Beethoven's Assassins E-Book

Andrew Crumey

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Original Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 665

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Simultaneously a touching human story, a meditation on art and science, and a primer on Beethoven's life and work, Andrew Crumey's ninth novel skilfully weaves history, music, erudition and humour in a page-turning mystery that will resonate in the reader's mind long afterwards. A lost opera and a dark conspiracy lie at the heart of this philosophical comedy which views Beethoven through the eyes of multiple characters across time, linked by strange events at a rambling country house. Nowadays a retreat for artists, scientists and researchers, the house was formerly an asylum with a clairvoyant inmate, and before that, a location for esoteric experiments. As labyrinthine as the architecture is a plot whose themes include Crusader legends and 1920s literary London, mesmerism and freemasonry, psychoanalysis and theosophy. Holding everything together is a present-day scholar whose pandemic disasters propel him into the byways of history and towards an untimely demise.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Beethoven’s Assassins

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now combines teaching creative writing at Northumbria University with his writing.

He is the author of seven previous novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D’Alembert’s Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia (2008, Dedalus edition 2015) and The Secret Knowledge (2013) as well as the narrative sequence The Great Chain of Unbeing (2018).

Andrew Crumey’s novels have been translated into fifteen languages.

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ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 39 7

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First published by Dedalus in 2023

Beethoven’s Assassins copyright © Andrew Crumey 2023

The right of Andrew Crumey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

Contents

One

Therese

Beethoven and Philosophy

Therese

Beethoven and Philosophy

Two

Adam

Sullivan

Therese

Three

Coyle

Adam

Sullivan

Coyle

Adam

Sullivan

Coyle

Adam

Four

1823

Five

Coyle

Celia Carter

Coyle

Ludwig

Coyle

Schindler

Beethoven and Philosophy

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One

Therese

By heck he couldn’t half go on. He’d spend hours wandering like a tramp round the estate, come home expecting his dinner, then he’d start lecturing us. Shouting, like, on account of his bad ears. Very convenient, those ears of his, for one who liked talking more than listening, wouldn’t you say? Believe me, you couldn’t get a word in edgeways with old fly-by-night around, except behind his back, though even then he’d notice. Which makes you wonder, don’t it? Exactly how deaf was he?

If you ask me, there’s far too much said about Ludwig and not enough about the rest of the family. Grandfather Beethoven was a very eminent musician in Bonn, so I’m told. As was Ludwig’s father until the — well, not to put too fine a point on it — until drink got the better of him. Which was Ludwig’s vice an’all, though you could never say that of either of his brothers, one of them my own fine husband. They both saw sense early on. Only brass in music’s the sort you blow through. Ludwig did it as a matter of family honour, him being the eldest, but the next one, he went into the civil service, didn’t he? And the youngest, my Johann, he had the best notion, got himself trained in the science of pharmacy, meaning medications and such. Put it this way: how many tunes have you ever bought in your life? And how many pills? Which is how we ended up with our very own country estate when old Ludwig was still renting slums in Vienna.

Lovely place — our pride and joy. And of course it didn’t matter how many times we gave invites to Ludwig to come and spend a summer with us, he always had some sort of excuse, by which we knew him to mean he didn’t want to soil himself with our presence, me being the — ahem — “fallen woman” with a teenage daughter not my husband’s. Oh, right blooming moralist, our Ludwig.

Only time he showed up, turned out to be the last flaming holiday he ever had, didn’t it? Of course he’d pretty much dried up by then, as a composer you understand. Well, he was an old man, past fifty, all he’d been writing lately was some string quartets and who cares about the likes of that? Fit only for the fire, my husband reckoned. Said one of them had this great big fugue (kind of old-fashioned style like what Sebastian Bach wrote), went on for half a blooming hour and sounded like four cats having a fight. My Johann and the rest of the audience were cringing with embarrassment, it was such a hellish noise. Music’s meant to be nice, isn’t it? But the poor fellow was stone deaf — or so he gave everyone to believe — and what else can you expect? Johann had a quiet word with Ludwig afterwards, which is to say wrote it down, suggesting something shorter and simpler would make a better finale, a little more up-to-date. Somewhat less rechêrché, if you please. So that’s what Ludwig was up to when he came and stayed with us, trying to mend his quartet that had gone wrong.

Such a nice room we gave him to work in, my husband got it painted a few years back with views of the countryside round Bonn where he came from and it’s so beautiful, I mean, they go on about Michael Angelo and so forth but you should see the colours and all the details in the trees, can even count the leaves. Now that’s what I call art. You ask some people to draw a tree and it’s a stick with things coming out in all directions, could be anything. But these, you can tell if they’re oak or chestnut or birch or what have you. Same with the flowers and the birds, you could spend a month of Sundays trying to spot them all, cost us a florin or two I can tell you, but if you want the best you’ve got to pay for it, and the best means looking exactly like what nature does, and I don’t know about these fancy modern ideas but if you ask me, that’s what art is all about. Realism.

Oh, Ludwig managed it when he set his mind to it, that lovely symphony of his with the birds singing in it, a cuckoo and a quail and I can’t remember what else, just like the real thing. And the Battle Symphony, even better — that truly is a wonderful piece of work and you can see why it made him so famous, the one big success he had. One minute there’s Wellington’s troops coming over the hill, then it’s the Frenchies firing back at them — we heard the first performance, with real explosions, a bit loud for my taste but it brought the house down. Lovely supper afterwards, though I did have to complain to the waiter, I don’t take potatoes.

