TEN
TEN
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.
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 imperative 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.
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.”
There was a crudeness in Beethoven’s appearance that all witnesses remark upon. He could be unpolished even when decked out in finery. But his friends found him often exuberant, lively, and talkative. Czerny remembered him as “always merry, mischievous, full of witticisms and jokes.” Nonetheless, all contemporary accounts also remark on his moodiness, his emotional fragility, and a tendency toward melancholy.
Beethoven clung heroically to his life’s work. There is absolutely no question that he understood that music would be his only path to wholeness. He understood the meaning of his gift. And he felt a profound responsibility to it. He knew that he could not live as other people lived. “Live only in your art,” he wrote in his diary, “for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.”
Beethoven understood that if he were to survive, he would have to privilege his art—his dharma—above all other activities in life. He would, in fact, have to pare away everything that was not his art. This evidenced a solid understanding of Krishna’s doctrine of unity of purpose. “Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the sublime and be a sanctuary of art,” Beethoven wrote in his diary.
As a result of this view, Beethoven created a life that was organized in every way to support his dharma. His daily schedule is instructive. He rose at daybreak, ate breakfast, and went directly to his desk, where he worked until midday. After lunch he ordinarily took a long walk—sometimes twice around the city—which could occupy a good part of the afternoon. This walking practice is redolent of Thoreau, of Frost, and indeed of many great writers. Beethoven discovered that his most productive work hours were in the morning, and so he protected this time, and made sure that he arrived fresh at his desk in the morning, ready to commune with his muse. He usually retired to bed early.
Beethoven pared away what most of us think of as “fun,” but the truth of the matter is that there was nothing more fun for him than his music. He sketched musical ideas constantly, whether at home, on the street, in a tavern, or lying on his side in a meadow. “I always have a notebook … with me, and when an idea comes to me, I put it down at once,” he told young Gerhard von Breuning. “I even get up in the middle of the night when a thought comes, because otherwise I might forget it.” He filled a vast number of notebooks during his lifetime, and retained them for reference until his death.
6
Work was a kind of sustaining play for Beethoven. But what exactly was he working on? Nothing small or insignificant. He was attempting nothing less than mastery of the entire Western musical tradition.
By the time he was in his midtwenties, Beethoven had mastered the tools and vernacular of the greatest living musical masters: Haydn (his teacher for a time) and Mozart. Early in his career, Beethoven had taken on an intensive study of the forms and patterns of the Western classical tradition. He had, in particular, begun a close study of the central form of this tradition—what we today call sonata form.
Sonata form was the organizing paradigm of Western music. This form, carefully developed over the course of centuries, helped a composer develop the logic of a piece of music. Sonata form was organized around three main components: the exposition of a theme, or the declaration of a musical “argument” embedded in a harmonic structure; the gradual development of some of the interesting possibilities inherent in that harmonic structure and direction; and, finally, the recapitulation of the theme and harmonic structure—now transformed and deepened in some important way. This form provided a brilliant way of developing a musical thought—investigating its possibilities and bringing it to a resolution or conclusion. Most important, it created a container for all the components of drama: for creating and sustaining tension, for expressing development and transformation, for giving us the feeling of forward movement. Sonata form is a remarkably psychological approach to music. It connects us with something quintessentially human.
Sigmund Freud himself would have appreciated the possibilities for “working through” psychological conflict that are inherent in sonata form. Freud, of course, called this conflict “neurosis.” Neurosis is simply conflict between parts of the self—conflict, say, between our desires and our conscience; or conflict between our sometimes monstrously driven cravings and our more prudent selves, or even conflict between an overweening scrupulosity and normal human wishes.
All of the most mature forms of human play involve us in the “working through” of these conflicts. When “work is play for mortal stakes,” as it was for Beethoven, it helps us to resolve doubt and division, and to at least briefly experience a sense of resolution, of “union,” and of well-being.
So, sonata form provided Beethoven with an effective form for working through his inner conflicts. Some might protest that this working through was only symbolic. It was in fact very, very real. The working through provided to Beethoven by his music was central to his psychological survival. It was essential that Beethoven plumb the depths of musical form, because in doing so he was plumbing his own depths.
