The Tempest

THE TEMPEST

PETER HALSTEAD

CHAPTER I: THE PHANTOM OF THE SAWATCH

We filmed and recorded Beethoven’s 17th sonata, known as The Tempest, in a tractor barn up against the Holy Cross Wilderness in Colorado.

We had been living in Paris, in a building t hat had been the residence of Delacroix; Edith Wharton’s first apartment on the street looked a lot like ours. High schoolers would suck on their Gitanes outside the Collège Paul Claudel, ignoring the Chopin flooding out our French doors onto the cobblestones.

But the phantom of the Rue de Varenne was listening. He would play three notes over and over each day. His mother told us he was a genius and needed absolute silence to compose. He lived downstairs, and my Chopin was upsetting him. Would I mind never playing again?

We left the decadent salons of Paris with a heightened appreciation for the snows of the Northern Sawatch Range, which we had left nine years before, where the bears and the deer would hang out by the tall glass doors of the stone barn and listen contentedly to what had just been the Paris piano. Not a light could be seen at night, nor a phone pole by day. We climbed to remote alps in summertime, and I cut miles of trails to nowhere.

There are three wilderness areas between the barn and Mexico: Holy Cross (123,000 acres), Hunter-Frying Pan (82,000 acres), and the Weminuche

Division Hut Association links 38 backcountry huts on 350 miles of trail, meadows, valleys, forests, and lakes. We spent many a blizzard in those wooden cabins, hearths blazing, always with a traditional reading of Capt. Vomit’s Christmas by the kids.

Into this alpine paradise we imposed our microphones and cameras. I had recorded six albums there several decades

had added to our ProPiano Hamburg Steinway a second ProPiano Hamburg Steinway, which we were storing for the Bravo! Vail summer music festival. While it was captive in the Christmas mountains of 2023, I thought I would trick it into The Tempest.

I hope you enjoy the repercussions.

—Peter Halstead

CHAPTER II : A NEW PATH

After he wrote his letter of desperation and alienation, known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven realized that to continue on he would have to motivate himself with an entirely new direction in music. Artists always sense a groundswell before it arrives. They react to it, and they help it along.

Beethoven’s new path became a way of tuning music to the emerging profile of the modern psyche, with its immense emotional gamut. The well-behaved rules of classical music gave way to an entire lack of modulations. Beethoven didn’t ask politely to leave the room. He was desperate to express in music the physical suffering, the psychic despair, the emotions revealed in his Heiligenstadt Testament, written around the same time as the “Tempest” Sonata.

Beethoven may not have created the anomie, the depression, the Weltschmerz, the world-weariness of the modern persona, but he expressed it, he codified it. The new mood was spontaneous, asymmetrical, contradictory, full of ironies. The older persona (evidenced in the religious music of J.S. Bach) was the exact

opposite: sincere, straightforward, formal, symmetrical.

As Ariel sings in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange .

Beethoven didn’t subtract any formalisms from his classical past, but morphed his anxiety into something new, strange, and rich: he created the Romantic era, along with the writers of the era, Chateaubriand and Goethe, who wrote about young men so despairing that they were willing to travel to Louisiana to find a new identity.

Beethoven considered the Tempest Sonata the key to this new way of thinking and feeling. Its style disrupts the

conventions of the Classical age: it enters in the middle of the conversation, with no key established, and then breaks off and starts in a new direction. The melody, once hinted at, doesn’t return.

As with Picasso much later, this was fragmentary, episodic writing, rather than the traditional logical narrative, and it

worked its way into the British novel around the same time. Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818.

George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the first modern novel, was published in 1859, in three volumes.

The way we hear music, and what it has to say, influences the way artists paint, writers write, and, ultimately, even the way people vote. In launching out onto a sea of deafness with only his genius to protect him, Beethoven had to innovate, to create a music which could paint fear, anxiety, silence. In the same way, Prospero, the hero of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, masters a lush wilderness entirely with his love of learning, Shakespeare’s The Tempest deals with shipwreck, love, and exile: it was therapy for Beethoven’s own deafness.

Beethoven’s sonata has come to be called The Tempest because, when his secretary, Anton Schindler, asked him about it, Beethoven told him to read the play.

In 1797 The Tempest was the first Shakespeare play translated by August Wilhelm Schlegel, maybe because it was the last play Shakespeare wrote independently. Five years later, Beethoven finished his harmonic response.

Beethoven understood the abyss of sea (a metaphor for the dislocation that he was feeling) that begins Shakespeare’s play, and how its events are as symbolic to Shakespeare as Beethoven’s deafness was to him. So Beethoven’s work was a posthumous collaboration with Shakespeare. They both attempted to solve their own despairs by describing them.

CHAPTER III : THINKING MUSIC

Ionce asked the late pianist Teddy Lettvin, in his house in Cambridge, what purpose does a repeat serve?

My teacher Russell Sherman would have said a repeat gives you a chance to contradict what you just said when you played the music. A sonata is like a stage play which changes every minute, based on whether the heroine lights a cigarette, like Alan Ayckbourn’s play Smoking/No Smoking. Ayckbourn wrote eight plays, with 16 possible endings (later made into two films by Alain Resnais). One action sets off a chain reaction; the entire plot changes based on tiny whims.

Life is like that, and so is music. If you pause at a rest, you have to keep pausing, perhaps more significantly, at later rests.

What happens in the first few measures controls what happens in the entire sonata. Like the films Sliding Doors and 8 The Tempest

The Butterfly Effect, small events cause enormous consequences later on.

A sonata can have 160 different resolutions, based on the dozens of choices a musician makes along the way. A repeat gives us a chance to ask, “What if…?”

But Teddy Lettvin answered my question: “A repeat changes what you play because you should never bathe in dirty water.”

He was saying the same thing as Sherman, wittily, in character. As I was a Sherman student, I of course preferred Sherman’s longer, deeper answer, that a repeat gives you a way of contradicting yourself. As the playwright Tom Stoppard said, “I write dialogue because it is the only socially acceptable way of contradicting myself in public.”

Sherman always felt that you didn’t just go out and play the notes from motor memory, although that is what naturally happens to terrified beginners at their first concerts. Sherman felt that you had to be thinking in order to form the tones, their links, their meaning. You had to surprise yourself, think on your feet.

Structure is what shapes what poets write, and it is the structure of a piece (especially in Beethoven) that conveys the character and the characters inside the music.

People hear the difference. Harrison Smith quoted Sherman as saying he developed his playing style “from reading how poets analyzed poetry, scanned lines, and made the accents fluctuate with different shadings and nuances.”

In a repeat the rhythms, the accents, the voicings, the timings all change subtly, and the end result is completely different.

We all come of age in different cultural climates; for me, in music, it was the importance of structure, rather than line, momentum, rhythm. It was the inner voices, rather than the top notes of the tenor or soprano, that lent deeper meaning to obvious melodies. It was sleuthing out secrets in formerly underappreciated notes. This was the new enlightenment, called the Second Viennese School. It was adopted by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Steuermann, Kolisch, Wolpe, and Kirchner, and filtered down through my teacher Russell Sherman to me.

When you play at Carnegie Hall, certain teachers will tell you to go for only the top notes, the melodies, because no one

can hear the other notes. The hall is too noisy, the audience is too far away. When you play in Jordan Hall, however, at the New England Conservatory, as Russell Sherman did in groundbreaking Beethoven concerts, the audience is right there, filled with students looking for

truth, for revelation. It changes the way you play, and hear, music. Matter doesn’t disappear; it is just rearranged. Works of art aren’t blocks of ice; they are filled with loose parts, which it is up to the interpreter to arrange. The philosophy behind focusing on the inner parts of music

becomes an issue of life or death, as Beethoven felt. He saw music as representative of the structure of the universe. If he could have heard, it might have limited him to other people’s music. But not hearing allowed him to expand his music to directions that no one had yet

heard, allowing him to leap over the next logical steps. Structure creates limits, and because of them the inner voices take on extra importance. Matisse’s cutouts came from his being restricted to bed, and so he created visions no one else had ever imagined before.

CHAPTER IV: THE ARGUMENT

When the sounds of the world, the sounds of music, conversations in cafés gradually drift away from you as you go deaf, the strangification of the world introduces a psychological chasm, where normal actions seem distanced, as if you’re watching life through ski goggles, with the sound turned off. This has been

described quite well by Andrei Biely, in his novel St. Petersburg, and by Vladimir Nabokov.