Then you get these intellectual types, scruffy young articles like that horrible scrawny Schindler who was always sniffing around. Well, they turn up their noses at the likes of the Battle Symphony, don’t they? They’d rather listen to the sound of chairs scraping as everyone leaves the room with a headache, oh pardon me, it wasn’t chairs, it was the sound of the violins in one of those damn quartets. Because they’re brainy, see? They’re better than us folks what’ve done some honest grafting and made a good living from it and can afford to pay their blooming wages. Never good enough for them to just listen and enjoy, no, they’ve got to be analysing and finding some sort of hidden meaning, like it’s all a great big puzzle. Ha! I’d like to show them our beautiful scenes from Bonn in our very own country house, in the room we gave Ludwig. That’d learn them. Because then they’d see some proper art.

But do you know what he did? Do you know what my brother-in-law went and done in that lovely room he stayed in that cost us more to decorate than he could ever earn from twenty symphonies? With all those beautiful views of his homeland, all those lovely reminders of childhood, all the blades of grass you can count, the hair on a dog’s back looking like you could stroke it? Well?

He wrote on it. The old bugger had the effrontery to scribble on our wall, on our beautiful painted murals, with his dirty great hairy hands and his grubby pencil. Art? I think we can see where we stand on that one, don’t you? By heck I was hopping mad, I was livid, I can tell you, and you don’t want to see me when I’m angry, you really don’t. By God I was spitting blood, I was hitting the ruddy roof when I saw what that stupid deaf lunatic brother-in-law of mine had done on our wall. I screamed: “Johann!!”

And he came running to look. Jaw hit the floor so it did, same as mine had. I mean, you can talk about genius and inspiration and all the rest of it, but how do you account for anyone so blinking gormless as to do that, eh?

And what was it he’d written on the wall of the loveliest room in our house? Some new tune that’d come into his head? Some comment about fate or beauty or the infinite that people might want to put in a book? No.

Three pairs of socks.

That’s what our great composer had chosen to make a note of, so he wouldn’t forget, and he’d put it right there on a patch of blue sky on our mural. I could have bloody murdered him, pardon my language and God rest his soul, but I’m telling you, it still makes me seethe. I’ve even got half a mind to go with a hammer and chisel and put a word or two on that nice tombstone of his, even things up.

How can anyone be so dim-witted? I’ll grant you, a man who’s never had a wife might lack a bit of social polish — but it was on our bloody wall! Three pairs of socks! Had to get a fellow in to paint over it, but you could still see the join, he didn’t have the same shade of blue. Johann said you’d only notice if you looked hard but I could see it staring me in the face every time I walked in there, flipping eyesore, like some sort of miasma thingy, right over a beech tree. How would he have liked it if I’d gone through his desk and pulled out that blooming long Mass he wrote, stuck a ruddy great splodge on his Gloria, begging your pardon? Three pairs of socks, indeed. I’d sock the old fool, so I would.

If he wasn’t scribbling he was off roaming like a vagabond, and it was the death of him, all that tramping round the countryside like he was a blooming peasant, everyone thinking he must be bonkers. What’s there to look at in a ruddy field, when you can sit in the most beautifully painted room, admiring the very finest Italian art that hard-earned money can buy? What was he playing at?

Went and caught pneumonia, didn’t he? All our fault, of course, nowt to do with being fifty-five years of age and not wearing a vest when it’s breezy out, oh no, don’t blame it on being a flipping idiot because it’s all Therese’s fault, she’s the lady of the house and it’s her responsibility to admonish the servants about keeping the fires well lit because what else is there for her to do, blah-de-blah, and her husband ought to chastise her more often for neglecting her duties, what with marriage being a holy sacred vow of obedience and service to a higher cause. And on and flaming on. That’s what you get for giving a genius a bit of hospitality. Thank you very much, mister three pairs of socks.

By the time we all got back to Vienna for the winter he was in a right blooming state, chest like a bag of marbles, should have heard it rattle. And what with his gallivanting round, all he’d managed at our place was another rotten quartet. He wrote on it, “The difficult decision: Must it be?” Shame he didn’t ask me, I’d have told him quick enough, no it must not be, so stop going out in the blooming rain, nobody ever wrote a decent tune that way.

And you can guess who had to take charge of looking after him in that wretched hovel he was renting. Could have been a perfectly decent apartment if only he’d ever got a decorator in. Probably would have lived longer too, if he’d got the walls properly lined. All that damp, went straight to his lungs. Fine and well having your head in the clouds as long as there’s some dogsbody changing your sheets, eh? So yes, I was there with him to the very end — me, the little tart that Johann was too good for, yes, that’s what Ludwig always thought, just because I started out as housekeeper though I’m not ashamed of any of it. I was the one made sure the maid did her job while he lay abed, though as far as Ludwig was concerned I was no better than the maid myself, and got about as much thanks.

I was there beside him when he died. As some would have it, I’m the one who killed him, letting him catch a cold. But all those people, the ones who worship Beethoven like a god, what do they know? A lot of tunes and portraits, that’s all they’ve got. Their Beethoven’s made up. I know what the real one smelled like.

