Beethoven Variations by Ruth Padel

Author:Ruth Padel [Padel, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

BREAKING AXLE

Why are you making such a scene today? Will you not let me go a little now? I only want to go to my room. You must realise other people are human too.

Karl to Beethoven, Gneixendorf, Conversation Book, October 1826

On my screen is the château

where Beethoven is finishing his last quartet

staying with his brother

and the sister-in-law he hates

near a village whose name,

he says, sounds like a breaking axle.

Here he is, dropsical, all diarrhoea

and swollen feet, holding in his gut

with a truss, at his desk

above the garden

looking down on a sundial

inscribed Memento Mori

and I’m there with him, plummeting into the past

to find some blessing in it. When he plays duets

with his nephew, I make sure

he enjoys it. I want him to glide

through his only close relationships

like a falling star

and not accuse Karl of sex with his sister-in-law

just because the boy plays duets with her too.

I am trying to cancel

the mathematics of strain,

and give his brother enough money to pay the mortgage

so he does not press Beethoven for rent.

If Beethoven looks like flying into a temper,

ordering a servant to drag out

an open milk-wagon

and take him and Karl back to Vienna –

a two-day December journey

staying the night in an unheated inn

falling so ill he’ll have to be lifted on the cart next day –

I shall make this not happen. And if it does

I’ll call out in the forest

from dark lanes dusted with snow

for them to keep each other warm, he and Karl,

heads on each other’s shoulders,

two hearts tilting into each other

like drips of light in a breaking rainbow

for there is love here, this is the last time

they will be alone, Karl is the one

person he has tried to live with and love long term

and I don’t want him to have screwed it up completely.

I will take a shot of him not screwing it up

on my phone. And before they leave

in a midnight blur of recriminations

here is a shot of him in that house

in his last months of active life,

the ghosts of grief

in caverns of his psyche

letting him down lightly. But no,

I see him drinking even more heavily

and nagging – he will not let his nephew be,

even for a second – so I call his name.

Ludwig! Herr Beethoven! Bitte!

He turns, he smiles. He says, Ruth,

will you take the parts I have just copied out

of my new quartet, with a joke in them

about accepting mortality, to my publisher in Vienna?

He hands them over. I think I probably bow

and I say, It will be an honour.

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