Opus 13 for Monk

 Beethoven was 27 years old when he wrote this sonata, also known as the “Grande Sonate Pathétique”. I was 27 once. I turn 57 tomorrow. My youngest child turns 26 in a week. Yesterday we celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary. I’ve been a physician for 28 years. My Mom died over 30 years ago. My mother-in-law died a few days ago. Monk turns 2 soon and my piano is about 63 years old. The Gutenberg bible was printed some 500 years ago. The Diamond Sutra is thought to be the oldest printed book. Physicists know why the hammers of my piano fall and cause the strings to be sounded, but they still don’t know exactly what time is.

I was on the prowl today for some new dogs to hear this, one of LVB’s greatest hits, but alas, little brother Monk was left alone to absorb it, with the added indignity of wearing one of my t-shirts. It’s my party and I can dress my dog if I want to. 

My Dad, dead now over 27 years, often played the opening of this sonata. He would arch one eyebrow with a Rabelaisian delight in the tragicomic. The slow movement I played at my Mom’s funeral service, don’t ask me how I got through that one. If she was here today, which she actually is because matter is neither created nor destroyed, she would’ve told me not to play it so fast, and she would be right. My mom-in-law who lived with us this past year, and whom I was cuddled up next to in bed when she passed peacefully to the next adventure, heard me practicing this one recently. Usually she would be on the couch with her beanie on, a book in hand and Monk stretched out snoring on top of her. 

The Pathetique was written 228 years ago. Sometimes when I consider the potential extinction of our species, the thing that really forms a lump of grief in my throat is the thought that Beethoven and so much other music, art, writing, will be gone. Homo sapiens has been around for something like 300,000 years. My mom-in-law lived 92 years. I would guess she has read at least 8200 books over her lifetime, assuming she started her prolific pace at around age 10. She was about 5 pages away from finishing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when she died. Not her first reading of it, but I feel some frustration she did not finish. Seeing it generally took her about 10 minutes to pick her next book, my guess is there was always going to be one left unfinished. 

I cannot count the number of fortepianos and sforzandos Beethoven used in his lifetime, his 56 years on earth. When Mary Oliver went back in time to ask him what he planned to do with his “one wild and precious life” I’m pretty sure he said he planned to run around shouting the musical equivalent of “BOO!” to unsuspecting people just trying to go about their own wild and precious existence in peace. 

Verdi took that trick to use in the opening of his Requiem’s “Dies irae” which, even though I know it’s coming makes me jump every single time. 

Grief (like Beethoven) is timeless, sneaky, loud, soft, tender, annoying, profound. I sometimes think to call my Dad to tell him something (Oops dead—Boo!) or try to remember the exact sound of my mom’s voice  or my mom-in-law’s chuckle or the feel of a beloved long gone dog pressed up against me (boo! Boo! BOO!). Grief sneaks up and maybe that’s why crying is known as “boo hoo!’. The non duality of grief: no birth, no death, no way we can love each other fully and no way we cannot love each other fully. 

Dan was a friend from college who died of early-onset dementia. I actually blame him for the purchase of my new-old piano, which I rather impulsively picked out the same visit to the Bay Area when I went to tell him goodbye. No time like the present thought I. 

They Might be Giants, a band Dan loved, said “ I returned a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date, I came back as a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the date stamped on myself”. It is a tragicomic koan, perhaps signifying the meaning of life or the lack of meaning of life or …

Only 21 more sonatas until The Hammerklavier. One that should only be left to the experts, one avoided by most, so wild and probably overly-precious. I don’t really understand the passage of time (was I not playing whiffle ball in my Wisconsin yard, age 10, just yesterday?). But from a physics standpoint that piece won’t play itself. If I travel forward in time and practice it while working on the intervening 20 sonatas, will it go better than expected? If I expect anything at all, have I already squandered the time being? Do pianos even work in outer space? 

Dedicating this one to Nancy. Remembering closing Printer’s Inc Bookstore with her 35 years ago on weekend nights, before I even met her son, my husband, us counting the tills and gabbing after we chased out the last rowdy bookstore denizen. She was a great mom-in-law. I will miss her. I miss her. She is missed.

Opus 10, No 3 for Sammy, Monk & Flora

 Sight reading is an interesting phenomena. I am pretty fair at it, and though I love this sonata quite a lot and should’ve practiced it, I decided to just read it today as I had a three dog audience at hand. When I sight read I like to follow the advice of Martin Luther and “sin boldly”. Sight reading is like skiing or mountain biking or technical trail running. You need to look at where you want to go, not where you are afraid to fall.

Imperfection abounds, yet mostly Beethoven Op 10 no 3 will look good in any outfit. My husband of going on 35 years thinks I too look good in any outfit. He likes me when my chin hairs emerge and when I have nasty surgical scars on my neck. He likes me when I sit in my recliner which is where I’ve been for the majority of the last 4 months and when I ask for a coffee refill from my La-Z-Girl throne. It’s nice to be cared for in such an unconditional fashion. Perhaps I do the same for him, and maybe this is why we are in our third decade of marriage despite a child in prison and a life-eating profession like medicine.

I am now five weeks post my second major surgery in 3 months. I have found piano playing to be painful in the literal sense but a palliative balm in the figurative sense. At first I could manage 5-10 minutes. Now I can at least fumble my way through a sonata despite a slow movement that is bloated with gravitas. Serious as movement two is (largo and mesto which indicates slow and melancholic, though it just occurs to me it sounds like something you’d eat at a trattoria), the rest of the sonata is full of jokes. Dramatic pauses, ridiculous sforzando-pianos, and a rondo theme that opens with his favorite scheme of “the third time is the charm.” That is, LVB liked to start something twice then the third time take it to fruition. It must have driven his other band members nuts sometimes. Fun fact, Beethoven precisely counted his coffee beans every morning. 60 beans per cup. He was a beautiful brilliant batty barista with a knack for piano and an ear for composing, even when he was deaf.

