Beethoven and Buddha

Beethoven was no stranger to anguish. He began to go deaf in his mid twenties and the torment of it brought him to the verge of suicide. He wrote a letter to his brothers speaking of his despair:

“But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had forth all that I felt was within me.”

I find it unbelievable that Beethoven was able to compose the most innovative and sublime music while completely deaf. He possessed an unfailing spirit in the face of difficulty, and had an incredible triumph of will. He had the vision and idealism of a true artist who was continually breaking into new territory, transforming every genre that he touched. He expanded the sonata, the symphony, and the string quartet and in Beethoven’s later years his music became more abstract and meditative stepping beyond anything heard at the time.

here is the second movement, the bold scherzo & playful trio:

Did he realize that his music expressed this quality of accepting and being with anguish? When playing the Opus 110 sonata, there are sections that are so honest, so lingering, poignantly expressing this feeling of sorrow. And yet, I think Stephen is right in that we don’t feel overwhelmed. This is experienced most clearly in the slow section, named “Arioso Dolente”. Beethoven has named the movement “dolente” meaning sorrowful, and I feel there are few pieces that can truly capture the the depths of what he expresses.

It is worth noting that Beethoven wrote this within the last five years of his life, and was completely deaf, and had been for probably around 10 years! In Maynard Solomon’s book, he says something so interesting- that rather than being a curse, Beethoven’s deafness may have contributed to his creativity. He writes:

“There may be a sense in which deafness played a positive role in his creativity, for we know that deafness did not impair and indeed may have even heightened his abilities as a composer…perhaps by permitting a total concentration upon composition within a world of increasing auditory seclusion. In his deaf world, Beethoven could experiment with new forms of experience, free from the intrusive sounds of the external environment; free from the rigidities of the material world; free, like the dreamer, to combine and recombine the stuff of reality, in accordance with his desires, into previously undreamed-of forms and structures.”

here is the third movement, the meditative adagio and the sorrowful arioso dolente:

After the “Arioso Dolente”, Beethoven writes a fugue, one of the innovative aspects of his compositional style. I almost feel Beethoven expresses the “Five Stages of Grief” according to the Kubler-Ross model; cycling through an expression in the first movement of the beauty of life, then turmoil and anger in the scherzo and trio, desolation in the arioso dolente, and then the fugue. It is like the fugue is a turning point towards acceptance. It is complicated, and it begins the journey back to life.

here are the two fugues and arioso dolente:

After the first fugue, Beethoven returns to a variation of the pensive slow Arioso Dolente, and is his deeply creative way, breaks from the traditional forms of the time. It has a powerful effect . It allows for another moment of grieving, reflection, of patience and an enduring quality. From here the sonata gradually climbs out into even more light.

After the Arioso Dolente, Beethoven brilliantly inverts the fugue, like a mad improvisation and then ends the piece in the most beautiful, exaltant and dramatic way. Different pianists and writers have commented eloquently about this part of the sonata:

Matthews writes that it is not fanciful to see the final movement’s second fugue as a “gathering of confidence after illness or despair”, a theme which can be discerned in other late works by Beethoven.

Rosen states that this movement is the first time in the history of music where the academic devices of counterpoint and fugue are integral to a composition’s drama, and observes that Beethoven in this work does not “simply represent the return to life, but persuades us physically of the process.”

The last observation is key- there is a physical, all encompassing experience of the return to life. Stephen Bachelor points out:

“In yearning for anguish to be assuaged…we reinforce what creates anguish in the first place: the craving for life to be other than it is…Dharma practice starts not with belief in a transcendent reality, but through embracing the anguish experienced in an uncertain world.”

There is the feeling here in this last section of the sun shining through the clouds. The music seems to be a total celebration of life as it is. Whether Beethoven himself embraced duhkha, we don’t know, but he certainly had the intention to. We know this through many historians who documented Beethoven’s life. The great Beethoven scholar, Maynard Solomon refers extensively to Beethoven’s acquiescence to deafness. Rather than caving into despair and committing suicide, Beethoven resolves to continue living. In the “Heiligenstadt Testament”, Beethoven writes, “Patience, they say, is what I must choose now for my guide, and I have done so.”