Music • Images
When I was about nine or ten years old, I often played Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. Of course, at that time I wasn’t yet able to explain why this music affected me so intensely.
But the music conjured up images and feelings. Sometimes there was sadness, sometimes I was the hero.
I already knew that Beethoven had become deaf later in life. I found that a deeply affecting story, perhaps because I already knew that my stuttering was a handicap (and that it would stay with me). Somewhere, I recognised it.
I felt the sadness, or rather: the helplessness. Ludwig, my fellow sufferer, in a way only I could understand (or so I thought).
How old must I have been? Three or four, maybe?
Here I am with my little sister, laying flowers at Martin’s grave.
And so, music and the unpleasant side of life were connected for me from an early age.
My mother once told me that Jim Reeves had died in a plane crash. And I knew that my mother loved his song I Love You Because. I felt sorry for her.
I felt sorry for my dad when he told me one night that my mother had died. I was eleven years old. Out of pity, because I thought I had to show that I was sad, I played the Moonlight Sonata on my little record player at full volume and burst into tears. Somehow I thought, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? I just wanted to comfort you dad...
Now, as a father myself, I can imagine much better what that must have been like for him.
Het died on a friday morning only seven years later...
The Dutch tearjerker 'Jongen, kom naar huis toe' by Johnny Hoes reminded my mother of her eldest son, my older brother Martin, who died at just twenty. I guess I became aware at an early age that life wasn’t only beautiful.
That there was loss, sadness, unpleasant things that could suddenly happen.
But music remained the place where I could disappear. I could enter that magical, elusive world where I could feel whatever I wanted to feel and be whoever I wanted to be: wonderfully miserable and gloriously heroic.
Maybe that's also one of the meanings of the drowning I’m talking about on this website. And one I will undoubtedly return to along the way.
What has always struck me in this excerpt of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, is the relentless repetition of six chords. They return in a rising sequence. The emphatic accents and powerful timpani strikes give the music an almost relentless drive. It is as if the music is fighting its way through something, only to begin again, higher still, with the same force and, somewhere beneath it all, a sense of helplessness. And then, at the end of this sequence, the Fmaj7(a) chord, just screaming for salvation.
I felt his despair or anger. Sure, this was my own interpretation, my way of imagining a struggle cast in music.. Within my musical fantasy, I could easily imagine what Beethoven might have felt.
We were comrades in struggle. He was deaf. I stuttered.