Beethoven identified with the alienation he recognized in the German translation of The Tempest. The duke Prospero is exiled by a coup on an island of strange and inexplicable phenomena, such as St. Elmo’s fire—the flickering of lightning around the masts of a ship reported by many sailors just before shipwreck—just as Beethoven has been exiled by his deafness, away from the social life of cafés and friends on which he depended to anchor him during the solitude of composing. Prospero moves between the monster Caliban and the sprite Ariel, evil and frantic symbols of his psyche, as Beethoven moves between the despair of deafness and the elation of forging a new harmonic path through the shoals of Classical formalism. He’s risking a ship -

wreck to create a new musical island, an entire country, by changing the Classical expectations of audiences.

Beethoven set out to compose what derangement and isolation felt like, to escape from his deafness with his only solace, his music, which he didn’t need ears to hear, because it was inside him.

He was filled with the ecstasy of the Ninth Symphony, even though he hadn’t composed it yet.

CHAPTER V: THE FORBIDDEN SONATA

My late teacher Russell Sherman used to say that you needed to understand Schoenberg in order to play Mozart, to understand where Mozart wanted to go, what he suspected lay just outside the window, over the horizon of certain strange chords, or inside them, the way a painter knows that, when he draws a line, it continues outside the painting into his house, his sky, his hopes, his fears.

So Beethoven disrupts his courtly chords, his architectural echoes of Mantua, of Milan, with echoes of works that would be written long after he died: the Dies Irae, or Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, or Schoenberg’s Verklërte Nacht, or Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

In Homer’s Iliad there are similar echoes of future events, dramatic foreshadowings of the future destruction of the ramparts of Troy, the coming desolation.

Beethoven doesn’t know that future harmonic desolation will lead to the Second Viennese School in the 1940s. Although you can tell from the Grosse Fuge, his last complete work, that he understands the future isn’t Baroque. A performer might intuit from the beginning wisps of that alienation, in the first movement of the Tempest Sonata, a world beyond the Haydnesque carriage rides and hoops in the Prater, the park in Vienna, in 1802.

That performer might then make Ariel’s devil dance a bit more strident, a bit more violent, maybe faster, in order to break through into a parallel time, so he could compare Beethoven’s intolerance of Vienna with Prospero’s loss of Milan. The way Ravel turned the Viennese waltz dark in La valse of 1917, a comment on how the First World War had destroyed the prewar calm of Austria.

Although Shakespeare’s Tempest ends with the wistful restoration of Prospero as Duke, Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata ends in drowning. As Miranda says,

Had I been any god of power, I would

Have sunk the sea within the earth.

Beethoven has sunk the sea inside the earth of the sonata’s unstoppable third movement.

Tempest

CHAPTER VI : INVITATION TO A DROWNING

Composed over 1801 and 1802, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17, The Tempest, contains an entire finale dedicated to drowning. Shakespeare’s play of the same name begins with a ship’s passengers drowning (it is later revealed that they have been saved by Prospero’s magic). Beethoven understands that underlying the grace of the Milan court (the first movement) and the courtship of its lovers (the second movement) is the constant threat of the sea (the third movement).

As such, it is one of the longer musical meditations on water. Waves swirl and eddy powerfully downward, a maelstrom, although their spray is often flung upward.

The first movement presents the dichotomy between Caliban’s anger and Prospero’s tolerance, with, up in the rafters (and the treble of the piano), a couple of demonic dances by Ariel.

The second movement moves between the courtly Milanese chords of Ferdinand and the ingenuous, wistful recitative of Miranda, who will fall in love with Ferdinand, the son of the king, and return to Italy as the queen apparent.

As much as the play was possibly a way of working out the playwright’s frustration with losing the crown (discussed later in this essay), the sonata faced Beethoven’s greatest fear: deafness, loss of the ability to socialize, and the consequent loss of his ability to fight for his standing in the world. He couldn’t hear his own music; he couldn’t hear the applause; he couldn’t hear his immortality unfolding. He was as exiled as Prospero. As exiled as the playwright, cut off from his inheritance forever. The sonata unfolds with the sign of the Milanese court: a rolled chord. Like an unrolled carpet. Almost immediately an obsessive downpour intrudes. The notes repeat. The ship is sinking down, down, down. And with the ship, consciousness. Society. The future. All drowning.

Beethoven builds the sonata up only so he can knock it down. He writes higher notes so he has room to force them lower.

Motifs drive downward like a ship swirling down a maelstrom, until a chromatic scale (which Mozart used in his opera Don Giovanni to introduce the devil) leads to a gallery of modulations which, after a minute, evolve into a dervish interlude:

Ariel leaping about the rigging. This is the disruption of everything Haydn. An attack on the traditions of harmony, in the same way that Prospero and Ariel are planning an attack on what Prospero’s brother has falsely imposed on the court of Milan in banishing Prospero.

Beethoven gradually breaks down the comfortable modulations of music into as much chaos as he could imagine at that time. If he could have thought of Berg or Webern, he would have gone there. When he shocks the audience’s Classical expectations with an unexpected chord, he means more than that. He means the Grosse Fuge. He means Sorabji’s Opus clavicembalisticum. He means Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Stockhausen. He means to paint annihilation, Armageddon, a Scriabin Mysterium where the world disintegrates into disorder.

Beethoven felt the world crumbling around him. Deafness was just the first stage. He knew Napoleon was out there with his armies of the night. Everyone could feel the Habsburg Empire faltering. The waltzes were incessant, desperate, frenzied, partying against the inevitable.

And so Ariel’s dances, Caliban’s rumblings, should be more insistent, more cinematic: more Danny Elfman, more Bernard Herrmann. But Beethoven was trapped in custom, in harmonies he distrusted. He knew there was another world behind the neat mirror of Vienna.

But he didn’t know exactly what it was.

At the moment, Beethoven was trying to rise above the musical present: arpeggios provide him the fastest escape from the slow heartbeat of carriages and waltzes. They are the arpeggios of the “Mannheim rocket,” the introductory

fanfares developed during Beethoven’s youth by the schools in Mannheim, where the beginning notes of a musical work rise, accelerate, and grow louder, launching themselves outside the boundaries of more expected notes, the way a painter’s diagonal implies a line that continues into space, out of the frame, into a meta-world, a parallel universe.

Without knowing it, Beethoven longs for that quantum world of Bohr and Heisenberg, for that transition to Oz, the poet’s leap. He is Orpheus, walking 22 The Tempest

through the mirror into Narnia. We all long for undiscovered, lyrical countrysides. For Illyria, Belmont, the midsummer forest, Prospero’s island.

Arpeggios become waves on which the crew washes onto Prospero’s island. They also lead back to the driving rain, to the tempest which creates the sonata and which has to be revisited to keep the sonata firmly grounded in the maelstrom. Ariel may dance, but the coruscations of day fade into an uneasy night with ominous rumbling arpeggios in the bass, before the island crumbles into the downward lap of waves, the backwash of arpeggiated surf on a dark beach.

The Adagio, the second movement, uses the same rolled chord in the trombones (the elegance of Mantua, Milan), answered by the level-headed clarinet of Miranda.

Shakespeare understood women, and daughters especially: Miranda, Cordelia, Juliet, Hero, Ophelia.

While many loves in Shakespeare are about deception, loves are sometimes also about redemption: Cordelia, Miranda. So in Beethoven’s Tempest Miranda has the liberating timbre of a woodwind. An oboe, a clarinet, a flute, even a bassoon. Never brassy, or percussive. But breathy, innocent. Freeing. Many pianists try in these passages to convey this reedy texture.

The Italian architecture of Milan is translated by Beethoven into palatial chords which frame the woodwinds, the growing, redemptive love between Miranda and Ferdinand. Distant rumbles in the bass suggest thunder: trouble ahead, as Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano plot to seize the island. A long piccolo scale

leads to the final plaintive wail of Miranda’s oboe.

The Tempest

In the last movement the sinking theme is repeated in a funnel of notes. This drowning motif is expanded into a rhapsodic filigree which rises into the sky like flume from the waves, only to be drowned out by turbulence in the unlit depths of the ocean, set in a minor, despairing key.

Prospero chants in his mystical attempt to create reality out of words in the last act:

And deeper than ever did plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.

Beethoven is driving sound deeper than hearing could ever hear, because the mind is deeper than the sea. Even the piano is drowned, overwhelmed, by Beethoven’s imagination. As Ariel sings:

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails.