Piano sonatas were Beethoven’s first laboratory for investigating the transformational possibilities of sonata form. Through his development of the piano sonata, he was able to investigate the plasticity of sonata form itself. What was the form’s real capacity for holding conflict? For helping him endure the tension of opposites? How much of himself could he pour into this form?
We have said that deliberate practice leads to heightened pattern recognition. There is no greater example of this heightened pattern recognition than Beethoven, who found astonishing new patterns within the structure of Western music. He found patterns within patterns, just as Thoreau did in nature and Corot did in painting. Beethoven found within the sonata form new, unexplored possibilities. As Solomon tells us, he explored “thematic condensation; more intense, extended and dramatic development; and the infusion of richer fantasy and improvisatory materials into an even more highly structured classicism.” Beethoven saw possibilities in this form that only a highly developed musical imagination could perceive.
In effect, then, Beethoven became a musical seer. Like the mystical rishis of ancient India, he perceived aspects of reality that were beyond the perceptual range of ordinary people. Very few of his contemporaries could understand the musical leaps he had made. And of course, not seeing the genius of his refined perception, his critics called him “mad.”
They were only half right. Throughout his life, Beethoven was indeed constantly threatened by the forces of disintegration planted in his childhood. But his music became a laboratory in which he could bring these forces to the surface, work them out, master them. This is the very hallmark of great dharma. Each of us must find the form that allows this naming, this working through, and, finally, this mastery. We may find these forms in sports, in the arts, in finance, in academia, in relationship building, in child-rearing—or, indeed, in stamp collecting. But find them we must.
7
By his midtwenties, at the very apex of his meteoric rise to the top of musical Vienna, Beethoven was harboring a devastating secret. He was slowly going deaf. He had no idea what this might mean for his music. It was clear that he would no longer be able to conduct or perform. But would he even be able to compose? Beethoven was justly afraid that he might not be able to psychologically survive the loss of his creative life. In an effort to deny his increasing infirmity—both to others and to himself—he became more and more withdrawn. His social and emotional isolation added an almost unbearable burden to an already heavily stressed psyche. His fragile compromise with life was breaking down.
Beethoven describes his increasing misery in a now-famous letter to his friend Franz Wegeler: “… my ears continue to hum and buzz day and night. I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap … Heaven only knows what is to become of me. Already I have often cursed my Creator and my existence.”
Ludwig van Beethoven had made a fragile compromise with life. Now the whole house of cards was threatening to collapse. As his deafness increased, so did his anxiety, his dread, and his depression.
In the spring of 1802, Beethoven moved to the quiet little village of Heiligenstadt, north of Vienna on the Danube, where he apparently remained for almost half a year. This move had been suggested by a physician, who assured him that a period of enforced rest and quiet would make a difference in his hearing. When it became clear that even radical quiet was not having the slightest positive effect, he began to unravel. In Heiligenstadt—alone, desperate, despairing—he seriously contemplated suicide. He most likely remained at serious risk of taking his own life for a period of some weeks, or even months.
Throughout the course of this ordeal, the composer searched his own soul. He raged at heaven. He prayed. He most likely wrote in his journal—though we have no writing from the very center of this crisis. What we do have, miraculously, is a document that Beethoven wrote after he had finally made the decision to live. It is a remarkable piece of personal testimony—now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament—in which he bares his soul to his family and his friends. The Testament, written in the form of a letter to his brothers, was never mailed. It was discovered in his desk drawer after his death.
The Heiligenstadt Testament recounts Beethoven’s wrestling match with suicidality. It describes the razor’s edge on which he then lived, and makes a full accounting of the consequences—both personal and professional—of his deafness. And it describes his decision to go on living. He would live, henceforth, he says, for his art alone: “It was only my art that held me back [from suicide] … Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. So I endured this wretched existence … Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so—Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready.—Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eighth year.—Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul; thou knowest that therein dwells the love of mankind and the desire to do good …”
Beethoven had faced death. And he had decided to live. As a result of this ordeal, he was less afraid of either death or suffering. The experience of utter despair profoundly changed him. “Stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart,” says the Tao te Ching, as you will recall. Though Beethoven had not discovered the Tao te Ching in his vast reading of Eastern literature, nevertheless, he had independently discovered this same principle of dharma. Embrace death with your whole heart and you will endure forever
“With joy I hasten to meet death,” he writes toward the end of the Heiligenstadt Testament. “—If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will still be coming too soon despite my harsh fate, and I should probably wish it later—yet even so I should be happy, for would it not free me from a state of endless suffering?”
