anthropological Discourse.” Dr. Zantop’s essay can be found in the anthology, Gender and Germanness, Cultural Productions of Nation. Berghahn Books, 1987.
Biographical material absorbed over a lifetime of reading includes a number of works, led by the gold standard of Beethoven research, The Life of Beethoven by Alexander Wheelock Thayer. Other authors whose works I consulted in the final stages of writing included Barry Cooper, Maynard Solomon, and popular Beethoven Web sites such as the Raptus Society, Ludwig van Beethoven Forum, and the Beethoven Reference Site. A number of Web sites provided public-domain translations of Beethoven documents, sufficient for a work of fiction, though not for scholarship. I have not read any work of fiction about Beethoven, though I have enjoyed a couple of films, especially Copying Beethoven, with a commendable performance by Ed Harris.
For those wondering which episodes in this novel were purely fictional, they include the Masonic reunion and any connection between Beethoven and his cousin Rovantini with the racial experiment at Kassel. However, both episodes have a deep connection to Beethoven’s story. Masonic life was an important part of the world of Beethoven and his mentors. His teacher Neefe, briefly mentioned in this book, was head of the Bonn chapter of the Bavarian Illuminati, another secret society popular in the late eighteenth century. As for the experiment at Kassel, it underscores just how entrenched racism and discrimination against dark-skinned people was during the years of Beethoven’s development. Another fictional episode relates to the Immortal Beloved. We may never know for certain who the beloved was, but we do know that Beethoven’s heart was captured by a friend he knew for too short a time.