This reverential atmosphere is heightened by the tune itself.
Combined with the molto adagio pacing, the music feels stuck in an unending desert or an infinite sea – similar, Kapilow has described, to the feeling you get trapped in hospital for days without end. Beethoven wrote this first section of the Heiliger Dankgesang in the ‘F Lydian’ mode, a scale without sharps or flats. For about three heartrending minutes, the notes come glacially – so glacially, says Michiko Theurer, a violinist who has played and studied the piece, that it almost feels like a meditation exercise. Start listening to the Heiliger Dankgesang and reality seems to hold its breath and wait. “You observe that in people who have had extremely hard lives – they have found that attitude of gratitude.” “It is clearly a statement of faith,” explains Edward Dusinberre, first violinist in the Takács Quartet and an expert on the Heiliger Dankgesang. As he notes, the movement is a Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode. Even if a dumpling-free diet really did help his recovery, the composer himself looked to a higher power. In the end, Beethoven did get somewhat better – and it was while recovering at Baden that he wrote the Heiliger Dankgesang. As a servant remembered in an incident the following year, their master would “wander in the fields, calling, waving his arms about, moving slowly, then fast, then abruptly, stopping to scribble in his notebook.” Between that and his shabby appearance, 1825 even saw Beethoven detained by police – after they mistook him for a vagrant.
Beethoven’s own erratic behaviour may have pushed people away, too. Possibly due to his deafness, or else his angry mood swings, he felt increasingly isolated from his friends and family, complaining to his nephew about “you, and my contemptible brother, and the detestable family that I am afflicted with”. The spring of 1825 was not good to Beethoven. For composers and musicians, this remarkable piece of music has proved irresistible, providing solace and giving strength even when the future seems lost. She says listening gives her a sense of hope and renewal – what “we have all been hoping for” over the last few months. Written two years before he died, while Beethoven was recovering from a near-fatal illness, Padel sees in this sublime combination of two violins, viola and cello a tonic for our anxious and uncertain times. In the Lydian Mode is based on the third movement of one of Beethoven’s late string quartets, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang – the Holy Song of Thanksgiving. Yet amid the coronavirus, and the death that comes with it, one of them stands out. All the poems in her new book, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, are vividly beautiful, sparked as they are by sonatas, symphonies and songs. In May, officials eagerly reopened the Beethoven-Haus, his childhood home in the centre of Bonn.Īnd for Ruth Padel, a British poet and musician, Beethoven and his birthday have inspired literary creation too. In March, performers with the Berlin State Opera took to their balconies to sing excerpts from his heroic Ninth Symphony. Despite lockdowns and a pandemic, fans all over the world are celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth with typical enthusiasm, hosting talks and digital concerts from Rotterdam to Denver. As so often with the man and his music, Ludwig van Beethoven is different. Few composers write pieces that are remembered centuries after their deaths – and fewer still have their notes inspire poetry.
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