March when he finally kicked the bucket, blooming freezing so it was. Snow on the ground, Ludwig’s apartment like an ice-house, even with all the fires going. What did he say during his last days on earth? I’ve heard so many stories, how he’s meant to have come out with stuff like, “I shall hear in heaven”, or “Applaud, friends, the comedy is over”. Don’t believe what you see in a book — I was there, remember. I wasn’t one of the hero-worshippers who popped in for half an hour so they could dine out on it for the rest of their lives. Towards the end he was asleep mostly, and we waited. Me and the maid, we were up all night with him, keeping watch, the next night too. Sometimes he sort of came to, but he was, you know, delurious, his mind all coming and going. Murmuring to himself, rambling. Expect he was remembering Bonn. I like to think that in his mind he was seeing those trees and birds again, the ones in the murals, and the distant buildings of his home town, only they weren’t paintings any more, they were the real thing. And he wasn’t flipping writing on them, of course.

All that composing, struggling with the muse, as they say, and what good had it done him? Dying in a rented apartment. If he’d stuck to his early style, like his brothers advised, he might at least have made a bit more money. And opera — all he could ever manage was the one, but look at Rossini, made a fortune and retired. They know what side their bread’s buttered, those Italians. Ludwig, of course, he was too good for that. He wrote for his noblemen friends, not the common people, reckoned he could manage well enough from the handouts he took. And see where it got him, gasping in his bed in that horrible damp, airless room, without a wife to hold his hand or children to miss him when he was gone.

Said something about a tavern. Missing it, I imagine. And the name Schindler — I said, do you want me to fetch him for you? Lanky young rascal had been in and out every day like a hare with a dog on its tail, could hardly wait for Ludwig to die so he could start cashing in on all the manuscripts he’d been hoarding while calling himself the composer’s “secretary”, planning to write a biography we guessed, but Ludwig didn’t want to see that sneak, what he came out with next was barely a whisper but I heard it well enough. Arsehole! Had to laugh, pity I couldn’t tell Johann, what with the vulgarity. Then he mumbled something about the desk, and next minute he was unconscious again. Very fond of his desk, was Ludwig. Took the same one with him, round all the places he rented, and there were a good few of them, furniture movers must have made a fortune out of him, but such a hoarder, so he was, never threw out a scrap of paper, which was why Schindler had to make do with thievery. And I knew what Ludwig was about. His final wish. Wanted me to make sure Schindler didn’t get hold of whatever was in the desk. Probably only more quartets, I supposed, or another ruddy symphony, and if you ask my honest opinion I’ll tell you I wouldn’t have minded seeing that desk and all its contents go on a bonfire, for all the good it could do to anyone. But I’m not that sort of a woman, oh no, I was going to make sure his wishes were respected, just as I saw to it that somebody was always there holding his hand, even when all the world was asleep in their beds and the only one doing the holding was this chump here.

He came next morning, snooty Schindler, same as he’d been coming every day for weeks, and my eyes must have looked like a pair of saddle bags after the way I’d been sat there nearly all the night with Ludwig, me and the maid taking turns, and do you know who he’d gone and brought with him? Some ruddy artist, that’s who, wanting to make a picture of the great man on his death-bed, and I was flipping mad, I can tell you, I mean, don’t you think it’s the biggest blooming cheek, portraitising a fellow when he’s out cold and can’t even lift a finger to comb his hair? The thought of it. And for all his dirty clothes and foul habits, old Ludwig knew how to keep up appearances whenever he was getting his picture made. Well, have you ever seen a portrait of Beethoven in a torn shirt with egg all over it? Or one of him with his spectacles on? No, he always took them off, so he did, though he was blind as a ruddy mole. Wasn’t a very good artist come to see him either, not like that lovely signor whatsisname who did our murals, this one was a Viennese like the rest of us, didn’t even have a moustache.

Another friend showed up and sent the artist packing, and by this time the snow was falling again, looked like the sky was never going to run out of the stuff, and I don’t remember us getting much snow in March when I was a girl, there’s something very strange happening with the weather, I heard somebody say it was to do with a volcano in India or punishment for irreligion, I don’t know, but the day went on and another young fellow arrived, the musician Hüttenbrenner. White flakes all over his coat when he walked in, took one look at Ludwig and I thought he was going to faint or throw up, I said to myself, blimey, that’s all we need. And the other men deciding it was time to sort out the funeral, off they went, just me and this drippy Hüttenbrenner left, and the maid coming in and out with damp cloths to put on his forehead. Ludwig’s I mean, not Hüttenbrenner who between you and me looked about as spineless as a yard and a half of pump water.

We sat there, waiting for the end, the only sound the hoarse rattle in Ludwig’s lungs, while outside the sky was like lead. Sometimes the rattle would stop, we’d think here it is at last, he’s gone. Then it’d start again. Those long pauses with nothing happening. Like some of his ruddy music. And the room got darker and darker, though it was not yet evening, the snow still falling, could feel my eyelids sinking too, when all of a sudden, without any warning — flash! Whole room lit up a brilliant blue-white and next moment, like a huge cannon firing — boom! Don’t often get snow and lightning together, but there it was, and Hüttenbrenner, he just about had a heart attack, I swear he took off into the air with fright and landed back in his chair again. I thought, two corpses, that’d be a fine mess for me to deal with. Well, he couldn’t take any more of this, face was ashen, I could see he was thinking this was all a sign from God or something, him all worked up at the thought of being in the same room as the greatest composer in Vienna, so off he scuttled, said he had to get some air.

