Strangers from a Plane, Beethoven and an Old Woman

I don’t travel as much as I used to. Whenever I was in a plane I’d look down on towns in Germany or France and think of all the lives that were going on below me; of all the lives that had gone on and would continue to be lived through history, and wonder at how little those people and I had in common.

What bearing did I have on them or they on me? I had nothing to fill in the gaps between us, no way to bridge my world to theirs and so we carry on mutually oblivious, free of commitment, prejudice, commonality.

Is the human race, then, nothing more than an aggregate of strangers?  Are even (or is that especially?) those with whom we have intimate relations unfathomable, unknowable?

Is it better like this? The metaphorical viewpoint granted or necessitated by being in a plane looking down on unknown towns and fields may allow me to make a determination, but in truth I don’t know.

And yet, in language, art, film and music there is evidence of sharing. These media are where we can be together, which is to say these are the places where we are not alone.

Last week I went to the see a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony number 7.  It was a moving experience. There was no one there I knew, and yet as the four movements progressed I had the impression that everyone there was being drawn together. The music seemed to have this awesome centripetal power that was creating a kind of communion, a common body and mind. I imagined that Beethoven was reaching across more than two centuries to incarnate for forty minutes or so the Weltgeist  imagined by his Romantic idealist contemporary and countryman, Hegel.

Or so it seemed. Beethoven and Hegel lend themselves to this kind of thinking. I know that I left the concert with a grin on my face and I looked around the hall and I saw the same face looking back at me. So I guess that others are susceptible to the same influence. So be it. If I’m deluded and vain I’m fairly sure I was not the only one last Friday night!

There was a woman in the audience who was about 80 years old. God knows who she was. I am going to say her name is Brigid. That was my grandmother’s name, so it will do for her. 

Beethoven had been long dead when Brigid’s parents were born. I am tempted to think that I shared something with a hall full of strangers last Friday. Why not say that I shared the same experience with the people who first heard this Symphony on 8^th December 1813?

If Beethoven can make strangers share in the same time and space then why can’t he do the same across time and space? What if Brigid had dropped dead during the last movement? She was rocking over and back a good bit - it seemed like she was tempting fate. We would still have been together for the three and half movements before the temptress kicked the bucket. What was it? Had Beethoven rejuvenated her? Surely there are worse ways of dying than doing so in the throes of returning to ones youth? 

Soon enough I will be 80 years old too. If I have to choose between colon cancer and a heart attack listening to Beethoven then take me now – I’m listening to it again!

Be all of that as it chooses to be, I guess what I am getting at here is that while travelling is good, standing still can be just as good. They are, of course two sides of the same thing.

Oddly, during intervals at the concert I was reading C S Lewis’ The Discarded Image. Beethoven exemplifies not only the post-medieval but of course the post-renaissance world. His symphony number 7 is to my ears, a celebration of the world of the heroic individual. The middle ages could never have produced such a work.

Neither could the renaissance have done so. The renaissance was still too undemocratic for the controlled chaos of Beethoven.

In every movement it has raw and energetic percussion, it has shocking changes of tempo and it is unrelenting in its development and of melody and changes of key. At the same time it is structured and consistent. Not the structure and consistency of Bach but one bending under the pressure of its energy and yet managing to cohere.

The war between form and content in Beethoven is a musical foreshadowing of the struggles that had begun and would continue to take place in history right up to the present day. As such, what he has to say about the tensions between the controlling and the controlled, between the ruling and the ruled skips modernism and speaks much more eloquently than  much of what has followed him.

So Beethoven is one of the authors of how people in our time think, feel and imagine. There is no getting around it. The Romantic worldview may be just as illusory as the bookish conservatism of C S Lewis’ middle ages or for that matter the scepticism of modernism and the formlessness of post modernism but Beethoven comes from a period of creativity in Europe that is, viewed from our time, a kind of twilight of optimism. It would never again be permissible to express the kind of hope that he did - especially given the horrific effects of the transfer of the Romantic sensibility into politics that was Nazism.

Still, though, hope and optimism, if taken in small doses, never did anyone any harm!

I don’t travel as much as I used to.  Maybe for me, it’s better to stand still. I lack patience. I know this.

Last Friday’s concert showed me what can happen if you wait. Beethoven might show up.