A Recovering Composer's Summertime, Part 2: Beethoven is STILL Right (Although It Took the World Until February 2020 To Completely Catch Up)

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

Part 1: Summertime Is For the Woods (Or, At Least, the Parks)

When I was a teenager, Beethoven was my favorite composer for many reasons. The first was his "Moonlight" Sonata, the piece that caused me to want to play the piano, and whose rolling triplets show up in my own improvisations as a rhythm quite often because I learned to play in three before learning twos and fours in terms of muscle memory (and also, because traditional gospel music is often in a relatively slow 12/8, which is the same practically speaking as Beethoven's 4/4 adagio with TRIPLETS).

But the other things were more subtle ... in digging into Beethoven's life, I discovered that he felt the same way that I do about the outdoors, and especially about trees... the far greater composer gained a lifetime friend in one quote recorded in Thayer's Life of Beethoven:

Oh God, I am happy in Thy woods, where every tree says Thy Name: Holy! Holy!

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 17, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

My family used to vacation in the Santa Cruz Mountains, among the redwoods, and that is the happiest place I would ever be until I was old enough to go into Golden Gate Park and later Yerba Buena Park on my own. The latter is less crowded and more wild, and thus is my favorite ... ah, when you get above those paved roads ...

Photos by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 11, 2023, in Yerba Buena Park

... and yet, Golden Gate Park, where I was on the day of writing this, has its own vistas ...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, February 18, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

... adjoins San Francisco's last live oak stands (the first picture in the post is a live oak, and so are these) ...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

... and has its own roads into wildness, as long as you are a bit willing to get off the paved paths and venture where park and wood meet...

... or, at least, know the roads to where the tourists generally are not ...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

... and there, as a young woman, I heard music galore, alone with God and His woods. Beethoven is still right, and pointed the way for me.

I discovered something else in teen years about Beethoven that I admired ... he was a responsible teenager who stepped up for his family ... that for Part 3 ... but first, something a bit better known about Beethoven can happen for me while IN the woods -- or at least the parks -- that he would have loved in San Francisco!

Part 2: Improvisation at the Piano IN the Park -- A Dream (Almost and Someday Going to Completely) Come True

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

I remember discovering that there were pianos in the park as a rumor last year... imagine my joy last month when that beautiful image came out of the San Francisco fog (named Karl, like Beethoven's adopted son -- but we'll get to THAT in part 3).

However, the idea that there is trouble in paradise comes upon closer examination in this picture...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

... and, the agony and the ecstasy go from here...

The tuning is done for. The action is DEADLY stiff ... no more than ten minutes is possible if you need your hands for, say, typing a Hive post or practicing piano at home. But, there are better pianos further out ... and we will get there ... and I will improvise more in the park this summer and autumn, Lord willing. Unlike Beethoven, who was better known up to about age 42 as a public performer than a composer, I am at age 42 nearly unknown to the public as an improviser at the piano, but have an international reach as a composer ... so, the great composer and I are passing each other at middle age, and I acknowledge him most respectfully while going, knowing that I have aging parents, and he and I shall meet again in family responsibility...

Part 3: Beethoven's Least Known Life Journey, and His Wisdom

On this subject, it is perhaps best to let Beethoven tell us himself about how he sometimes felt, under burdens that few knew he was carrying ... with some help from the great pianist Daniel Barenboim on this occasion...

It is not often mentioned, but Beethoven was a family man in a way that tracks a lot of what many go through today -- he was the one who stood in the gap in a family broken by death and addiction, and, having done so once, he would be called on again. He became the main support for his father and two younger brothers well before the age of 20 because his mother passed away when he was 17, and his abusive, alcoholic father completely lost himself ... so, at the back of his mind, the great composer became someone responsible for a family as a teenager. He also in his twenties discovered that the last surviving daughter of Johann Sebastian Bach was in danger of starvation -- he led the effort to fund raise to make sure she wouldn't!

But little did young Beethoven know he wasn't done -- when he was 43, his brother Kaspar Karl died and left his own son Karl in joint custody with the composer and the child's mother. Unfortunately, Momma Johanna and Uncle Ludwig clashed on how Karl should be raised. Thus began YEARS of court battles -- the record is not pretty -- but in the end, Uncle Ludwig won, became the adoptive father of his nephew Karl, and remained a single father to the end of his life.

Family takes money, but art is not always at money's command -- keep that thought for part 4 -- but from about age 18 until his brothers were grown, and then again from age 43 to the end of his life, Beethoven had that pressure of knowing he had a mouth in addition to his own to feed no matter what he could write at a given time. Bonus points at 43 for being well-advanced in deafness, and public performance opportunities being no more ... extra bonus points for having to take care of a child and be in and out of court in addition to all the changes in his life as the Napoleonic Wars were reaching their end.

