Beethoven’s Silent Sonata

In the 1994 movie, Immortal Beloved, Gary Oldman plays Ludwig van Beethoven. The brilliant, arrogant and occasionally irascible musician is struggling with the onset of deafness, which he tries to mask. His condition grows steadily worse, however, until he is completely deaf. In this scene, Beethoven finds a way to ‘hear’ the music through the notes resonating in the body of the piano. The moment is, at once, immensely uplifting and tragic.

When Beethoven’s deafness is discovered he reacts with vitriolic anger, for it would be perilous in his role as composer should it be common knowledge he was deaf.

There is a scene later in the film when an ageing Beethoven enters a concert hall mid performance as Ode to Joy is being played. The auditorium is filled with the rousing emotion of the symphony. When the camera closes in on the face of Beethoven (Oldman) the sound suddenly cuts to silence – he hears not a note of his own composition. The silence in this scene and the anguish wrought on the composer’s face is painful to watch. As the performance ends, Beethoven sees the crowd’s enthusiastic standing ovation but is deaf to their clamorous applause.

Another immersive performance from Gary Oldman. In recent weeks I watched Darkest Hour and was mesmerised by Oldman’s role as Winston Churchill. The two films are separated by a 23-year time span – what unites them is the actor’s ability to find a way to inhabit a character so intimately that what happens on the screen exudes a palpable and irrefutable truth.

Immortal Beloved: 2017, Directed by Bernard Rose. Music by Ludwig van Beethoven and film music by George Fenton (no relation)- whose other film scores include: Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons, White Mischief and The Madness of King George.

Getting Inside Cromwell’s Head

Hilary Mantel's Tudor world

I was talking to a good friend of mine who enjoys history and suggested he might like to read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall – the first book in her fictional trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, doomed advisor to Henry VIII during the span of a particularly turbulent decade in Tudor England. My friend had no interest whatsoever in reading fiction, he practically spat the word, citing that he prefers to read actual history – the facts. Historical fiction seems to polarise opinion in this way.

Clearly, then, my friend won’t be anticipating as I am, the third instalment in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which was supposed to be released in August of 2018. I say supposed to be because Hilary Mantel has just announced that it is looking ‘increasingly unlikely’ that the book would be ready. ‘It simply depends when it comes in…you know, publishing goes in seasons. If I can get it in (finished) early in the new year, it might very well come out later in the summer. The book may not appear until 2019,’ said Mantel. Interesting that literature has to bow to the vagaries of the market, even though both Wolf Hall, 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies, 2012 made Mantel the first author to win the Man Booker Prize for consecutive books. Even though the BBC created a marvellous, and much lauded, six-part adaption for television called Wolf Hall starring the brilliant Mark Rylance as Cromwell. I’d recommend it to anyone, save my friend who’s a stickler for the absolute facts.

I’ve been fascinated by Mantel’s exploration of the inner thoughts and feelings of the Machiavellian Cromwell. The ruthless mind, the complex machinations, the corridor wranglings, the manipulations in court – it makes House of Cards seem tame by comparison. I look forward to the last instalment which charts his final years, the fall from grace and ultimately his execution by beheading.

Writing Exquisite Sentences

I had the great pleasure to attend a one-day workshop through Writers Victoria run by Emily Bitto, author of the Stella Prize winning The Strays. The subject of the workshop was very promising: Writing Exquisite Sentences. The day did not disappoint.

Exquisite sentences give pleasure, Emily said, they are controlled, specific, aware of rhythm and musicality. They evoke and awaken the senses, especially the visual sense. Joseph Conrad was quoted: “…by the power of the written word, to make you see.” Exquisite sentences should surprise, be rich in meaning or symbolism and have some subtext.

Clearly not every sentence can be exquisite, the effect would be an overloaded confectionery of sorts. Everyone knows that moment, however, when you just have to stop and re-read a sentence because it is so artfully expressed, so exquisitely formed it sings off the page.

Among the authors discussed, Emily quoted two of my favourites in Cormac McCarthy and James Salter. In the days following the workshop I re-visited McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Salter’s Light Years, both annotated with those sentences that bade me stop and wonder.

***

‘The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some fire at the earth’s ends.’

‘The other boy was from Missouri. They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.’

‘The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the outermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.’

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy.

***

‘The wide afternoon bed, the dark of drawn curtains. He was escaping from his clothes, they fell in a heap. She lay there waiting. She seemed quiet, remote. He touched his forehead to her like a servant, like a believer in God. He could not speak.’

‘Viri and I are good friends, good friends. I think we’ll always be. But the rest, the rest is dead. We both know it. There’s no use pretending. It’s decorated like a corpse, but it’s already rotten.’

‘Things had somehow changed between them. She would always have affection for him, but the summer had passed.’

Light Years – James Salter.

***

‘I looked at Heloise, she was absorbed in a secret game of her own. Her lips were moving, and she was pecking at the loose gravel with the beak of her thumb and fingers.’

‘The household found its way into its own peculiar form of dailiness. There was an architecture to it. Not precise, but an architecture nonetheless, as if everyone was a door or a window pulled from old houses and assembled into a new one.’

‘I remember that morning with Jerome in the garden. The soft clarity of six a.m. when the day is going to be hot, as if the sun has not yet thrown off its white sheets.’

The Strays – Emily Bitto.