I’m going to leave this edition of the Beethoven Dog Project as it is, warts and all. It’s just not every day you get three dogs clamoring for classical music. They like Beethoven best as they can really dig their teeth into his music. The bones of each sonata hold the seemingly simple tunes and fragments together, and the marrow of those bones signal a deep connection to sacred creativity. Fueled by 60 coffee beans and an ego that was never afraid of falling, rather always keeping focus on where he was headed, riding the black diamond musical moguls of this rugged, ragged life.

Op 10, No 2, for Maisie

 Sometimes you just play, no matter what else is going on. You do it because you can and someday maybe you won’t be able to. Or you do it because it is your first love, the thing you gave as an answer when adults asked you what you wanted to “be” when you grew up. Or you do it because Maisie is just laying there serenely and while away from her family seems calmed by the piano and in a few days you are getting surgery and you also had surgery not that long ago and post operatively no matter how much you want to play you will not, you cannot.

Maisie knows me mainly as a pianist. For years now I descend upon her home early mornings or weekends and play with one of her people. Or she comes over with her person and plays here. Maisie finds Monk fairly obnoxious. Which I don’t really get, but I don’t speak dog so who knows what he is saying to her. Mostly he’s a goofball whereas Maisie is more on the classy side.

Opus 10 number 2 is, if I remember correctly, the first Beethoven Sonata I ever played. I probably nailed it at age 8, and truthfully at 7 times that age now and with very little recent practicing (see above re surgery), it’s a bit rough, or should I say ruff? It’s OK though. This piece is a lark. A little piece that Ludwig could probably improvise with his 2 pinky fingers while holding a conversation regarding the importance of art and music in the true understanding of human nature. I love its lightness. It doesn’t seem too concerned with itself. But still it delights. Maisie might find it meh-sie but she also may be dreaming about the beach and the woods and bacon and everything good. 

Right at this very moment, despite an unstable spinal cord, I can play piano well enough. In fact my recent surgery fixed a fumbling right hand. The next surgery will get a nice protective moat around my spinal palace, so it may continue to reign over my body with stable decision making and jewel-like precision. If only certain other folks in power would do the same…

Sometimes you just have to play, even when the world is in chaos. I do love Beethoven but my main go-to recently has been Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier with its 48 preludes and fugues provides endless challenge, while it is also comforting in its familiarity. It is ordered and perfect and stable. Stability is underrated and overlooked. Like breathing it is often forgotten until it disappears or is threatened. The breath of the holy spirit as well as the wind and fire is celebrated on this day of Pentecost, the 50th day after Easter. If Bach is the breath, Beethoven is the wind and fire. A Shining Star, giving strength to carry on, yeah.

Just Maisie it’ll all be OK.

Opus 10, No 1, for Monk

 This the fifth sonata was part of a group of three that the 1798 (or so) press reviewed as “three nice sonatas”. I am not sure anything by Beethoven can really be called “nice”, unless said in an edgy drawl, “noiicccccee”. Anyway this sonata is Mozartean in the way a single wrong note is like showing up to a work meeting naked. It doesn’t exactly ruin the meeting but no one really wanted to see that over morning coffee.

Playing Beethoven for dogs will not change the world, but it might bring joy (to me? to the dogs? to someone walking by?) and joy, they say, can be an act of resistance. Playing Beethoven for dogs does not express the grief of the execution of Renee Good just blocks away from the execution of George Floyd. Maybe it does send out some well-crafted sound waves into the atmosphere, serving as an antidote to the venom of hate.

When I lived in Minneapolis I enjoyed eating ice cream when it was 20 degrees below zero. I once left the music school at the U and was met by about 30 angry looking raccoons, eyes all fixed on me, glowing. I enjoyed soup and bread at St Martin’s Table. I snow shoed to the video store. I worked at a bookstore owned by Meredith Birney Baxter’s brother. I studied genetics and heard Beethoven’s 7th symphony live. I was a student in a lab studying malignant hyperthermia. I fell in love with organic chemistry.

Minnesota is not for the faint of heart. Though my father once received a heart transplant there, so..

what I’m trying to say is it does not surprise me to see the people there, not all of them but many of them, rise up together as a community to help their neighbors. Which, along with welcoming the stranger and loving your enemies is an actual thing that Jesus said was super important.

As for Opus 10, no 1 and my little brother Monk witnessing it, I rather enjoyed this piece and am glad to have explored it. Monk full on snored during the slow movement. I think he might need a CPAP machine, though in his case I suppose it would be a CPUP. And though Monk slept through most of the sonata he surely noticed at least subconsciously, the brief moments resembling the fifth symphony, another gem in c minor. Beethoven is a doggone genius!

I will keep on with the Beethoven Dog Project. It is this small grounding bit of joy and a challenge on many levels. What’s the point? The grounding allows me to keep perspective in this time of uncertainty. It reminds me that although some people have chosen to revel in the suffering of others, that most people like a good tune and a community of friends. The challenge keeps me learning. Can I play one phrase in the sonata in a way that cracks open a bit of the mystery? Can I find a deeper relationship with music? Can I slowly drive my husband and dog insane with nonstop Beethoven, piano lid up?

If Opus10, no 1 has me at a work meeting naked, God only knows what the Hammerklavier will bring. Hopefully something “nice”…

https://youtu.be/h8vZMXKXv7s?feature=shared