Art will not always come when the artist is aging, exhausted, and stressed out, and even when it does, it may not serve money-making purposes ... we know that after 1814 Beethoven slowed down in production, but still created some of his greatest works in the last 13 years of his life (including the "Hammerklavier" Sonata in 1817, whose slow movement you could be listening to while reading this) ... yet there were not enough of them, and they were not accessible enough to pay the constant bills.

Yet Beethoven was also wise ... he knew he had pieces he had written when things were good, just waiting in his proverbial closet to get dusted off, touched up, and made to meet opportunities as they arose! On that wisdom, the family man kept the bills paid and himself and Karl fed -- and even left Karl an inheritance!

When I was a frustrated late teenager realizing the community I lived in did not have the means to support me performing the classical-influenced works I was writing then, my mom told me: "Remember Beethoven's closet!" ... so I learned to put things away ... music, writing, visual art ... I am quite prolific, and external hard drives are becoming my new best friends. Guess what? Beethoven is still right and so is Mom ... this month I found THIS collection of opportunities -- The Composer's Site!

For my fellow Hive composers ... would you look at all the opportunities on there ... and those ridiculously close deadlines? If there is ANYTHING I would hate about this site, it would be some the stupidly close deadlines there are by the time they hear about items and get them up ... I WOULD hate the fact, except that I know the secret of Beethoven's closet! I have plenty of music available to work with to meet opportunities that fit it -- and that leaves me time to live my offline life (like the meetings I'm in RIGHT NOW AS YOU READ THIS), keep up my production on Hive, and score the HARDEST piece I've ever scored ... @mipiano, the score is right at the first reprise of the theme of "Song of the Not-So-Mourning Dove"!

(Notice. my friend, that finally we have some nice six-note patterns in the bass ... a respite ... but then the phrasing breaks into four ... and in the measures next to be scored, a smoothed "rhythm of the primes" will return)

Part 4: Beethoven's Greatest Wish, Answered 210 Years Later (Right Here)

According to Thayer's Life of Beethoven, one of the things that Beethoven thought of, around 1810, was for the need for there to be an Art Exchange -- a place where artists could bring their work in exchange for the things that they needed to live, so they would not have to struggle to survive. He said this on the background of which he lived: the Catholic Church only employed so many musicians, and only for certain things that met its needs, and also, Europe was full of dictators fighting each other -- Beethoven lost patrons and steady income because of the Napoleonic Wars. Neither church nor state would ever be reliable sources of income for independent artists ever again, and Beethoven saw the end of that era overtake him. He knew, therefore, that this Exchange would need to be independent of existing institutions, and be in the hands of the people.

Further down the century's path...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

... Karl Marx, in 1848, almost uttered the same thing: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." But, Marx also said in his infamous manifesto when communism was fully achieved, the state would "wither away," and that never quite happened over the attempts at this style of governance in the 20th century. Beethoven could have told Marx to expect that ... Napoleon Bonaparte NEARLY got a symphony dedicated to him as the First Consul of France, upholding the ideas of the French Revolution, but then became a dictator -- and broke Beethoven's heart (and thus Beethoven ripped the dedication page off his Third Symphony, and left it without dedication).

Surely Beethoven knew: no centralized power would ever be able to resist the temptation to dominate, to dictate ... so, another century and a half would have to go by until Beethoven's wish was granted in February 2020. If he could have been here, he would have been on Hive, and with a little help from Hive's German-speaking community and a good translation service, probably hanging out in this community, like this ...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, July 19, 2023, in Golden Gate Park

We, right here, right now, are living Beethoven's greatest wish ... we as content creators can come to Hive and decide, in a way no single person dominates and controls, in a way transparent to the people, to bring our work and bless one another with a reward that, for an increasing number of people in certain parts of the world, is ALREADY enough to sustain their lives. Beethoven was thinking of Hive, 210 years ahead of his time. He is still right ... and when I think of him, and come share here on Hive, I am grateful for the blessing to live now, as the sun shines brightly on Beethoven's greatest wish!

Now, may we have the tenacity of that teenage boy with the strength to uphold his family, the seriousness and passion of his middle years and symphonies, and the determination of his old age to leave a legacy for his nephew and heir -- may we hold to what Beethoven has to teach us with and beyond his music, and keep what we have in Hive ALIVE, as our legacy to the coming artists of the future!

"Hive at the Heart," created by the author, Deeann D. Mathews