Beethoven fills the sails of the narration with the breath of imagination, but it needs our complicity as an audience, as listeners, to succeed. Like St. Elmo’s fire, the sheet lightning that flickers around masts at sea, that breath travels through the rigging, from theatrical play to sonata to future audiences. We make it

real by seeing or hearing it. We give it form, as James Merrill writes, hoping that his listeners will validate his poetry by their attention, which inflates his otherwise flimsy identity.

Audiences are the observation principle, come alive in theater. Schrödinger and Heisenberg posited that watching any light forces electrons to behave like particles, rather than waves, thus closing down the possibilities of their behavior.

That is, if we see a man go through one door, it is obvious he didn’t go through another. But in a mystery novel, before the mystery is known, the energy of the story stems from the potential of a killer to have gone through any number of doors. When you perform a sonata, you have to choose which door to tale, how each phrase suggests the next one, which of the many voices each chord contains to accent, which of myriad dynamics would benefit each note.

Before you play a piece, many possibilities await you. While listening to that piece reduces it to one interpretation, in our minds and in the minds of other pianists there are still many choices remaining. It is in our imagining of the sonata that freedom exists. Once the music is realized, its imaginative existence closes down.

When you sight-read a sonata, you never know what’s going to happen, how, on the fly, you’re going to interpret any measure. But once you memorize it, you narrow it down and play it the same way every time, thus eliminating its spontaneity. Gidon Kremer wrote that he likes to surprise himself every time he plays something, to keep it fresh. Words and notes contain multitudes; by making decisions

randomly each time, the pianist preserves the freedom of the piece, its ability to act spontaneously.

Even if the notes stay the same (as they do with Gidon Kremer), the subtle nuances of interpretation make for a very different emotional outcome.

Laura Cumming has written of art (see the Bibliography): …people, even today, like to play down Golden Age Dutch Art, as if it were just a transcription of the visible world, proficient, but nonetheless documentary. The wildness and strangeness and utter originality, the vision and imagination: all of it seems to go unnoticed.

This is also true of music.

The Elizabethan Renaissance in Shakespeare’s time sought out new worlds. It needed new sources of wealth not just to prevail over the Netherlands and Spain but to survive. Elizabeth I was actually a pirate queen who financed her kingdom by having her proxies raid Spanish galleons. Later these pirates became the admirals of the British Navy. This exploratory bent led to similar forays in language by Donne and Shakespeare.

The great circumnavigators and cartographers formed the first profitsharing corporations, leading to financial innovations and new forms of trade.

In the same way, Beethoven sought out new worlds to sustain the loss of the old sensibilities of nostalgia, order, harmony.

What he heard in his head wasn’t just sound: it was the future. His Tempest Sonata was the first example of his new acoustic world.

CHAPTER VII : INTO THE STORM

Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata starts in an unfinished way, with a chord in midprogress. Like Nabokov’s family tree, which introduces his novel Ada, that chord is a parody. It has a lot in common with Hollywood trumpets that presage a Spanish Main swashbuckler. It also sounds waterlogged and soggy, fitting for a play that begins with a shipwreck. Wind and water whipping away certainty.

The melody immediately following is an homage to Bach’s aria in the St. John Passion “Es ist vollbracht” (It is finished). Christ’s night of sorrow approaches its final hours where, in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, the sins of the world wash through his mind, and he has to decide if he has the strength to die for humanity’s sins. A contemporary audience would have recognized this melody, as much as someone from our time might recognize Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Beethoven was in his own Gethsemane, his sickness scouring and eroding his memory, his talents challenged by his deafness, which had been growing over

the past six years. He wasn’t ready to give up composing because of the failures of his own body. But he would have to give up the world, its feedback and praise.

As Yeats said, The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Beethoven’s doctor had recommended that he retreat to the small resort town of Heiligenstadt, where he had spent many happy summers, where he could eat and drink in the elegant mountain taverns and compose by the forested streams, as Brahms, Mahler, and Berg would later do on the Wörthersee in Austria.

However, Beethoven’s sense of alienation only increased in Heiligenstadt, and in October 1802 he wrote the suicidal threepage Testament to his brothers. Only a few months before, he had written the Tempest Sonata, where death has the first and last word in the first and last movements.

The sprechstimme (speak-singing) recitative interrupting the first movement of the Tempest Sonata includes one of the anticipatory hints of the “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony, so that a kind of happy-sadness lurks even in the midst of Beethoven’s despair.

He had already written in his sketchbooks many of the themes which would transfigure his later works; he knew how much was waiting for him to integrate into symphonies and sonatas, which kept him from killing himself. He knew what he had to do and who he would become; he just needed time to formalize the motifs which were constantly in his head, to give them a context.

But at the moment he was drowning in a foreboding of his own shipwreck, a metaphor which would allow him to triangulate between his own disaster, Shakespeare’s plot, and the music which would link the two. In a storm the barometer lowers. This lowering pressure creates exhaustion and distress in some people. He would use these physiological reactions to fuel his own resurrection. As art is an escape from reality for so many people, Beethoven’s retreat from his own mind would free his music to wander in a soundless daze over the now surreal landscape which used to be a comfort zone of carousing.

The two sonatas bookending the Tempest are calm and Mozartean; the Tempest, however, is the breakthrough: the door in Narnia’s closet. D minor was the key of death in Mozart. Mozart wrote his most cheerful music under the most

dire straits. Don Giovanni dies beautifully in D minor. It is the key of Mozart’s last concerto, and of his Requiem.

It was music that anticipated what would follow. The Tempest is Beethoven’s only sonata in D minor. The Ninth Symphony is also in D minor, and, as the Tempest is episodic, the Ninth uses similar fragments and unexpected voices to convey joy in ways that were shocking at the time but have remained emotionally authentic.

D minor was a key Beethoven used for the author’s message. So the Tempest is a cry out of the depths, the composer at his most vulnerable, fall’s suicide note in summer’s music.

How does Beethoven portray the shipwreck and the ensuing desolation of the world? (It isn’t just a shipwreck: it’s the wreck of Beethoven’s world as he knew it.)

CHAPTER VIII : IN WHICH SAILORS RISE FROM THE DEAD: THROUGH WHICH A MIDDLE-AGED GERMAN FINDS HIS OWN RESURRECTION

The mock-heroic introduction to the Tempest can’t be more melodramatic, or melodically dramatic. Something witchy and impossible is happening. This isn’t a boring concert. It’s Timothy rising from the dead. It’s a wake, a wave, and, semaphores flying, the Flying Dutchman ascending from the maelstrom. All in the first minute of the sonata.

Prospero’s magic mixes with Beethoven’s despair to produce a song of master and boatswain, an incantation, a potion, that brings hearing to the deaf, that floods

The Tempest

dumb sailors with language, restores the despairing exile to his kingdom, and brings a suicidal musician enough courage that he can carouse again in the bars of his youth, in Heiligenstadt.

Something is coming. You can hear the incomplete chord which signals the graduation procession. The curtain rises on a Turner painting of windswept waves, a spectral sun behind a sky of wraiths, of feux follets, will o’ the wisps, sheet lightning. Spirits walk abroad. The sky is filled with demons.

There are drips. They don’t drip down. They drip up. Like duppies. They are bubbles from drowning sailors.

That chord again, in a different, distant key, strangifying the sea. No land in sight. Nothing to hold onto. No harbor offers sanctuary. You are in the mists, disconnected from anything comfortable. You live in the churn and froth of the sea, distant from the familiar. As Coleridge wrote in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798, only four years before Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata:

The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea.

The ocean passes by as you sink downward, your breath rising up. You watch

yourself sink inside your snorkel mask. It’s like watching TV. You are disconnected from your own death.

The bubbles burst encouragingly onto the surface of the water, into the chaotic wind, but then sink down again in a flurry of currents, a cadenza which bounces against the bottom of the piano.

And now a pattern emerges.

The sailor’s bass note (he is far underwater) sends related frequencies leaping into the air. Then it happens again with a different chord, caught up in a different current. The sea is littered with drowning sailors in different keys. Again, Coleridge:

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

But now the prayers rise upward more insistently. The drowned are rising from the dead. Through the crosscurrents, through the music, zombies rise. Coleridge:

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream,

To have seen those dead men rise.