Beethoven finished his Testament with a strange good-bye, “Thus I bid thee farewell,” he ends. To whom was he saying good-bye? It seems clear that he was saying good-bye to an earlier version of himself.
In the years leading up to Heiligenstadt, Beethoven had angrily railed against the injustice of his condition. He was Job with his fist raised toward Heaven. But for the most part during those earlier years, he kept his despair a secret. He confided it to no one. He intended to use his anger to keep him alive, to keep his creative spirit moving. He would overcome. “I will take Fate by the throat,” he had declared.
Now, at Heiligenstadt, came a great surrender. And not just a surrender to a terrible fate, but a true acceptance of that fate. At first, of course, his surrender looked more like resignation. But at Heiligenstadt, he found the beginnings of a true acceptance of his situation. After Heiligenstadt there was a deep change in Beethoven. He had discovered the link between his suffering and his art. His sacrifice now had meaning. He had discovered one of the central principles of dharma.
By the end of the summer of 1802, as J. W. N. Sullivan tells us, Beethoven had discovered that his work was mightier than his suffering. He had discovered, in fact, that his work could not be destroyed by his suffering: “… he found that his genius, that he had felt called upon to cherish and protect, was really a mighty force using him as a channel or servant … only when the consciously defiant Beethoven had succumbed, only when his pride and strength had been so reduced that he was willing, even eager, to die and abandon the struggle, did he find that his creative power was indeed indestructible and that it was its deathless energy that made it impossible for him to die.”
“In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer,” wrote Albert Camus, in the midst of a similar period of despair. An invincible summer.
“Never again was [Beethoven’s] attitude toward life one of defiance,” writes Sullivan. “He had become aware within himself of an indomitable creative energy that nothing could destroy.” Beethoven, exulting in this newfound freedom, wrote the following note to himself in the margins of his great C Major string quartet, “In the same way that you are now able to throw yourself into the whirlpool of society, so you are able to write your works in spite of all social hindrances. Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even for art.”
Beethoven came to see that complete surrender to his situation in life—to his deafness, to his various neuroses—was absolutely essential for his own spiritual development and for the development of his art. He accepted the apparent mystery that his art and his suffering were inextricably linked.
8
After Heiligenstadt, Beethoven’s creativity burst forth, unrestrained, at least temporarily, by inner conflict. Having worked through a nearly fatal series of doubts and self-division, Beethoven entered a period of unity of purpose and of certitude. “I live entirely in my music,” he wrote, “and hardly have I completed one composition when I have already begun another. At my present rate of composition, I often produce three or four works at the same time.” This burgeoning of creativity reminds us of Thoreau at Walden, of Frost in England, or of Whitman after the Civil War. The music, Beethoven says, seems to be writing itself. The Master now experienced a new dimension of trust in The Gift. He understood that his gift was not personal. That he was not the Doer. That his responsibility was not to create The Gift—that was a done deal—but only to sustain it, to husband it, to nurture it in every way possible. This newfound faith in The Gift had a paradoxical effect: It relaxed him and energized him at one and the same time.
What emerged next was what some biographers call Beethoven’s “heroic period.” The term “heroic” is usually thought to refer to Beethoven’s fascination with power, and with powerful men—specifically Napoleon, to whom he had first dedicated his magisterial Third Symphony, the Eroica. In fact, “heroic” refers to Beethoven’s own newly exuberant experience of faith.
Beethoven now truly began to intuit the connection between The Wound and The Gift. He would never again try to cover up The Wound. In fact, he would open it for all to see. He would submit to the mystery of his fate, and trust it. He would allow himself to be a sacrifice. “Submission, deepest submission to your fate, only this can give you the sacrifices—for this matter of service,” he wrote in his Tagebuch (his diary). What does this mean? The theme of sacrifice and submission colors many of his entries in the Tagebuch henceforward. It means that he accepts his life as a sacrifice. But now a willing sacrifice. Even an eager one. He began to understand that The Wound itself is an aspect of The Gift. They cannot be divided.