That’s how I ended up being the only one there with Ludwig when he died. Me of all people. None of your princes and bishops and virtuosos and connoisseurs, oh no. Just a woman he’d always despised. I moved my chair closer and held his hand. I said to him, Ludwig, you old bugger, you remember what you did on our wall? I forgive you. He couldn’t hear, of course, or see — even the thunderclap hadn’t been enough to wake him, though the vibration must have shook those deaf ears of his. I said, remember all the horrible things you ever said about me? I forgive them. You’re still an old bugger, mind, but I forgive you for being an old bugger. And when you get, you know, up there, if you can put in a good word for us, try and see to it that my daughter has a long life and a good husband and many healthy children, because that’s all any mother could wish for. I said to him, I know you’ve always gone on about art and spirit and higher powers but look at you, Ludwig, you’re going out the door same as every other poor sod on this earth, so don’t give me any nonsense about posterity. Just don’t forget us when you’re on a cloud or a star or whatever. That’s what I said to him. And he gave a rattle.

I thought about Ludwig’s desk, in the composing room. I could go there now, before Schindler got back, grab hold of everything, no, not everything, because then the men would know. I could hunt for whatever Ludwig wanted me to keep from him. But if I did that, Ludwig might die alone, and even an old bugger deserves better than that. It was one of those, what you call, moral dilemmas. And I’m not very good with them.

But it was like he read my mind, and I do believe what they say about mesmerism and magnetism and such, that there’s a fluid in the air, ether I think it’s called, and it sends vibrations, which is how you might hear things even if you were deaf as a post in the ordinary sense, because while I held his clammy hand I saw his eyelids flick, he was trying to open them, like trying to heave a great log, so much effort for him, his lips quivering, wanting to speak, and suddenly the strength came to him, he stared up to heaven, his hand gripped mine and he started to say something. This was Beethoven’s last moment, his soul breaking free of that wretched body, and it was given to me to hear his farewell, yes, I heard him whisper to me, in answer to all my doubts about whether I should let myself rifle through that desk of his, unseen by anyone. His final dying words. Everything is allowed.

Beethoven and Philosophy

The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth fell in the year when corona virus swept the world. One small, predictable event — relatively insignificant yet worthy of celebration — was engulfed by another wholly opposite. Among innumerable concerts, lectures and tie-ins forcibly cancelled was a book I’d been invited to contribute to. The plan was a series of essays by various writers, pundits and public figures, each taking Beethoven as platform for pretty much anything they liked. The editor who emailed me in December 2019 said she’d already been promised a lovely piece by a bishop about the spiritual value of classical radio stations and was eagerly awaiting something on “colour” from an award-winning artist I hadn’t heard of until I googled subsequently. Being less illustrious myself, I couldn’t count on such a totally free rein, instead being offered the theme that must have been the pre-chosen reason for my candidature. Would I like to write about Beethoven and philosophy? Having recently published a bluffer’s guide to Plato and mentioned to a mutual acquaintance at an arts board shindig that I was struggling with the Waldstein Sonata, it seemed to fit.

Re-reading the email, I considered the implausibility of the proposal. Beethoven made no contribution to philosophy — not, at any rate, of a kind that would justify his inclusion in an undergraduate module. Certainly there have been philosopher-composers — Rousseau, Nietzsche and Adorno come quickly to mind — also composers significantly influenced by philosophy, such as Wagner, Ives, Cage. But Beethoven? My initial impulse was to politely decline the impossible brief for which I would be rewarded with a free copy and an invitation to the launch at the Edinburgh Book Festival. No fee was mentioned, only that the publishing company was small, of limited means, and keen to foster intelligent writing in a world awash with garbage. It was this crumb of flattery that won me over — I wrote back saying I’d come up with something.

The conjunction was a hinge I could bend. On one side, Beethoven, on the other, philosophy, to be juxtaposed at an arbitrary angle. Begin with the manifestly foredoomed efforts of a self-taught amateur pianist, not far off retirement age, trying to get his clumsy digits round the flashy arpeggios of the Waldstein, Moonlight and other sonatas that Korean children routinely rattle off on YouTube. How to cope with inevitable failure? Philosophically, of course. I might say something about the Stoics; perhaps quote Walter Benjamin’s remark that hope exists for the benefit of those who have none. Surely no worse than some cleric’s encomium to Classic FM.

I always ask students at their first lecture what they understand philosophy to be. Typically they’ll mention the meaning of life, purpose of existence, whether it’s OK to eat meat, that sort of thing. The literal-minded might offer “love of wisdom”, an analysis of whose terms is as good an entry to the subject as any. No one is likely to offer Deleuze’s “movement of thought” or even Plato’s “preparation for death”, which is fine, since it leaves me something to teach. Would any of those notions of philosophy have a place in the unpaid labour I was contemplating? A half-remembered quotation and some quick web searching brought the hook I sought.

In 1802 Beethoven wrote of having been “forced already in my 28th year to become a philosopher.” He had begun losing his hearing just as his career was starting to blossom. Preparing for deafness meant preparing for death. What Beethoven wrote at the village of Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, was a last will and testament addressed to his two younger brothers, describing the incipient malady he’d been keeping secret. Rather than take his own life he resolved to do as much as he could in whatever time remained. Ten years later he’d finished his Eighth Symphony and Fifth Piano Concerto, could still hear well enough to conduct ordinary conversation, and had another fifteen years to go.