Beethoven’s Germanic innovation is woven musically into the magician Prospero’s linguistic transformations. The crew of the ship bursts onto the beach in soap bubbles. The cast is assembled.

The sailors are brought to life by Prospero, an avatar for Beethoven, also fighting for his life by resurrecting his music with new ways of saving itself, a new alchemy. Home isn’t an old cozy library, a traditional wood-paneled Viennese salon, filled with familiar waltzes. It is a dark, wet beach, rippled with sand rivers and flying fronds. Not what anyone was expecting. A wilderness island. Coleridge:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

All this in the first page of the sonata.

CHAPTER IX : IN WHICH SPRITES RISE OUT OF THE SWASH AND DANCE IN THE LASH OF THE STORM

Ariel, Prospero’s familiar spirit, whirls in the air. Familiars were thought to be at that time doppelgängers, mystical shadows that took on strange shapes. Ariel, dancing in his home key, is the first harmonically real person so far, although he is a hobgoblin, an unreal creature of Prospero’s mind. Like Caliban, Ariel is a “monster of the id” created by Dr. Morbius’s sleeping fears in the film Forbidden Planet. (This science-fiction version of The Tempest has a more malevolent demon….)

About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue and white.

Beethoven was in exile, and the night was filled with demons. As it seemed to be for Shakespeare.

CHAPTER X : IN WHICH A MAN DIES, BUT

THE PLAY GOES ON

He has passed shepherds singing, and heard nothing. He is going deaf. Heiligenstadt, his former vacation town, now symbolizes his isolation.

However, out of this dark night of the soul comes a resolution to fight back. To create a New Path.

The Tempest contains the germ of the New Path, of Beethoven’s response to his fate, to his malaise. Both the first and third movements are a description of his drowning, a novel narrative using abutting episodes that appear abruptly, rather than being introduced genteelly by the usual Haydn-like modulations. The New Method dispensed with these harmonic “bridges.” It just went where it wanted to go, without further ado.

It changed the way Beethoven wrote. It liberated music from having to explain, to make excuses, to signal before it

turned left or right. It brought a freedom to music which inspired Liszt, who wrote a sonata without movements. Liszt in turn influenced Wagner, his son-in-law, who in turn made a great impression on Schoenberg.

The Tempest Sonata is the first gasp of a vision that would reshape music, reshape the way writers think, and thus reshape European culture itself; it changed the way we evolved.

This fever dream of a musical saga strongly suggests that the entire narrative is a hallucination: Prospero’s, and Beethoven’s. This is a dream sonata, like Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story An “ Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge:” a flash forward from a man’s mind as he dies. Everyone in the play has been brought back for Prospero’s costume drama — but as zombies, beauties and beasts of the id, reimagined by a magician’s delirium.

CHAPTER XI : HEILIGENSTADT

Although 200 years apart, both the play and the music are caldrons of despair, with, in Prospero’s case, a happy ending tacked on.

In Beethoven’s version the problem, the storm, isn’t resolved; it just subsides. It is perfectly capable of starting up again.

This very lack of resolution is new to music.

Beethoven’s problems (deafness and despair) were only getting worse. And so he had to reach further out into new ways of portraying emotion to stave off the debilitating world-weariness begun in deafness.

Falling, drowning, and whirling are embodied in the moto perpetuo of the final movement, which gurgles down the maelstrom, as the breakers simply fade away, as the narrator sinks to his destiny. This is a storm without an ending. There is no remedy for losing an entire kingdom, in Prospero’s case. Or, in Beethoven’s case, for losing access to the one gift that justifies your existence, that every day surprises you.

Beethoven wrote the Tempest Sonata, Opus 31, No. 2, over 1801 and 1802. Later in 1802 he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, telling his brothers he wanted to kill himself.

Schindler, Beethoven’s first biogropher and personal secretary, possessed the 400 “conversation books” in which Beethoven’s friends wrote down questions for him, because he couldn’t hear them. Schindler asked Beethoven how to interpret Sonata No. 17. Beethoven replied, “Read The Tempest.” Direct from Beethoven’s lips, this anecdote outweighs people who speculate that he might not have said what Schindler reported.

Beethoven felt he was exiled by his increasing deafness, “the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection.” Beethoven was

saved from suicide by his art, as Prospero was saved from total despair by the magic of his books.

Beethoven had been driven nearly insane by his fixation on his nephew Karl. By 1826 Karl himself was ready to put an end to it. In the widespread Romantic obsession with imitating Chateaubriand’s novel René and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, on July 29 Karl climbed up on the ruins of the 12th-century Burgruine Rauhenstein in the Helenental in Baden bei Wien, just south of Vienna. He had brought two pistols but managed to miss himself with all four bullets. He recovered, joined the army, married, and had five children. Eight months later, on March 26, Beethoven died, leaving his entire estate to Karl. Had Karl managed to kill himself, he would have been very much like the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who killed himself because his passport didn’t work. The day before, it would have, and the day after, no passports were required.

The figurative drowning evoked by Beethoven’s music matches the emotional and political whirlpool down which Prospero was being sucked, as Vladimir Nabokov was tormented by the loss of the Russian throne during the 1917 Revolution.

But it wasn’t until Nabokov wrote Pale Fire that he stumbled on a way of telling his own story, through footnotes written by a madman who imagines himself to be king of the imaginary country of Zembla. Novaya Zembla is an immense island north of the Russian mainland. It approximates the way that Norwegians think of Svalbard, beautifully described by Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials.

Glenn Gould had a similar mantra, “The Idea of North,” which he made into a video and which drove his interpretation

On the hill, the Gothic castle ruins where Karl tried to shoot himself.

of solitude, the unobtainable wilderness that exists in our hearts, which we try to fill with structure, with the scaffoldings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the Bavarian pastry of Brahms’s Intermezzi, the sensual cat’s cradle of Scriabin’s Mysterium. Gould recorded himself, setting up his own mics, alone in the protective solitude of the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto at three in the morning, and edited it on the phone with Andrew Kazdin in New York after midnight. He recorded The Quiet of the Land about Manitoba, and The Latecomers about Newfoundland, the northern sanctuaries of his mind; he never visited them. Gould loved the darkness of Canada, the grey of the North. He said that one of his great comforts was that behind every silver lining was a cloud.

So The Tempest is about the dream of islands, of wilderness, of darkness, of justice, of restitution. Of the solitude of the North, of Svalbard. It is a collective fantasy, part Les Enfants terribles by Cocteau, part Axel, the play by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

Edmund Wilson wrote about this literature of despair and isolation in his critical work Axel’s Castle in 1931. Beethoven jumbles it all together with his own separation anxiety from his nephew Karl. He may not have known all the details of why Shakespeare was playing court on a

desert island, but he transcribed the play’s delirium into a demon dance that contains more than it presents.

I don’t think there is a period at the end of Beethoven’s long musical sentence. It is a life sentence. Maybe a death sentence. The downward arpeggios just trail away into the deep, the way people with nitrogen narcosis have been known to swim away deliriously into the depths, never to be seen again. As Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ends:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

CHAPTER XII : REVERSE ENGINEERING

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, in that it was his last, supposedly written when the Bard was in retirement in Stratford in 1612. But there are records of it being performed as early as 1603. It was supposedly inspired by an account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, not published until 1625. But Shakespeare of Stratford died in 1616.

I was shocked when I started reading about this period to learn that almost nothing I assumed was in fact true. Anyone interested in pursuing this period, fraught with intrigues, illegitimate children, betrayals, and foundlings, can find new directions in the Bibliography.

There were many amazing coincidences if you simply assumed for a few minutes that someone else had written The Tempest.

CHAPTER XIII : OXFORD AS EXPLORER

Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, inheritor of one of the oldest peerages in the realm, dreamed of new worlds. There were dozens of books dealing with America at the time, and their language found its way into his plays and his poetry.

Oxford saw himself as an exile from the start, and snuck away to Italy when the queen was otherwise engaged. He might never have returned if the queen hadn’t sent agents to bring him back forcibly. His 15-month grand tour took him to Paris, Strasbourg, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Palermo, and, on his way back through France, Rousillon—the setting

for Love’s Labour’s Lost—and to Strasbourg, Lyon, Padua, Venice, Genoa, Verona, Florence, and Siena. Fourteen of Shakespeare’s plays take place in some of these towns.

