Anam Cara

I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing . . . Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed . . . But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life . . . only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce . . .

When the first signs of deafness began, Beethoven responded with defiance. In the scherzo in the Ninth Symphony there is a wonderful evocation of the force that triumphs over destiny, and his Eroica or Third Symphony charts the great transition where his soul moves towards acceptance of and integration with his awful destiny. From that isolation of deafness he creates music of an immensely profound, divine and complex beauty. This new growth of soul comes to magnificent flowering in the last string quartets. From despair and forsakenness, he creates sublime and unforgettable beauty. Sorrow is transformed by tranquillity.

The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who loves Beethoven, echoes this when speaking of beauty: ‘Beauty, for me, is felt to be beautiful only when it is contrasted with its opposite, when we can also see the abyss, the shadow.’

M

USIC AND

H

EALING

:

‘I C

AN

S

EE DOWN ALONG THE

M

USIC

’

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO IS A MUSIC THERAPIST. I HAVE SEEN HER work with a man who had had a stroke; he could no longer speak. I saw her last session with him where she sang and played in an attentive and accompanying improvised style. Within the emerging rhythm as she accompanied, anticipated and challenged him, both of them remained within the flow of the melody. He began to hum the music with her and ended up actually speaking. It was such a touching experience to see this person unexpectedly freed.

Music is often the only language which can find those banished to the nameless interior of illness. It calls out to the buried knowing in them, its rhythmic, lyrical warmth eventually freeing their frozen rhythm. She says: ‘I can see down along the music into a person – as though the music were a tunnel between them and me. Or to use another image: through the invisible hands of music I search for the person and the music can find them and bring them back. Only music can reach the trapped knowing within them.’

T

HE

M

USIC OF THE

V

OICE

And you, who with your soft but searching voice

Drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,

Who held me near your heart that I might rest

Confiding in the darkness of your choice:

Possessed by you I chose to have no choice,

Fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.

GEOFFREY HILL, ‘Tenebrae’