This month Ruth Padel presents a major new work, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, published in the 250th year of Beethoven’s birth. Below are two poems from it.
 

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    Idealising the Unattainable Can Begin Very Early

 

‘Little Louis clung with great affection to his grandfather. Though he lost him so soon,
he retained the most vivid impression of him.’ Franz Wegeler, Biographical Notes

 

It’s not the face that stays most truly naked
through a life. What jumps out from this court portrait
of your Flemish grandfather whose name you bear -
the painting you will lash to a wagon every time you move
along with your manuscripts, piano, single bed
and writing-desk, all rumbling uncovered through city air
furred with floating particles of horse-dung -

is this V of bare chest, the open shirt within

the formal robes, the one soft patch of skin
where he might have cradled you. In all the debris
everywhere you live, jugs of red wine
always on the go, the fevers, smells and flies,
broken love-hopes, slamming doors,
you will find your heart shored up
by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes.

 
 

    Meeting Mozart

 

Never mind a three-week winter journey to Vienna
on your own. You’re sixteen, burning
to be taught by Mozart Mozart Mozart.
He looks like a fat little bird. Bug eyes, fidgety,
tapping his toes. When you play one of his sonatas
he’s unimpressed. But something makes him say,

Alright then, improvise. And at last he’s caught.
Watch out for this boy. He’ll give the world
something to talk about. But a message from Bonn
skewers you back. Your mother’s ill.
Your dream of learning
from the one man you measure yourself against,
whose music drives your heart, is snatched away.

She waits till you return
to drown in the coughed-up dregs
of her own lungs, and for the one and only time
in what’s going to be a life of illness
you get asthma. As if her breath
the breath she cannot catch, has stolen yours.