In 1575–76 Oxford borrowed money and sold many of his estates in order to travel around Italy, returning to England fluent in Italian and well acquainted with the northern Italian cities. His Italian-accented partnership with Elizabeth produced the English Renaissance.

But Oxford also dreamed of new kingdoms, new realms he could rule without fear of assassination, beyond the reach of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s master of as50 The Tempest

sassins (and Oxford’s guardian). De Vere dreamed up companies with John Dee, the queen’s geographer, cartographer, alchemist, and part-time magician. Dee and de Vere partnered in this with Sir Thomas Smyth, the wealthiest businessman in England, and the explorer Sebastian Cabot. Elizabeth’s consigliere

Cecil was equally absorbed in the invention of the corporation, a joint-stock cartel of investors which would finance ships and explorations of new worlds with capital which would then remain in use for centuries, passed down through families and boards of directors.

The cartel (Dee, Smyth, Cabot, Oxford) started in 1555 with the Muscovy Company, which searched for the Northeast Passage, and, while searching, brought woolens, metals, and Mediterranean goods to Russia, and in return, hemp, tallow, and cordage to England.

In 1581 they formed the Levant Company, trading rum and spices, cottons and woolens, kerseys, indigo, gall, camlet, tin, pewter, maroquin, and soda ash.

They branched out to the East India Company in 1600 and the Virginia Company in 1606.

Virginia (where his ship, the Sea Venture, wrecked in Bermuda).

Oxford disappeared shortly after Elizabeth I died.

His body was never found. The Tempest, with its echoes of Virginia, seems to have been set in Lampedusa, known for its spirits that walked the warm night; it was thus a Forbidden Island. From there de Vere went on to slake his loss of the throne with Timon’s jewels, with Prospero’s books.

Oxford signed his name with a crown and seven strokes. He was Elizabeth’s first child (he would have been the seventh Edward to be king). In 1603, at the time of Elizabeth’s death, he stopped his aspirational signature. Cecil had given the throne to the greatest of his enemies, the Stuart king

There was no one to keep Oxford in England. His mother was dead. The same week, his beloved daughter married. Her husband might have been wonderful (and it turned out he was), but she had been ignoring her father recently. He wasn’t at the wedding. He had never loved her mother.

James of Scotland, whose mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been beheaded by her cousin, Elizabeth I, was coming to be his ruler, slowly carousing his way down the maize and the furze to London.

It made sense that the great proponent of England’s foreign exploits, Edward de Vere, heir to the throne, wandered abroad, as he had done earlier, leaving his twin, the Earl of Rutland, to stand in as Master Chamberlain to the usurper, James Stuart.

CHAPTER XIV: THE EXPLORATION OF THE NEW WORLD

Athousand miles of farm, of village, field, and grove, swashed through reeds and reaches to beach here on the dunes of the Naakstrand, a dozen miles of sand and eel grass just north of Delft. The nights were filled with the slosh of the endless northern sea, the dark, invisible waves immolating themselves on the anonymous, unknown coast, unknown to England, but as real to the Dutch as the great shingles of Aycliffe or Folkestone.

Each of these beaches brings with it the eternal longing of adolescence, the Guy Fawkes fireworks, the sandy seductions of prom nights, all of our pent-up passion focused on a long-awaited postcard scene, that northern light on a distant beach. And here is one bedraggled, unloved lord on the lam, waiting on the docks in the swirling mist for a ship of Drake’s fleet,

the Marigold, the Swan, to set out down the Thames for the profits of empire. To breech the Horn for Java, the East Indies.

When Elizabeth inherited the English throne by default, its earlier candidates having died in various ways, the country was hardly an empire. It was bankrupt.

John Dee, astrologer, astronomer, magician, alchemist, geographer, occultist, had invented the concept of empire. He had realized, along with the great pirates of the age (Raleigh, Drake, and Hawkins), and along with Oxford and the Queen herself, that England would be free of the threat and wealth of Spain if it sought its own empire abroad, where it could unearth metals and diamonds in its own mines, grow spices and coffee on its own plantations.

They formed ingenious syndicates which opened up trade with other continents: the Virginia Company, the Levant Company, the Muscovy Company, the East India Company.

All poets, courtiers, alchemists, lovers were caught up in the great melting pot of the sea. John Donne wrote his love poems around this time, although during his life he published only two of them.

Donne was a party to Essex’s naval expeditions against Spain: in 1596 the English fleet under Essex and Lord Admiral Howard took Cadiz. In 1597 the Island Voyage, under Essex and Raleigh, sailed with Donne to the Azores with the intent of capturing the “Spanish Plate” fleet on its return from the West Indies.

Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, had brought in enough gold, silver, and spice to finance the entire Elizabethan Age. Without it, Elizabeth would not have survived. The secret to British glory lay in the galleon, the barque, the pinnace, and the corsair: ships of the line.

The great noble buccaneers, conquerors of pirate islands, funders of the royal exchequer, poets all, became Elizabeth’s admirals, and sometimes her lovers.

Oceans were the lair of pirates and poets, and the savior of nations.

Essex had been a ward of Cecil’s along with Oxford. He was one of Elizabeth’s illegitimate sons, and, like Oxford, her lover, and the last man beheaded in the Tower of London. He gave Elizabeth’s ring, which would have saved his life, to the Countess of Nottingham to deliver to the queen. The countess, who was his spurned mistress, kept the ring. This is the subject of Donizetti’s great

bel canto opera Roberto Devereux. The 1939 film The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, is based on Lytton Strachey’s novel Elizabeth and Essex.

Earlier ages were closer to these stories, to the bounding main, than we are.

Essex had the army’s loyalty, and was thus an obstacle to Robert Cecil, who had grown up with Essex and Oxford as a ward at Cecil House. In putting James of Scotland on the throne, Cecil, a hunchbacked brilliant statesman, revenged himself on all of Elizabeth’s sons, who had despised him at Cecil House. Out of spite, he single-handedly brought about the end of the Tudors.

The sea was the blood of poets. It was the undulation that connected dreams of fortune to the impoverished islands off of Europe. It was the subliminal undertone of the theater. The trade winds brought The Tempest

with them coffee, the tobacco Raleigh smoked as he watched Essex’s beheading from his window, and freedom. The fortune and the future. They were the natural exit strategy of England’s dreamers, of her golden generation, of the cavaliers, the toplofty paladins of the great companies, the founding fathers of modern commerce, the easy riders of the Gulf Stream.

Leaving his writing with his daughter, whose husband would publish it in 1623, Oxford set off for a destiny as necessary as his writing had been: his fortune. It had been co-opted by the queen and Cecil, to make him dependent on them.

Now he needed to remake himself in the mold of Drake, of Dudley, Essex, and Hatton: the monarch of his own kingdom. He had created lands onstage, in the mind’s eye; now he would transform

words more favorably, through the alchemy of the sea into the inheritance stolen from him during his youth by his mentor, his adopted father, Cecil. He and the queen robbed him to keep him in court. Had Oxford been master of his fate, he would have stayed in Italy.

People in England at the time kept their wealth buried. So wealth seemed to flow from the soil. And from the sea, where the Spanish had 200 vessels which carried the wealth of the world.

Seventy feet of oak, pine, and cedar, a caravel, was the tool available only to the commanders of the tall ships, for amassing gold and silver. And to the adventurers and aristocrats who financed those ships. The world lay at their feet, with a ship, a crew, a theodolite, and the courage to set sail.

Oxford disappeared after Elizabeth died. His twin, Rutland, continued to impersonate him, as he had done all his life. Thus Shakespeare’s plays about shipwrecked twins: Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors.

Where did Oxford go? Wherever it was, he meant it to be as far away from James as ships could sail, the kind of exile he had attempted in Europe, but this time it would not be about food, and wine, and books: it would be about the engines of empire. The commodities which had empowered his enemies.

There were treaties in place, conspiracies of nations, which were bloodily enforced. But to sail beyond treaties, to places unnamed, unclaimed! Where new worlds could be invented, and bought. Oxford saw these worlds as Elizabeth did, as vaults, guarantors of fame, of posterity, where thousands of miles of rogue waves and avalanches were the dragons at the planet’s edge, over which, with topgallants aloft, a lateen sail on the mizzen, and 4,000 feet of sail below, a buccaneer could vault to fortune.

And the terrifying seas would surround his fragile plays with ramparts which would thwart the grasping armies of the Stuarts, provoked by the predatory Robert Cecil, more monstrous than his father. A small, deformed chess master.

