Lay for the Day
29th
March
1795: Ludwig van Beethoven gives his first concert in Vienna, a little
over two years after moving to the city. Born in Bonn in 1770, he had
made his public debut as a musician at the age of eight, in Cologne.
1827: Beethoven is buried in Vienna. He was 56 years old.
Composure
His face is covered
in calluses. His brow is deafened with hair like a rock in the sea. His
mouth opens and closes like a mussel and his ears are thick with them.
.
The tide looks through his eye like a mussel. His brain is a mollusc delicately
gobbling in an opaline casing. He makes music by splintering pianos with
his teeth into so much matchwood and chopsticks, chomping lickerish flats
and sharps, cracking the ivories like a dog. He rehearses the Sonata for
Snapped Strings, tossing violins over his shoulder one after another to
join the discarded heap, hurling his harp into the percussion, unmindful
of the china figurines arranged along the top. Will they lower him down
in the end in chains, when the moon is dark, long years before his time,
his monumental marble, Multiple Collision, still unfinished?
John Gibbens
The
Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar
