The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (40 page)

In his late teens, and probably as a result of Neefe’s coaching, Beethoven began to read widely and voraciously. This is when he began to frame his life as
a quest to understand
. He read poetry, drama, philosophy of all kinds. “
There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me,” he declared.

Beethoven was not an intellectual. His quest was more urgent than that. He was grasping for psychological survival. “
I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand
what the better and wiser people
of every age were driving at in their works.” This was not a pose. Beethoven was
never interested in high-blown metaphysics, but only in practical solutions to the problems of living. This quality of inquiry marks him as a real yogi. He might have said, as Thoreau did, “even I am at times a yogi.”

5

As we have seen, Beethoven had begun his phase of deliberate practice by the time he was five or six. By the time he was fifteen he was a brilliant and virtuosic pianist. And by his late teens he was probably the greatest pianist in Europe—the successor to Mozart, who had been dead just twelve months when Beethoven arrived in Vienna. Beethoven was highly sought after in the palaces and salons of aristocratic connoisseurs. Some were offended by the sheer boldness and unconventionality of his musical style, but most describe his musical presence as positively astonishing. We have this eyewitness account written by Carl Czerny:

No doubt about it: Beethoven was a wunderkind. And he knew it. He aimed to be the best. He took on all comers. He frequently participated in pianistic duels, in which he challenged other important European pianists of his day to public competitions. These were like great athletic competitions and they sometimes drew hundreds of spectators. Beethoven always won. (One sore loser, Abbé Joseph Gelinek, believed that Beethoven’s supernormal powers at the piano could only be explained as sorcery—and the good Abbé later described being “
bested by that young fellow [Beethoven] who must be in league with the devil.”)

Beethoven was by all accounts a commanding presence, though often in a positively unnerving fashion. Solomon gives us a description: “
[He] was short of stature, with a large head, and thick black hair that framed a pock-marked face. His forehead was broad and heavily underlined
by bushy eyebrows.” Many found him ugly. But everyone noticed the unusual beauty and expressiveness of his eyes, which were sometimes flashing with life, other times inexpressively sad. Solomon continues: “
His mouth was small and delicately shaped. He had white teeth, which he habitually rubbed with a napkin or handkerchief … He was powerfully built, with wide shoulders, strong hands overgrown with hair, and short, thick fingers.”

There was a crudeness in Beethoven’s appearance that all witnesses remark upon. He could be unpolished even when decked out in finery. But his friends found him often exuberant, lively, and talkative. Czerny remembered him as “
always merry, mischievous, full of witticisms and jokes.” Nonetheless, all contemporary accounts also remark on his moodiness, his emotional fragility, and a tendency toward melancholy.

Beethoven clung heroically to his life’s work. There is absolutely no question that he understood that music would be his only path to wholeness. He understood the meaning of his gift. And he felt a profound responsibility to it. He knew that he could not live as other people lived. “
Live only in your art,” he wrote in his diary, “for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the
only existence
for you.”

Beethoven understood that if he were to survive, he would have to privilege his art—his dharma—above all other activities in life. He would, in fact, have to pare away everything that was
not
his art. This evidenced a solid understanding of Krishna’s doctrine of unity of purpose. “
Everything that is called life should be sacrificed to the sublime and be a sanctuary of art,” Beethoven wrote in his diary.

As a result of this view, Beethoven created a life that was organized in every way to support his dharma.
His daily schedule is instructive. He rose at daybreak, ate breakfast, and went directly to his desk, where he worked until midday. After lunch he ordinarily took a long walk—sometimes twice around the city—which could occupy a good part of the afternoon. This walking practice is redolent of Thoreau, of Frost, and indeed of many great writers. Beethoven discovered that his most productive work hours were in the morning, and so he protected this time, and made sure that he arrived fresh at his desk in the morning, ready to commune with his muse. He usually retired to bed early.

Beethoven pared away what most of us think of as “fun,” but the
truth of the matter is that there was nothing more fun for him than his music. He sketched musical ideas constantly, whether at home, on the street, in a tavern, or lying on his side in a meadow. “
I always have a notebook … with me, and when an idea comes to me, I put it down at once,” he told young Gerhard von Breuning. “I even get up in the middle of the night when a thought comes, because otherwise I might forget it.” He filled a vast number of notebooks during his lifetime, and retained them for reference until his death.

6

Work was a kind of sustaining play for Beethoven. But what exactly was he working on? Nothing small or insignificant. He was attempting nothing less than mastery of the entire Western musical tradition.

By the time he was in his midtwenties, Beethoven had mastered the tools and vernacular of the greatest living musical masters: Haydn (his teacher for a time) and Mozart. Early in his career, Beethoven had taken on an intensive study of the forms and patterns of the Western classical tradition. He had, in particular, begun a close study of the central form of this tradition—what we today call sonata form.

Sonata form was the organizing paradigm of Western music. This form, carefully developed over the course of centuries, helped a composer develop the logic of a piece of music. Sonata form was organized around three main components: the exposition of a theme, or the declaration of a musical “argument” embedded in a harmonic structure; the gradual development of some of the interesting possibilities inherent in that harmonic structure and direction; and, finally, the recapitulation of the theme and harmonic structure—now transformed and deepened in some important way. This form provided a brilliant way of developing a musical thought—investigating its possibilities and bringing it to a resolution or conclusion. Most important, it created a container for all the components of drama: for creating and sustaining tension, for expressing development and transformation, for giving us the feeling of forward movement. Sonata form is a remarkably psychological approach to music. It connects us with something quintessentially human.

Sigmund Freud himself would have appreciated the possibilities for
“working through” psychological conflict that are inherent in sonata form. Freud, of course, called this conflict “neurosis.” Neurosis is simply
conflict between parts of the self
—conflict, say, between our desires and our conscience; or conflict between our sometimes monstrously driven cravings and our more prudent selves, or even conflict between an overweening scrupulosity and normal human wishes.

All of the most mature forms of human play involve us in the “working through” of these conflicts. When “work is play for mortal stakes,” as it was for Beethoven, it helps us to resolve doubt and division, and to at least briefly experience a sense of resolution, of “union,” and of well-being.

So, sonata form provided Beethoven with an effective form for working through his inner conflicts. Some might protest that this working through was only symbolic. It was in fact very, very real. The working through provided to Beethoven by his music was central to his psychological survival. It was essential that Beethoven plumb the depths of musical form, because in doing so he was plumbing his own depths.

Piano sonatas were Beethoven’s first laboratory for investigating the transformational possibilities of sonata form. Through his development of the piano sonata, he was able to investigate the plasticity of sonata form itself. What was the form’s real capacity for holding conflict? For helping him endure the tension of opposites? How much of himself could he pour into this form?

We have said that deliberate practice leads to heightened pattern recognition. There is no greater example of this heightened pattern recognition than Beethoven, who found astonishing new patterns within the structure of Western music. He found patterns within patterns, just as Thoreau did in nature and Corot did in painting. Beethoven found within the sonata form new, unexplored possibilities. As Solomon tells us, he explored “
thematic condensation; more intense, extended and dramatic development; and the infusion of richer fantasy and improvisatory materials into an even more highly structured classicism.” Beethoven saw possibilities in this form that only a highly developed musical imagination could perceive.

In effect, then, Beethoven became a musical seer. Like the mystical
rishis
of ancient India, he perceived aspects of reality that were beyond
the perceptual range of ordinary people. Very few of his contemporaries could understand the musical leaps he had made. And of course, not seeing the genius of his refined perception, his critics called him “mad.”

They were only half right. Throughout his life, Beethoven was indeed constantly threatened by the forces of disintegration planted in his childhood. But his music became a laboratory in which he could bring these forces to the surface, work them out, master them. This is the very hallmark of great dharma. Each of us must find the form that allows this naming, this working through, and, finally, this mastery. We may find these forms in sports, in the arts, in finance, in academia, in relationship building, in child-rearing—or, indeed, in stamp collecting.
But find them we must
.