Dear Beethoven

A love letter for Valentine's Day

Dear Beethoven,

I love you.

This morning I listened to your ninth symphony and wept. Thank you! I like weeping. It takes me to the place in my body where grace lives, where I know, really know, how much I love or long to love people I am mad at.

I love you for making something that transports me there in five minutes.

I love you also because I’ve heard you were disagreeable. I am too! One morning I was sitting at the coffee shop with a friend is also a musician and a composer. I was feeling misunderstood about something, who knows what, and we started talking about you. He said you were were the first composer to say no to royalty as patrons. You didn’t like that system, wouldn't participate in it—and people respected you for that. I said it probably made you lonely and financially anxious---isn’t that what freelancing does to most of us? My friend said yes, but you knew you had greatness, that it belonged to you and you to it.

He added that you were very rude. “Beethoven was the type of guy who, if you saw him on the street and said , ‘Hello, Ludwig! What do you think of this weather?’ would shake a fist at you and say, ‘You owe me money!’

Yeah! I thought. Everyone owes all the artists money! And the caretakers and the land and animal stewards. I get it! Sometimes my husband will tell me we need to make more money and I’ll think, This again?! Isn’t it enough to hear the flowers singing? Isn’t it enough to spend two hours with a friend, lifting each other’s sad moods? Isn’t that money?

I don’t even think the Universe understands money—at least not our insanity around it. One day, I was riding my bike and I said, “Listen Universe, I need to pay a bill. Can you please send me some money?”

Three minutes later my helmet flew off my head. Just like that! It simply flew off, so I stopped my bike to pick it up and when I looked up, I was standing in front of a field of goldenrod dotted with purple asters. Literally a field of gold. If I hadn't stopped, I wouldn't have noticed it and once I did I couldn’t stop staring. The Universe said, See? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. You have everything already.

I said, very funny. You’re lucky I’m not allergic.

And the Universe said, No, YOU are lucky. Imagine how much worse it would be if you were allergic to gold!

I know that in truth no one really owes anyone anything. In your symphonies, the piccolo doesn’t owe the cello, the conductor doesn’t owe the soloists. Everyone is just singing their truest note to each other, making the whole thing wilder and sweeter and more, and more, and more, until when you listen, some block somewhere breaks free and you start laughing or crying or both, because you know this is what we really are.

Still. I like imagining you, the man who was walking around—nearly deaf! With ODE TO JOY churning inside— trying and failing at having a pleasant conversation about the weather.

Beethoven, can I tell you something? Because now I feel like we’re friends? Yesterday I heard someone read aloud your letter to your Immortal Beloved—the one that was found in your estate in 1812, the one you never sent. Who did you write it to? Scholars have argued for years—Josephine Van Brunsvik, who you were hopelessly in love with? Your nephew, Antonie Brettano to whom you were devoted?

“My angel, my all, my very self,” you wrote, “Why this profound sorrow, when necessity speaks--can our love endure without sacrifices, without our demanding everything from one another, can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, that I am not wholly yours?”

When I heard these lines I thought, boy, are we in times like that! Necessity is speaking. We are demanding everything from each other.

Now, I wonder if that letter was to your own artistic soul, your pure connection to the stars.

“Love demands all,” you wrote. “and rightly so, and thus it is for me with you, for you with me-- but you forget so easily that I must live for me and for you.”

What if that’s who we’re pining for all the time? This connection to the mysterious soul self that is always with us but somehow hard to reach, and we long for the union so deeply we keep begging it to come, even though it’s right there, the way a musk ox, so intoxicated by its own scent it looks for it everywhere, not knowing that it comes from itself?

When I look at that letter that was never meant for my eyes, that’s who I see you talking to—your creative connection, saying, Stay with me! I love you so much. Help me do what I’m here to do. I am at your mercy, always. Let the blazing light inside of me burst from my heart, shooting sparks and lighting up the sky.

I love you for being a madman. I love you for your wonderful hair and fierce eyes. I love you for being so far ahead of your time. I love you for carrying a storm inside you and transforming it into something, hundreds of years later, I can listen to, on a day when the news is bad and my mood is dark, and you say, yes. I know. People are capable of terrible things.

And they can also do this.