CHAPTER XV: THE ISLAND

The Tempest, written in the white heat of Oxford’s hasty exile in the same year as Elizabeth’s death, was about getting England back.

More was at stake than lives: an entire country—England, not Milan—is to be regained by the power of Oxford’s words, as the kingdom was sustained by his plays during Elizabeth’s reign. New kingdoms now rose on the heavy seas, beyond the reach of the Cecils, of the title-obsessed raiders masquerading as ministers, lord high chancellors, and secretaries of state.

Like Prospero, the earl fled England to Mersea Island, only 20 miles southeast of his ancestral Castle Hedingham.

Mersea had all the ingredients of Prospero’s island. It was raked with cold sea storms. It was filled with mushrooms, filberts, crabs, broom, briars, and furzes.

It had everything described in The Tempest: sheep, wheat, rye, barley. The sands were yellow, the shore sterile and rocky. There were bogs and fens. And cowslips.

So I charmed their ears, That calf-like they my lowing followed through Toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking gorse and thorns

When the Sea Venture foundered off of Bermuda in 1609, the crew mentioned the sheet lightning that flickered in the rigging. Such portents still seem to have an importance beyond their scientific explanation. Shakespeare included those ghostly vortices in The Tempest. Ariel is sheet lightning personified.

Many pianists over the long history of Vail’s Bravo summerfest signed the plate of the ProPiano Hamburg Steinway. I imagine this unprecedented sound from the digital depths, cobbled together from the undertones, from the unleashed acoustic spirits living inside Beethoven’s roiling D minor scales, to be the plaintive wails of those mute pianists, signatories to the iron and ironic destiny of the Sea Venture, wrecked in Bermuda. These metallic yowls protest either my music or their own incarceration in the flat world of the gilded soundboard cover: Inon Barnatan, Menahem Pressler, Garrick Ohlsson, Hélène Grimaud, Yefim Bronfman, Natasha Paremski, and others.

I vary tempo to convey Ariel’s will o’ the wisp darting about. That erratic and antic flibbertigibbet also works her way into other characters, into the stately

Milan court, into Caliban’s ominous bass notes, into Prospero’s magic eloquence, and especially into the plotting jesters Stephano and Trinculo. Adrian is ones of the Milanese lords, an early appearance of Adrian Brinkerhoff, the beleaguered antihero of the Pianist Lost series, subtly watching the action and the overreacting from the scuppers.

Beethoven doesn’t subscribe to Shakespeare’s forced happy ending, but understands that the direction of the play is down, down, down, as the arpeggios spiral into madness, into the nitrogen narcosis of its incessant depths. This is true also of Shakespeare’s depression of his 1606 Timon of Athens and King Lear, suppressed until the First Folio of 1623.

If indeed the real writer of the plays was in exile on an island, similar to Prospero’s, he had little to write home about, although all the manuscripts ended up suspiciously in the possession of Susan de Vere, married into the family which published the Folio, and the daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford, so they must have worked their way from Mersea Island in the delta of the Blackwater back to Hedingham Castle in Essex, four miles west of Halstead, and twenty miles from Mersea. The quality of Mersea is not strained. The Tempest

CHAPTER XVI : ST. ELMO’S FIRE

Living for a summer in the dunes at the western tip of Nantucket, you had a sense of vertigo, of the sand sifting with the tide, of entire islands moving back from the constant waves. Like Sable Island, 177 miles off Nova Scotia, whose shoaling sandbar is composed, under the thin blown spindrift of its face, of 350 recorded shipwrecks, compacted and composted for as long as there have been ships to wreck. The foggiest place in the Maritime Provinces of Atlantic Canada, Sable is surrounded by the tropical cyclones, hurricanes, and immense rogue waves of the North Atlantic Sea.

I flamed amazement: sometimes I’d divide And burn in many places….

Madaket feels on foggy nights like it is subtly rocking like a boat. Although it is the fog moving, when you’re away from the house it feels like it is the marram grass that is streaming with the wind, the air shifting with the blowing sand, the ground itself trembling with the surf.

Since Heraclitus, we’ve known that the earth was composed of vibrating waves, flow being the only constant.

I boarded the king’s ship: now on the beak,

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin….

The north side of Madaket ends in Eel Point. That one summer, there were only three or four people there: Madaket

Millie, Fred Rogers, and us. There was someone else, but we never met him. The marsh hawks, called grey ghosts, outnumbered the people. The falcons would flit over the marram grass in the murk, along with snow buntings, seagulls, and kestrels. Eel Point, the sandy headland to the

east, on the wild ocean side, would sift across the bay at night, so it seemed, an illusion of wind and solitude. Distant bells and slaps would sound from the small rigging of our Hobie Cat, beached nearby.

The music in my brain never stopped, like an implanted radio. Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata unfolded nightly. If I got distracted for five minutes, the music would pick up, mimicking the winds outside, right where it would have been, when I rejoined it.

…then like reeds, not hair, Was the first man that leaped: cried ‘Hell is empty And all the devils are here.’

The lights would turn on, swell, and then turn off. A testament to the quality of power in those early days in Nantucket. But also spooky.

Especially when you added in feux follets. Will o’ the wisps purl around masts at sea, to portend strange storms and founderings, death at sea. We were at sea, out there in the moors.

I would walk around the house while outside the beads and bolts, the coruscations of static electrons, the mad fires of the fog, would flicker and fork like snakes’ tongues at every window. I should have been scared; I was entranced.

…in the deep nook where once Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew

When the music of Ariel breaks out after the courtly Milanese arpeggios in the first movement of the Tempest, it expands in my mind into St. Elmo’s Fire in the rigging:

Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade. But doth suffer a sea change.

Everyone who lives in drizzle and gauze knows those lights, those sheet lightning flashes, the glimmer of the electron grid that underlays existence even when there was nothing, what scientists now call the cosmic microwave background, the CMB, the fossil radiation of eternity.

The unexplained lights of Lampedusa, the static electricity in the clouds on Mersea, bewitched the Earl of Oxford in his exile, driving him to safer outposts, far from the rapacious Stuart court: the pirate island of Île-Sainte-Marie off Madagascar, and Sandabur, later called by the Portuguese Velha Goa.

CHAPTER XVII : EXILE

There comes a time when everything starts going wrong. At that time, anyone with a proper sense of plot leaves the stage. The handwriting was on the wall. The signs were bad. Nothing was on his side. No one in power was in the least disposed to him. It was time to get out of town. In the space between the music and the drama, Beethoven was aware that the metaphors of loss and catharsis, forgiveness, salvation, might spread across the centuries, from genius to genius, if the magic combination of notes could save, if not an audience, then the composer himself, who knew what lay in the offing, in the future, beyond the mere frequency of the notes.

Beethoven knew there was more to his pauses and eruptions than he could hear. The choral glory of the Ninth Symphony lurked in the future of The Tempest: in the pauses and the angry dances of this coral cry lay the vaster Schoenbergian wastelands of the Grosse Fuge.

A pianist can try to compensate in performance, in anticipatory empathy, for these early stages of the more savage islands of Beethoven’s rage, of his self-hatred, of the blame he knew he deserved for driving his nephew away forever. After all, he left Karl his considerable estate when he died.

For this one night: which, part of it, I’ll waste

With such discourse as I not doubt shall make it Go quick away: the story of my life.

It was the first time Germans had encountered the vast landscape of Shakespeare’s writing: The Tempest was the first play Schenker translated. The complex synapses of linguistic coincidence had just dawned on the German zeitgeist.

It was the escape Beethoven had been seeking. To shout his unspeakable, unhearable exile aloud, invoking Shakespeare’s equally ruined fortune. To illuminate his indescribable despair with the preternatural, metaphysical, subliminal fingers of astral flashes around the collapsing masts of a dying ship. To take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.

Both Shakespeare and Beethoven were spiritual expatriates in a distant kingdom of the mind, whether Heiligenstadt or Lampedusa, peopled with monsters, the oppressor’s wrong, the insolence of brothers plotting against them, indulging in imaginary triumphs of exoneration, in the longing for a mythological return to their former intact identities, as Persephone stages her eternal return to the earth each spring.

As the playwright’s daughter, Miranda, sails off with her father’s books on board, for the wistful return of Prospero to glory, so Oxford’s loving daughter Susan, along with her husband Philip Herbert and his brother William, will return her father’s manuscripts to posterity in the First Folio.

