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 hint 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! BOO1). 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.