Plato believed souls to be immortal: philosophy was preparation for life beyond. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein didn’t believe in souls at all, and compared the finiteness of existence to a person’s visual field, elsewhere using the same metaphor to express the limitation of human knowledge. We know there’s an edge to what we can see, but we can never see the edge. Aural deprivation spurred Beethoven’s quest for artistic immortality — though the first sign was tinnitus, a noise in his head. For most of his creative life, he was in anticipatory mourning for a sense he fully lost only at the end.

The thought took me back to Walter Benjamin, who analysed the German genre of “mourning drama” (Trauerspiel). Was that where the hope quote came from? I was sure I had a copy of the book somewhere in my flat, but a tour of disordered shelves failed to yield it. Resorting to the internet again, I found that Benjamin’s line, slightly misremembered, was from something I definitely had and soon located — his celebrated essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. But what about the Trauerspiel book? Probably left behind when I moved out of the marital home, likely taken to Oxfam.

Better make note of the exact quotation, I decided, so I could use it in the piece that, we now know, was destined never to be published, thanks to some contemporaneous goings-on in Wuhan. It was a different coincidence that struck me on rereading Benjamin’s essay; the quote in fact comes soon after a comment on Beethoven and the inexpressible enigma of art. “If music encloses genuine mysteries, this world of course remains a mute world, from which music will never ring out.” In my mind, connections were forming, as accidental as a conjuncture of bat-shit and civet cage, though happily of less consequence. A pile of student essays needed marking (“The past does not exist” — Discuss). I reckoned they could wait. The online catalogue of the university library listed plenty of Beethoven books, five of which I reserved and collected a few days later. Something to mull over while spending Christmas and Boxing Day with my parents, a three-hour drive away in Scotland.

To anyone but me, the octogenarian couple I found slowly fussing over sprout-peeling and giblet-boiling would surely have looked frail, even vulnerable; but my eyes had aged in fixed relative distance, and it was the photographs around the ex-council house I grew up in that most starkly reminded me how much had changed. Dad no longer smiled; the bonhomie of his younger days was a social mask that had slipped away, exposing his fundamentally humourless character. My offer to supervise the turkey was refused as soon as he could hear what I was suggesting. Was he really as deaf as he appeared, or did it merely suit him? With Beethoven on my mind, I couldn’t help imagining some sort of parallel.

The port and whisky I’d brought sent him to sleep mid-way through the traditional evening card game. After watching a film with Mum I retreated to my bedroom and books. The earliest full-length biography was by Anton Schindler, an office clerk and dedicated fiddler who got to know Beethoven after attending one of his last piano performances. Appointing himself number-one fan, Schindler saw Beethoven’s life as a drama in three acts. First had been the early years in Bonn, employment as court musician and move to Vienna. Then the decade and a bit culminating in “the most brilliant year of Beethoven’s life”, 1814, when he had his greatest hit with a hurriedly written crowd-pleaser celebrating Wellington’s victory in Spain, complete with mock gunfire and strains of “Rule Britannia”. Its success prompted the concert Schindler attended, where the forty-four-year-old composer premiered the Archduke Trio. Critics ascribed the below-par piano playing to deafness; Schindler thought otherwise. “Beethoven’s hearing was apparently entirely adequate; not so, though, the ability of his fingers.”

The third act was what Schindler witnessed — a time of increasing impairment. Beethoven’s left ear was best — at one of his favourite restaurants he would sit with it turned towards a musical clock whose repertoire included one of his own tunes. Metal ear trumpets were of some help; less useful was a device intended to conduct the sound of his piano, since any mixture of notes or voices was hard to unscramble. In loud public places, Beethoven asked friends to write what they were saying, resulting in one-sided “conversation books”, many of which eventually wound up in Schindler’s possession.

An Englishman visiting in 1815 had no difficulty making himself understood if he spoke into Beethoven’s ear, but by 1818 ordinary conversation was virtually impossible. When Schindler heard Beethoven try piano sonatas he was composing, it was to test playability rather than sound. The Ninth Symphony, Missa Solemnis and final string quartets were all worked out entirely on paper, first as fragmentary sketches, then gradually as full scores. When Beethoven stood on the podium at the first performance of the Ninth Symphony in 1823, it was only to set the opening tempo of each movement. Another conductor held the rest together, and at the end, a singer made Beethoven turn to acknowledge applause he hadn’t noticed.

Not much like my Dad at all, in fact, whom I could hear snoring loudly downstairs in his chair. Lacking any discernible creativity, my father instead possessed what might loosely be termed a scientific mind, having been employed as a factory electrician all his working life. When I was a child I found him funny and clever; and while the wisecracks were only whatever he’d picked up in the works canteen, the cleverness was more genuine. It was not that he was well educated — Dad left school at fourteen and I don’t think he ever read a whole book afterwards, unless we count domestic appliance instruction manuals. Nor would I rate his intelligence as anything but average. What he had in his younger days was a curious mind; a taste for abstraction, a hunger for debate. He was a pseudo-philosopher, unskilled but keen. His speculations were like my piano playing; done with sincerity more than accuracy.