Were those yearnings just magical thinking, or did the ectoplasmic spirits, Beethoven’s nephew Karl in absentia and Shakespeare’s Ariel, create a legacy, musical and linguistic, which actually located the native hue of resolution in the pale cast of thought? Which, like alchemy, created action out of simple words?

Poetry and music are the only antidotes to impossible tragedies. Only in the mind can the nightmares of the soul be healed.

And my ending is despair

Unless I be relieved by prayer.

70 The Tempest

CHAPTER XVIII : OUTCASTS

Would there be a difference if Shakespeare lived a comfortable life in the suburbs? If Beethoven were never deaf? But if Shakespeare lost England, if Beethoven lost Vienna, if that loss stretched over the centuries—what would it sound like? Would it be buried under the skin, or hidden in a drawer? Does despair have a key? An address? A special handshake? Or is it all warehouses with broken windows?

Why do we ask questions? Is there something we’d like to know? Would it change us? Would a fact help? Take one and call me in the morning.

Exile is Piper Perabo with a rum punch in a beach café in Koh Samui; Johnny Depp with a Cuba Libre in a dive in Havana; Pierce Brosnan with a martini in a bar in Mexico City. Always a bar, always a drink; a sarong wrapped around a spy.

Exile is also fog hiding an unseeing sea, moving in as the sky closes down. The palms don’t help; they sway indifferently in the rain. Flat bay laps, sky gurgles down the drain. Heroes are exhausted, depressed. Nothing is familiar; language at the bar is incoherent. Beat-up Pontiacs clog the Castro. Broken convertibles. A message: once there was sun.

There are no windows now. No chances. Faces show no interest, no kindness. No lifelong friends step up. Everything feels wrong.

How can we escape? Is there a chord? A magic word?

I had as a child a magic record. If you lifted the needle on the tone arm and put it down in the same place, the story would be totally different.

Can you just lift the needle? Change lanes without looking? It is so pompous to look. So presumptuous. Looking supposes there will be something to see. There’s something eternal about the indifferent palms, gazing out over the blurry, drifting sea. Unseeing. Uninterested. The world watching lazily as it drowns.

Tide washes in, then out again. The dawn takes itself back.

Plots are no answer. Plots are beards.

Life is about letters, not envelopes. Endings are just tacked on. Because no one knows how it ends.

CHAPTER XIX : RECORDING BEETHOVEN

I had a dream where I was presented with insensible jottings of W.H. Auden and had to type them up. I couldn’t make sense of them, no matter how I rearranged them. They were just notes, it seemed to me. Who was I to infer a finished product from the first drafts? Auden famously said there was no such thing as writing, there was only rewriting.

I was maybe dreaming of Auden because of his 1944 version of The Tempest: The Sea and the Mirror.

The Auden notes are a parable. Beethoven scores are menus, from which pianists order a few items. The sonatas offer many doors, doors that can never be opened simultaneously. We can only open one at a time.

The dream reminded me of Dylan Thomas’s first drafts, which were quite ordinary. Later he would recraft them into his own unique language. Because their beginnings were so humble, did that invalidate the later results?

As pianists, we are given the humble raw materials of either a volcano or a mud pile, and it is up to us. All poems and scores start as humble things; their glory, their stabs at greatness, are only as good as our insights into them.

In the dream I was in my childhood bedroom, where there were three windows, which I saw as escape routes, destinies.

There was a chute out one window which was never open, which I never looked through, which had a short dresser under it, so I couldn’t reach it to open it. It didn’t

matter, because it always unfolded on the same drab view of a neighbor’s driveway and garage, not the grandeur of the castle out the other window, or the roof out the third window, surrounded with a hint of midsummer foliage, where I’d climb out and jump down onto the lawn, or just sit, gargoyle-like, until the urge to run away had passed.

The chute was, in a typically insensible dream way, under the drab window.

All the windows had their uses. Each one offered a different saga, a different sonata. King Kong was in the habit of appearing at the castle window, the one that had all the space beneath it for fairy princesses to be serenaded, for cars to drive into the garage over which I lived. These cars always contained my parents—only twice in my life, my friends, as my second stepmother had low opinions of my high friends, which damned no one but her and my complicit father.

The garage loft was where I assembled my 300-page diary of demonic dreams, my adolescent homage to Dracula, to the warlocks and witches who surrounded my bedroom in eight languages: maybe in preparation for Shakespeare’s monsters and sprites in The Tempest.

At this point in the dream, I slid down the chute toward drabness and was propelled forward into a topless Willy’s jeep, to drive off across the grass, smoking like Auden himself, into the colorless wilds of my childhood. Why should I have to meet the poet, who was apparently downstairs and dying to discuss the notes I had? Downstairs was Grendel’s lair, where my stepmother lay in wait to curse me eternally for the one Miller I drank each night.

Far be it from me to have the inside track on how someone else’s poem, say, Auden’s poem, might develop. It wouldn’t be Auden’s poem. It would be mine. The first draft of any poem is unformed, and probably better the next day. Better when performed posthumously by the inventive biographer, or the sweating pianist.

My teacher Sherman claimed that his early foray into recording with Henry Kloss’s Advent Recording Company represented only that one day’s thinking, and not what the music later became (when we recorded it with Tom Frost and Tony Faulkner).

If I heard those tapes I would probably think, and I believe I share this with most performers, “WHAT? I did that? How stupid! You know??” I really think that most of us as performers would feel the same way about their old tapes.

Sherman never liked his recordings; he believed the mics didn’t capture what was on his mind, what he heard with his inner ear. He felt freed if he could play without any device listening. Spontaneous decisions may not stand the test of time, but better to be free to try for eternity without the pressure to have to pass the present through a microphone,

a filter which would predict and alter its future value: the observation principle. A watched pot never boils. We diminish the possibilities of a sonata by trying to fix it in a recording. (But otherwise its immortality is limited to the uncertain memories of people at the concert.)

When we were recording Liszt’s

Transcendental Etudes, Sherman asked to have headphones which let him listen to what the microphones were hearing, so he could vary the music based on the “feed.” The enemy. The judgmental eavesdropping microphones. But of course by the time he heard it the music was already played, so it was too late to alter its voicings or rhythms.

He wanted retrocausality: to change the past from the omniscient armchair of the present. Momentary inspiration might not survive later critical scrutiny, but it might provide the time lag he needed to extrude

fresh identities from traditions which had often fallen into performance clichés and audience expectations. We gestate the poems we write, the pieces we perform, over many years; all of which are negated by the brute finality of a microphone. It is too late when the tapes start turning.

No poem, no interpretation, is ever

complete. My dream was telling me that it was only today’s sonata, today’s poem. As Dylan Thomas said, no poem is ever finished; it is only abandoned.

And so no poem is the poem we intend. They all go off on wild Shanghais into our childhoods, led by errant adjectives which take over the neighborhood. Our youth is

shaped by end rhymes. It’s not what we did; it’s how it ends. The goal is to add all the stories together, not to settle for those dreamy first drafts.

Earlier in the Traumerei, the Freudian traumas of my low-ceilinged bedroom with its appliqué stars, I had introduced my grandson to T.S. Eliot, saying, “This is the greatest poet in the world.” Like any kid, my grandson wandered off while Eliot was struggling to live up to that introduction.

This is what poems do. They wander off while we are trying to turn ourselves into a better poet. My favorite line from Eliot was a phrase he in fact stole from Heraclitus, line 129 of The Dry Salvages: “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.”

This line acknowledges what we now know about the universe—that time isn’t directional. It goes in all directions,

up and down, forward and back. Every moment of our life is available to memory and imagination. What we are going to make up in two seconds is based on something that happened 50 years ago.

The Audenish gibberish in the dream was in fact written by me. The dream version of Eliot to which I aspired was my own dream.

All of this helps explain the background to why I see Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata through the sepia of my past, and why I try to vary the waves, to imitate French horns, to add my own winds to his ancient storm.

What is a storm but random turbulence, unpredictable, fractal, conflicting vectors controlled by algorithms so complex that only a quantum physicist could explain them? And while we can explain weather, we often don’t do a good job of predicting it.

Beethoven’s storm is subject to our own synapses, nerves, and dreams. The unpredictable musculature of the moment. Our fingers surprise us by minutely varying what we tell them. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise. In goes our hand into the piñata, and out comes the Gilbert and Sullivan our fingers grab.

