Beethoven, Broken Angel
To love Beethoven’s music is one thing.Countless people do. To love BeethovenIs another thing, altogether different.
Helene Breuning,* who nurtured him in youth, Called his fits of anger and pique his raptus —Barely controlled excrescences of his rage.
These he converted into masterpiecesWith his relentless refusal to cede desire,Turning even deafness to triumphant song.
Abnormal ruptures no other humanCould endure without his genius for courage,Raptures of sound fed the disease that drove him
To depths of our life only the heavensCould transform into energy humansCan bear by acknowledging it divine —
Anything else must be diabolic.His music convinces us a devil He was not — though, if an angel, broken.
Helen Keller,† her hand on the radio,Felt the Ninth as it charged the diaphragmDelivering pulses to her waiting mind.
Instrument by instrument, she could nameThe sounds, including the human voices,Thrilling her touch as she sat in darkness
No match for the light burning within herFrom “the power of his quenchless spirit By which out of his pain he wrought such joy,”
“Ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes.”Delicate? Shower? Sweet? This, Beethoven?No. This, his music. And that, our transcendence.
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*Jan Caeyers, Beethoven, A Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. p. 143
†The Auricle, Vol. II, No. 6, March 1924. American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives. Letter to the New York Symphony Orchestra.