On one of our walks, when I was maybe nine or ten years old, he asked if I thought a fly could stop a lorry. Of course not, I said. Yet imagine the insect and vehicle in head-on collision. First the fly is going in one direction, then suddenly the opposite. At a moment between, it must have been stationary, and likewise the lorry. So the fly had halted it, if only for an instant. It was not until my teens that I recognised this as an unconscious variation on Zeno’s paradox, though by that time I’d grown dubious of Dad’s conundrums. Consider, he would say, that every child has two parents, and each of those another two, back through the ages. Hence the world’s population in the past must have been greater. Even when I explained the obvious fallacy, he still couldn’t get it. Nor, I suppose, will I ever master those piano arpeggios I keep attempting. An amateur need please only himself. This was still Dad’s approach, though by now he was applying it to life in general, existing with little regard for anyone.

As the snoring continued, I read Schindler’s touching description of how Beethoven would start his day, rising at dawn and brewing coffee, sixty beans per cup. Then composing at his desk, perhaps a walk, and a meal made by his housekeeper. A favourite dish was macaroni cheese — though any was likely to evince complaint. Late in the afternoon he would repair to a tavern, “to read the papers” according to Schindler, keen to disavow any suggestion of alcoholism, though he added that Beethoven was very partial to fortified wine, and “often enjoyed a good glass of beer in the evening accompanied by his pipe and his paper.”

Surely allowed to put his feet up, just like Dad. Beethoven wasn’t old, even by the standards of his era, but everyone deserves to retire, and what Beethoven made on the back of his “battle symphony”, Wellington’s Victory, would have been pension enough, if he hadn’t stashed it in shares he refused to touch. Since the death of his youngest brother he’d been fighting for custody of his nephew Karl, and Beethoven intended to leave everything to him, even if it meant living in near squalor. In 1821 he was mistaken for a tramp and arrested. A person encountering him in a shop in 1823 noted his “general untidiness”, describing Beethoven as “a stout, short man with a very red face.” As a composer he was judged past his best — even his loyal admirer Schindler thought so. The Ninth Symphony’s eclectic finale would have been “all the more imposing if it were drawn together into a more concentrated unity.” The last piano sonata was a “mathematical labyrinth” that didn’t add up. The quartets plumbed “the deepest depths of obscurity.” The reason for the decline was simple: Beethoven couldn’t hear what he wrote.

If Schindler misjudged the music so badly, how far could his biography be trusted? The next author on my bedside pile, Alexander Thayer, spent years unpicking Schindler’s erroneous recollections and self-serving falsifications. But after so much pudding, port and cheese — not necessarily in that order — Thayer’s massive Life of Beethoven seemed too weighty even to browse. Unaware that coming months would bring ample time for thorough digestion, I reached for the thinnest of my library books, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, by J.W.N. Sullivan, whose first chapter reminded me that my primary task was philosophical rather than biographical. It was called “Art and Reality”.

In 1812, Beethoven met Goethe in the fashionable spa town of Teplitz, and while the two men walked together, they saw a royal entourage approach along the path. Goethe stepped aside, removed his hat and made a low bow. Beethoven marched straight through, arms folded. It’s a famous story, and it almost certainly never happened. The sole evidence is a letter from Beethoven to Bettina von Arnim, which she published long after both men had died. Challenged to produce the original, she refused. It was an attention-seeking hoax, or as we nowadays feel compelled to call such things, fake news. Bettina von Arnim was a novelist, good at making things up.

Sullivan’s book started with another of her claims. She said Beethoven once told her, “music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy… the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.” Even if Beethoven never said this, we can imagine it expressing his view, just as we might see the Teplitz myth as reflecting his feelings about the relative value of genius and nobility. The aesthetic view being proposed was a bold one. As Sullivan put it, “Art must rank with science and philosophy as a way of communicating knowledge about reality.” Here was something I could certainly use in my essay.

At the time, I knew little about John William Navin Sullivan — I’ve learned a lot more since. Born in the 1880s, he was primarily a science writer, one of the earliest popularisers of Einstein’s theories. He possibly even met the great physicist himself; though Sullivan, like Schindler and Bettina von Arnim, was something of a self-inventor, guilty of the occasional porky. It was in the years following World War One that Sullivan established himself in London literary life, working alongside Aldous Huxley at J.M. Murry’s Athenaeum magazine. According to the notorious Aleister Crowley (another unreliable narrator), Sullivan harboured a passion for Murry’s beautiful and mortally ill wife, the New Zealand-born short-story writer Katherine Mansfield. They certainly shared an interest in the esoteric teachings of George Gurdjieff, at whose institute Mansfield died in 1923, still only in her thirties. After allegedly trying to pass on his first wife to Crowley, Sullivan went on to marry one of Mansfield’s former schoolfriends, to whom he dedicated Beethoven in 1927. His three novels, all of which I would find myself reading during the pandemic, offer further hints of biography. But that lay in the future, as I lay in bed.

The snoring stopped: Dad must have stirred from lubricated slumber. The next stage would be a familiar groaning of the staircase as he ascended to the bathroom, and at around 4 a.m. I would probably be woken by renewed sounds of heavy footsteps. This had been Mum’s existence for decades — even a saint wouldn’t need that much patience.

Knowing J.W.N. Sullivan’s sympathy for unorthodox ways of thinking — Crowley’s number-magic, Gurdjieff’s mystic dancing — one can see why he might have viewed art as “communicating knowledge about reality”. But given his advanced understanding of theoretical physics, he appreciated the need for clarification. Knowledge can be an inert jarful of objective facts: the diameter of Jupiter, the strength of its gravitational pull. It can also be the subjective experience of knowing. It was this living knowledge that Sullivan supposed art to communicate, and only indirectly. “Beethoven does not communicate to us his perceptions or experiences. He communicates to us the attitude based on them.”