Solomon grasps this essential point: “Like Henry James’s obscure hurt and Dostoevsky’s holy disease, even [Beethoven’s] loss of hearing was in some sense necessary or at least useful, to the fulfillment of his creative quest.” Mysteriously, The Gift issues forth out of The Wound. It does not quite heal The Wound, but it makes sense of it. It gives it meaning. And meaning is everything.
With this newfound understanding, Beethoven now perceived altogether new possibilities in sonata form—precisely for giving voice to The Wound. Sonata form had not yet been stretched to its capacity—to express either heroic or tragic levels of experience. But Beethoven now saw that it was uniquely suited to this task. He grasped (as Solomon tells us) “its unique ability simultaneously to release and to contain the most explosive musical concepts within binding aesthetic structures.”
Krishna and Arjuna give us the field of battle. Is this just a symbol? No, it is not. It is quite real. The battlefield is an absolutely central component of the Gita. Our conflicts and inner divisions—all that separates us from our true selves—must be worked out on the field of real life. On the field of relationships. Of work. Of effort. Of hobbies. Of callings. This is what dharma is. Dharma calls us not to just any old battlefield, but to the battlefield where we will suffer most fruitfully. Where our suffering will be most useful to ourselves, to our souls, and to the world.
The ongoing argument in Bhagavad Gita scholarship about whether the battlefield at Kurukshetra is symbolic or real is a red herring. The battlefield is both entirely symbolic and entirely real. This is the genius of Krishna’s teaching on action. The soul must be purified through action. Beethoven gives us another kind of field of battle, in which great forces fight with one another, and in which dharma, truth, and unity eventually triumph.
Beethoven’s battleground is harmony and theme and variations. Music itself becomes a way of working through soul-shattering conflict. His own desperate need to work through his inner divisions gave the world a wholly new way of working with the problem of doubt and despair.
9
Beethoven’s fragile compromise with life broke down one more time before his death. Between the years 1815 and 1820, he survived a series of devastating psychological challenges: the severe illness of his brother Caspar Carl; the threatened loss of his nephew—and “adoptive son”—Karl (and with it the loss of his fantasy of “family”); the loss of his dream of marriage and the final renunciation of his hopes for domestic happiness.
Once again, Beethoven was on the brink of despair, and he found himself on the edge of emotional breakdown. His suicidal impulses were reawakened, and he talked of suicide with his friends and companions. “I often despair and would like to die,” he wrote. During this period, his physical appearance once again deteriorated, and his friends took to buying him new clothes—trying in vain to clean him up. On one now-famous occasion he was almost arrested in Vienna as a vagrant. “I learned yesterday,” wrote a Viennese acquaintance, “that Beethoven had become crazy.”
During these years, Beethoven was again at times close to the breaking point. Many of his symptoms were precisely what we might expect of a man who had been profoundly traumatized as a boy, and who had had no help to integrate this trauma: He had sudden rages, experienced increasing obsessive states (especially around money), felt unreasonably persecuted, and experienced ungrounded suspicions. He was in some ways—as Vienna saw daily—“a sublime madman.”
And yet, underneath these outward signs and symptoms was still percolating the very best of Beethoven—his capacity to use his work to survive, and to transmute his suffering into sublime creations.
During these years, Beethoven embarked on a new phase of his spiritual journey. He read voraciously, studying the core scriptures of many of the world’s great religions. He discussed his existential questions with a small circle of friends, through the vehicle of his “Conversation Books.” He developed a series of notebooks through which he communicated with his friends—intimates who were some of Vienna’s leading citizens, writers, philosophers, musicians, civil servants, journalists. He investigated various views of God. Above all, during these difficult years, Beethoven increased his sense of dedication to his own duty. “God sees into my innermost heart and knows that as a man I perform most conscientiously and on all occasions the duties which Humanity, God and Nature enjoin upon me …” Humanity, God, and Nature: These became Beethoven’s spiritual pillars.
What rose in Beethoven now was an intense determination to bring forth the best that was within him. He set to work. He knew that he would not have time to finish all of the fantastic musical creations that he had already envisioned. He knew that he was in a race against time. But he was determined to bring forth what he could. “I must leave behind me what the Eternal Spirit has infused into my soul,” he wrote. “Why, I feel as if I had hardly composed more than a few notes.”
