for Beethoven's Birthday

December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827

I am an organist, and no longer a Real Pianist, not the kind who plays Beethoven. But there was a time...

Like most piano students, my first encounter with him was the fine little composition Für Elise. And like most young pianists, I played it over and over. I would not be surprised if I played it a thousand times. It was a gateway into another realm of being.

That led, in due time, to the Sonatas. I no longer have the yellow paperback two-volume set of the Thirty-Two Sonatas, edited by the great nineteenth century conductor Hans von Bülow and published by G. Schirmer, numbers one and two in their series “Library of Musical Classics.”

Sadly, I was influenced by Purists as an undergraduate in the 1970's, when the Romantic sensibilities of von Bülow were unfashionable, and I discarded the set. I wish that I still had them, for I now recognize that von Bülow's copious footnotes and editorial suggestions, extending even to rewriting some of the notation, retain value. Those Thirty-Two Sonatas helped me survive to adulthood, and von Bülow's comments helped this romantic-minded teenager find a way into the spiritual meaning of these works.

In those days, every evening, when I had finished my regular practicing, I would stumble through a sonata movement, pounding it out on our little spinet piano in the living room. Nearly all of them were far over my head; it was the equivalent of a child in Sunday School class reading Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. But they all were icons, windows into a world of freedom and purity. It was like looking up at the stars, and seeing by their unchanging grace that my petty concerns were not so important as they seemed.

Some of the late sonatas and quartets, which are the ones I love the best, are still over my head; Beethoven's path led far beyond mortal realms. But I played the Moonlight Sonata and the Appassionata Sonata in high school recitals, and (much) later played the Opus 110, one of the most sublime of the late sonatas. I would love to do more, and contemplated a few years ago learning the Diabelli Variations. I soon realized that I am not up to that task, and probably no longer up to playing any Beethoven in public.

In graduate school, I had the opportunity to sing the Ninth Symphony under two different directors, one of whom I hated, and one (Rafael Kubelik) whom I loved. I will be forever grateful for this opportunity. It was not until adulthood – well after graduate school – that I finally encountered the Missa Solemnis.

It is fair to say that Beethoven was not a pious person in the conventional sense. But one author, it may be Romain Rolland, observed that for Beethoven, God was always part of the conversation, and this is true. The best one can tell through the music, Beethoven's relationship with God was much like that of the Psalmist – often stormy, sometimes (as in the Missa) ecstatic [there is hardly anything more amazing in all of music than the opening bars of the Gloria in excelsis], always unflinchingly honest.

Here is the Ninth Symphony, as conducted by Kubelik in 1959.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.