I would later find that Katherine Mansfield said something remarkably similar. “An artist communicates not his vision of the world, but the attitude which results in his vision; not his dream, but his dream-state.” Sullivan might have read those words in the magazine where they were posthumously published, or heard them from Katherine herself. They imply that while advance in science demands accumulation of material evidence, advance in art requires change of attitude. Either must be shaped by thought to become meaningful, making each a kind of philosophy. Science organises fact, art organises experience. Science explains phenomena, art expresses values.

At some point I must have fallen asleep; I woke with Sullivan’s Beethoven open across my chest, the bedside light still on, and Dad’s feet clomping on the landing, inaudible only to himself. Mum had intimated to me that she worried he was becoming forgetful, though this was hard to spot in a man so increasingly withdrawn. His condition seemed to me more like depression than dementia. In the past there’d been a succession of practical hobbies taken up with obsessional devotion — photography, wine making, orchid growing. Those had gradually been replaced by mental fixations — crank theories of ancient aliens, CIA mind control, the European Union as nascent Fourth Reich. Then even those lost their capacity to excite; his conversational horizon these days extended little beyond the most immediate concerns of his fragile body and limited daily routine.

Thinking there could be any sort of analogy between my father and Beethoven was the sort of dot joining that once led Dad to believe Margaret Thatcher was a foreign spy. More fruitful might be to wonder about the impulse behind the effort. My father was the first philosopher I met, and Beethoven the first composer I took a serious interest in. I identified with both, as childhood models of genius and authority. Amateur psychology is as fraught as DIY gas engineering, yet I can’t help perceiving a process of projection. Annoyance at Beethoven for writing music too hard for me to play, and at Dad for my not having seen through him sooner. In other words, annoyance at myself.

Another author on the pile — Theodor Adorno, who spent decades making fragmentary notes for a slim book published posthumously as Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Encountering the Waldstein Sonata at the age of thirteen, Adorno thought it portrayed Wallenstein, hero of the Thirty Years War — ancestor, in fact, of the sonata’s eponymous dedicatee. The opening bars — a quiet rhythmic pulse of repeated chords — made the teenage Adorno imagine a galloping knight in a dark forest. The first time I heard the sonata was at a similar age, on a record I’d saved pocket money to buy. When it began, I was startled, thinking the record was jumping. It was unlike anything I’d heard before — a moment of shock that can never be repeated, only remembered. The first false impression, Adorno suggested, may hold the deepest truth.

Adorno was an obvious touchstone for any essay claiming to be about Beethoven and philosophy, though I suspected his dialectical view of Beethoven as exemplar of the unity of the opposites of market and autonomy in bourgeois art might not be to the editor’s taste. Nor, at so late an hour, was I in any fit state to balance the nuclear density of Adorno’s prose with the modest quantity of free fluff being asked of me. I switched off the light and went back to sleep.

Mum was already having breakfast at the living-room dining table when I came downstairs on Boxing Day morning, and was looking cheerful as ever while extracting her first instalment of daily medication from a dispenser whose clear compartments rattled with a rainbow assortment of pills. I had no idea what any were for, and I’m not sure she did either. Her repeat prescriptions had multiplied over the years in tandem with the proliferation of her ailments, and though I’d more than once queried the wisdom of the succession of GP’s responsible for landing her with a dosette box resembling a sweet-shop pick’n’mix display, she was of a generation and class more deferential in attitude. Dad had negotiated his own version of the quandary by avoiding doctors altogether, making his demise within the next few years a merciful near-certainty, while Mum’s sunny disposition would surely take her to a century. My unspoken plan was to relocate back to Scotland, closer to her, whenever the time came.

I ate buttered toast with an overdose of caffeine while she had granola, blueberries and a glass of water. We talked about the garden and the weather, then she spoke again about Dad’s forgetfulness — had I noticed? I hadn’t, and the examples Mum gave sounded no more than manifestations of his general indifference to anything outside his head. Mum called it confusion; I took it to be the aspect of ageing in which a person becomes more obviously and irrevocably what they’ve always really been. I might have voiced greater concern had my sleep been unbroken by his elephantine roaming.

We heard him descend and enter the kitchen, where he embarked on a clatter-inducing culinary operation that eventually culminated in the bowl of cornflakes and chopped banana he brought to the living room. He hadn’t realised we were up, registered surprise with a cocking of his head, wished us good morning and sat down opposite me. His empty mug was where he expected, but there was no pot of tea awaiting him. He turned to Mum. “Did you not make any?”

“I didn’t know when you’d be down.”

“Eh?”

“I didn’t know. When you’d be down.”

“Eh?”

“I didn’t. Know. When…”

They could have taken a lesson from Beethoven and tried the conversation-book approach, though I’m sure Dad would never have accepted a system that implied the fault to lie within himself rather than the poor articulation of his interlocutors. One of his theories was that people nowadays spoke faster and less clearly than in previous decades — a consequence of watching too much American rubbish on television.

“Why did you not make tea?”

“I didn’t know…”

“Eh?”