Beethoven identified with Arjuna’s doubt and questioning, and with the idea of action that is redemptive. He copied into his diary a number of Krishna’s teachings about dharma: “Perform thy duty! Abandon all thought of the consequence.” Beethoven had understood Krishna’s lesson: Your soul can be saved only through action in the performance of your own dharma. He had copied another pillar of Krishna’s teachings into his diary: “Let not thy life be spent in inaction! Depend upon application!” And so, the Master launched into his final period of action. What emerged was another astonishing period of productivity.
Beethoven was remarkably clearheaded in mapping out the work that he wished to finish before his death: There was the great Ninth Symphony, of course; the Missa Solemnis; his spectacularly modern Diabelli Variations; and of course his late string quartets. He put his work above everything and organized his life exclusively around it. “My motto is always: nulla dies sine linea [no day without a line] … and if I let my Muse go to sleep, it is only that she may be all the more active when she awakes. I still hope to create a few great works, and then like an old child to finish my earthly course somewhere among kind people …”
In his search to fully express the sublime music he now heard in his head, Beethoven scoured the history of Western music. He turned backward in his final years toward Bach and Handel, toward the earlier geniuses of fugue and polyphony. What resulted was a remarkable final maturation of his style. In his last several years, we see Beethoven making new connections—expanding sonata form to its very breaking point. His creations were thrilling to those few who could understand what he was doing. And for those who could not understand it, he had little use.
Beethoven was now fiercely determined to offer his final contribution to mankind. He dedicated himself wholly to work. He stripped his life down to absolute essentials. He let go of social niceties. He cared not what others thought. He withdrew into himself when necessary. (And he found a rationale for this turn inward—yogis call this “introversion”—in the literature of the world’s great religions. As he himself wrote in his journals, he discovered the kind of deep meditative states and ritual silence described by Brahmin novices. Time both slowed down and speeded up. He became, indeed, a yogi, during these last years—experiencing a decided maturation of his mind, of his capacity to focus, and of his capacity to perceive subtle patterns in musical forms, patterns that few of his contemporaries could perceive or understand.
It was, indeed, Beethoven’s late-in-life genius that I had experienced in my struggle with his piano sonata opus 110. In this sonata, Beethoven was working through The Wound with such fierceness and with such skill that his arresting musical design caught me up in its net. There was something new and dangerous here that reached far down into my soul to touch my own Gordian knots—and my own longing for freedom. It was indeed the music of a Seer: wildly free, though brilliantly married with form.
Beethoven’s music has changed my life. What has it given me? It has given me not only inspiration and hope, but a visceral way to work through my own neurotic conflicts—a path through my own inner tangles. Every time I play his sonata, I touch a part of myself that nothing else can reach. And afterward, I have the distinct feeling of having been sorted out. Beethoven, in working through his own suffering with integrity, has carried some kind of load for me. This is the mystical effect of dharma.
It is this very effect that we see shining forth from the lives we have examined in this book so far. It shines forth from Marion. From Keats. From Thoreau. From Anthony. Each one of them was able to discover the secret of turning his own particular wound into light—and a light that illumined not only their own lives, but the life of the world.
10
Toward the close of his life, a fantastic transformation took place in Beethoven. The more Beethoven became vulnerable to the deterioration of age—both psychologically and physically—the more his Soul clapped its hands … and louder sang.
Two remarkable sketches survive of Beethoven on his deathbed—one by Joseph Teltscher drawn rapidly just before Beethoven’s death, and another by Josef Danhauser drawn just after his death. Both portray a man who is entirely spent. Spent, yes. But like Hokusai on his deathbed, still wanting to get up and work.
Solomon describes the moment of his death: “Late in the afternoon on the final day, during a snowfall and a great thunderstorm, he momentarily opened his eyes, lifted his right hand, and clenched it into a fist. When his hand fell back from this effort, Beethoven was dead.”
Ludwig van Beethoven has become for me one of the greatest exemplars of dharma. His courageous struggle with his vocation shows us the precise relationship between the salvation of the individual soul and the salvation of the world.
If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.
Now we can add a codicil: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.