Fantastic Metropolis

That evening Beethoven returned to his lodgings, after walking aimlessly about the streets of Vienna, and drank a great quantity of an oven-cleansing liquid. He was rushed to hospital, and after a long and arduous operation in which half his stomach was removed, he was pronounced saved.

 

From this time on Beethoven’s life is not at all well chronicled. Beethoven himself stopped writing his journal, and there is a singular lack of contemporary writing about him. We know only that something happened to make Beethoven change his whole attitude to life. Whether he had reached the extremity of suffering, which then metamorphosed into joy, we do not know, but certainly something caused him to change his outlook. Whether this experience was an internal or external one we cannot say. Beethoven himself merely writes, in his last journal entry: “One must live!”

He abruptly began work on the Mass in D, the work that was destined to be his greatest. Hector Berlioz was present at the first performance, and wrote in his Memoires:

Ludwig van Beethoven II has never been taken seriously as a composer, and deservedly, for there is no doubt that his work has had grievous faults, not the least of which has been its singular lack of inspiration. I say to you now, having heard last night his Mass in D, that his muse has at last responded, nay, has veritably heaped upon his head the riches of a lifetime! With what fluttering intoxication I experienced Beethoven’s music last night! I tore out my hair in a delirium of delight, I wept, I could not restrain the groans that Beethoven drew from me! Beethoven says to us: “You must live life to the full; you must take the suffering and build it into a foundation for joy, for joy is eternal, and can never die.” Here is life herself speaking to us with her full and glorious voice. I say that Beethoven’s Mass is one of the greatest of all musical works, and had I written but one bar of this work, then I would have accounted my life worthwhile.

In view of this, it is nothing less than a tragedy that this one performance of the Mass seems to be the only one every to have taken place. The manuscript appears to have been lost, and has since never come to light.

Immediately after completing the Mass, Beethoven sustained a small wound to the right thigh, after falling in the street outside his house. Blood poisoning soon developed, and within three weeks he had died. An ornate tomb was constructed at Mannheim, but it was unfortunately destroyed during the war.

The Text

SOUL: I slept awhile, and now I am awake,
        I see that all that went before was but a dream.
        All is still, and now I understand
        This stillness is the nat’ral state of things,
        And that the flurry of my earthbound life
        Was but the struggle of a soul in flight,
        In fear of drinking at the fountainhead.
        Into my being is poured a magic wine
        Of stillness; now I know
        There’s no escape from this, my judgement way.
        The wine has made me like a ship
        At rest from tossing on a busy sea.
        Now I can lift my anchor up and fly
        On snowy wings into the glory of the day.

CHORUS OF MOURNERS: Lord, have mercy on him,
        Christ, have mercy on him.

SOUL: And down below my friends I see
        Clustered about my bed,
        Knowing not that I, a bird, do fly
        The airy vaults of time,
        My sails outspread, my dipping prow,
        The wine of peace from stern to bow.
        But what is this? I feel that I
        Am urged still further in the sky.
        Did not this solitude so lack
        Another being apart from me,
        And had I now corporeal form,
        I’d say a hand pressed in my back.