He’d consented to see an audiologist — a rare submission to NHS persecution — but the wee lassie who’d stuck the stuff in his ear to make a mould had done it wrong and the hearing aid they gave him was nae bloody use at all. I’d heard the story several times the previous day, and also the abandoned hearing aid, whistling from a place I couldn’t locate. I’d tried stalking it, hoping to quell the irritation, but it proved wily as a mosquito. The only hope was to wait for the battery to expire. My hope for Mum was that a similar drainage of energy would end the interrogation she was being subjected to.

“You could have made a pot and left it.”

“But I didn’t…”

“Eh?”

She’d had enough, got up and went to boil the kettle, leaving Dad to focus on his breakfast bowl, which he pondered as if it were a crossword. He took each spoonful slowly, loudly and with deliberation — it was impossible to tell if such protraction indicated pleasure or apathy. Mum re-entered and deposited the controversial teapot, casting me a glance to say she considered the whole thing a joke. Subversive irony was what had long kept her from going mad.

He poured his tea, leaving it to cool, and gazed at me across the table with the unfathomable grey eyes of an aquarium specimen. Anything I might say to him would need repeating, and would not be worth repeating, so I said nothing. Instead he aired the thought that must have been circulating in the dark caverns of his mind.

“These lassies in Lidl. They can’t count.”

A pause for dramatic effect or regrouping of cognitive forces.

“They just push everything through. Can’t see what they’re doing.”

A story emerged at a pace similar to the eradication of his cornflakes. He’d bought two bottles of whisky, but the wee check-out girl — probably a thirty-something bilingual mother with a degree — tried to charge him for three. Mum intervened; a Greek chorus to the unfolding tragedy. “It didn’t have three on the receipt, Joe.”

“Eh?”

“There was brandy as well.”

“Always up to their tricks, these damn supermarkets. Think you won’t check and see they’ve charged for an extra bottle.”

“It was brandy for the pudding.”

“They’ve got some way of automating it. The cashiers don’t notice, too busy nattering like idiots. Maybe in on it.”

Another coincidental parallel. Beethoven, like my father, was paranoid, convinced that people were out to trick him, betray his trust, steal his money. If they’d had Lidl in early nineteenth-century Vienna, Beethoven would have been arguing at the checkout on a regular basis. Instead he wrote copious letters denouncing enemies who in many cases had been erstwhile friends. A significant difference is that no woman was ever foolish enough to marry him. Beethoven proposed in his twenties to a singer who found him “ugly and half-crazy”. He was nearly forty when he made what appears to have been his only other proposal, by letter, to his doctor’s nineteen-year-old niece who barely knew him. She was called Therese Malfatti; a little piano piece he may have written for her turned up decades later and became famous as Für Elise.

“Same with bananas the other day. Said 75p on the shelf, then it’s a pound on the receipt.”

“It was fun size, Joe.”

“Just a rip-off.”

“I told you at the time, it was 75p for the small ones and a pound for full size.”

“If you add it up, a banana every day. Aye, they make a good living, and it’s all a con.”

Dad’s paranoia was a sub-branch of his pseudophilosophy; a theoretical exercise by which he could prove himself superior to his antagonists, who were the whole of humanity. In earlier times the manifestations had been more practical, as for instance when he and Mum first came to stay at the new house Sarah and I had bought in Durham. After satisfying himself that the fuse box and boiler were in non-lethal condition, he’d investigated door and window locks, convinced we might be burgled at any moment. Later he quietly advised Sarah that her jewellery box should be kept in a safer place than her underwear drawer. The fact that he’d discovered the box for himself was proof to him of his value in preserving our security, and to Sarah that he was a bit weird, if not an outright pervert. Cluster A personality, she called it. We never told Mum.

Beethoven’s only documented relationship — discounting impossible longings and brothel visits alluded to in remorseful journal entries — was with an unknown “immortal beloved”, the anonymous addressee of a pencilled letter the composer preserved until his death. Schindler thought she was the dedicatee of the Moonlight Sonata — an idea that Thayer blew out of the water, suggesting instead the dedicatee of a later sonata, Opus 78. In the 1970s Maynard Solomon reviewed numerous candidates and opted for the dedicatee of the Diabelli Variations. As puzzling as her identity is the question whether she ever saw the letter. What’s certain is that it was written at Teplitz in 1812, around the time when Beethoven met Goethe. And he sure as hell wasn’t writing to Goethe.

My parents met at 16 and married at 21, making their publicly recognised romantic experiences as limited as their formal education. Mum had managed to privately extend the latter; whatever she might have done regarding the former is something I don’t need or want to know. From Dad’s perspective, marriage was a jackpot of lottery-odds proportion, though he never seemed to realise how lucky he’d been in finding the one person who could put up with him. By Boxing Day afternoon I couldn’t wait to start the drive home.

“Ring us when you get there,” Mum reminded as she kissed me goodbye.

“I will. Love you, Mum. See you, Dad.”

“Eh?”

In the car I continued the trivial game of parallels. A troubled childhood, short on parental affection, leading to withdrawal and difficulty forming friendships. Adult traits reflecting past trauma — hoarding, miserliness, alcohol dependency. A complicated attitude towards women — the old Madonna-whore thing. But Dad never wrote an opera, of course. Beethoven’s was about a woman disguising herself as a man in order to rescue her imprisoned husband. He never managed another, despite many plans and false starts. A bit like the laminate flooring Dad couldn’t get round to. Or perhaps not. It passed the time until I got home and made the call.