Although we try to be in the control center of our own dreams, the butler Riff Raff to the Rocky Horror of the piano, the delight and terror of the human condition is that we aren’t as organized as we’d like to be: there’s a humanity that tempers our fingers. We intend demonic; what comes out is human. That may be a clever way of avoiding blame for the result.

CHAPTER XX : THE PHANTOMS OF THE TRACTOR BARN

Music has three elements: the music itself, which is comfortably located in a frequency range we can hear. Above this are the overtones, higher frequencies created by the audible notes. Then there is a computer piece which plays only higher notes, inaudible to us. They resonate with the frequencies we can hear, creating a phantom piece of undertones, notes not written or played but hearable. This is the intended piece, not its actual notes or its computer program, but the result of its program.

We don’t need sophisticated algorithms to create these pieces: bad acoustics are notorious for creating canceled notes, doubled notes, and devils in music, those

sun devils or windspouts which swirl sonically in the air, turbulence created by actual movement, ghosts sprung up from genuine perturbances, vortices that come and go unpredictably, created by planes or pianos moving through swollen air.

Such phantoms are the acoustic equivalent of Jules Verne’s novel Hector Servadac, or The Career of a Comet: the sea on the comet does not freeze, even though below freezing point, as a stagnant sea resists freezing until its surface tension is disturbed. Once Nina throws a stone into it, it turns to ice.

Rooms held in atmospheric suspension by awkward designs are susceptible

to creating phantom undertones out of sounds being added to sounds, creating the tritone, a medieval diabolus in musica, such as a C and an F #.

Revived by Liszt, the devil’s interval was further popularized by Wagner in Götterdammerung. “At least it’s getting played,” Liszt rationalized. Something ungodly lurked beneath the sedate Gregorian chords. The triad later lent a Satanic darkness to heavy metal bands whose names reflected its effect: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Slayer. Welltempered tuning eliminated its medieval collision of grating frequencies.

But strange bezels in our tractor barn raised these demons out of thin air when I played the third movement of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata. Furious low notes bump into one another, and an unplayed but yowling dark monster rises from the syzygy.

This might disqualify the room from being thought an acceptable ambassador of received sonorities, of traditional chords. But to me, it produces exactly the monster of the id that Beethoven intuited.

Although Shakespeare turned his play into a comedy with a last-minute happy ending, most of the play wants to spiral into tragedy. Only Prospero’s deus ex machina magic saves the day. That is, the author pulls rank on his characters.

But Beethoven, as in the Moonlight Sonata, suspects that love in his leftover Jesuitical era lacked the authority it acquired for the Romantics, and the last movement of the Tempest spirals farther and farther into the depths, until everyone drowns. Out of this imbroglio rises my Kraken. I hope it is terrifying.

CHAPTER XXI : THE LAST WORD

Finally, the sonata, the play, water, lost kingdoms, islands out of reach, exile, inappropriate love, and despair weave together into one last wave which laps the sands of our thoughts before sleep. I hope that we wake up as we do on Christmas morning, with the thoughts of last evening’s wrapping and this morning’s presents mixed in with the grounding smell of forest pine, the dazzle of colored lights reflecting on the glass doors above the snow outside, the day wrapped in drifting snow and the dark promise of the night’s storm.

As always, Nabokov would like to thicken the plot:

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion-

which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed— then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

(Lectures on Russian Literature)

CHAPTER XXII : SOME FACTS

Everything below is a fact.

Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the most dashing courtier in the court of Elizabeth I.

He was sent to a stranger’s house when he was born (he thus became a foundling). That stranger was the Earl of Oxford, who was later driven into bankruptcy by William Cecil, and who died unexpectedly under mysterious circumstances just after having made Elizabeth’s lover, Robert Dudley, the executor of his will: shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/fallhouse-oxford/

Edward was then adopted by Dudley’s co-conspirator, William Cecil, who ran a school composed entirely of the Queen’s illegitimate children.

Wards were big business at the time. As Master of the Court of Wards, Cecil appropriated their lands and their fortunes.

The foster parents with whom those wards were placed ultimately found themselves bankrupt, and met with suspicious ends.

The wards were born after Elizabeth’s “progresses,” during which she would stay at a friend’s country house for six months or more, until she gave birth.

Cecil brought them one by one to his manor, Cecil House, also called Burghley House, overlooking Covent Garden, which back then was a large park. Here Cecil had his foundlings taught by the great scholars of England. They learned how to fence, to speak languages, to read philosophy and statecraft. They learned how to rule.

The star among them was de Vere.

Cecil married his daughter to de Vere, to ensure Cecil’s ties with the royal family, in case de Vere became king. De Vere was Elizabeth’s oldest.

Cecil’s son Robert decided that de Vere would not be king. Elizabeth’s sworn enemy, James Stuart, was installed instead.

James Stuart’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been beheaded by de Vere’s mother, Elizabeth.

James Stuart, however, unlike de Vere, had an army, and had survived multiple assassinations. He was a safer bet, not only to inherit the throne, but to survive it. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

The Folger Museum put the Droushout portrait, the only accepted portrait of Shakespeare, in the basement, because it was x-rayed and found to have been painted over a portrait of de Vere.

The Herbert brothers published The First Folio in 1623. Philip Herbert was married to Susan de Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford.

The Herberts were among the wealthiest aristocrats in the country. Wilton House has been their country seat for over 400 years, an estate presented to them by Henry VIII. Philip Herbert’s older brother William was the chancellor of Oxford

University. He founded Pembroke College at Oxford, along with King James. He was Lord Chamberlain of England. The great poet George Herbert was his uncle.

The wife and the daughter of the man from Stratford had never heard of The First Folio.

They were left no books or manuscripts, or even a Bible. They were illiterate.

De Vere’s Geneva Bible has passages underlined which all appear in Shakespeare.

In The Merchant of Venice, Portia gives directions to her estate in Belmont. Following them today leads to the Villa Foscari, where De Vere met the Marquis of Montferrat, who is mentioned by Portia. Who else would know this connection?

CHAPTER XXIII : PRODUCTION DETAILS

Recorded: December 17, 2023, the Tractor Barn, Tippet Alley, in the Vail Valley, Colorado.

5 DPA 4004 omni microphones, Pro Tools 11, in 24/192. Grace M900. 2 Neumann M49 omni tube mics as rim mics.

Piano: Hamburg Steinway D# 541505. On supposed winter retreat from the Bravo Vail! Festival, courtesy of AnneMarie McDermott. This piano is signed by Marc-André Hamelin, Anne-Marie McDermott, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Menahem Pressler, John Browning,

Jon Kimura Parker, Lang Lang, Alessio Bax, André Watts, Valentina Lisitsa, Natasha Peremsky, all of whom played it at the Vail summer festival since 2001.

I was hoping the piano would remember its history in front of me….

Producer: Monte Nickles

Production Director: Jim Ruberto

Editor: Monte Nickles

Piano Technician: Mike Toia

Book Design/Production: Craig White

Photography: Cathy Halstead, Peter Halstead, Erik Petersen, Craig White

A Tippet Rise Production

CHAPTER XXIV: BIBLIOGRAPHY

I may be accused of vivisection, but it seems evident to me that the parallels between an abandoned, deaf composer and an earl whose identity has been erased together create a phantom channel in the Tempest Sonata which summons up sheet lightning faces in the fog. Volcanic graben can cause seabeds to sink rapidly, and islands are simply nunataks, volcanoes risen out of a drowned sea, like Arctic mountains buried in snow. The rising island of Ys in Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral, its carillon sounding at low tides, the crew of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner come back to life, Prospero’s resurrected court, Beethoven’s distant bells and rising spires, are in fact persuasive phantasmagoria which outlive the errata of history.

Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth, Charles Beauclerk, Grove, 2010

On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Roger A. Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky, McFarland, 2013

Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, Paul Streitz, Oxford Institute Press, Darien, 2001

Edward de Vere and the Shakespeare Printers, Robert Sean Brazil, Cortical, Seattle, 2010

De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon, William Farina, McFarland, London, 2006

Anonymous, starring Rhys Ifans, Joely Richardson, Derek Jacobi, dir: Roland Emmerich, 2011

94 The Tempest

Last Will and Testament, dir: Laura and Lisa Wilson, 2012

The de Veres of Castle Hedingham, Verily Anderson, Terence Dalton, 1993

100 Reasons Shakespeare Was the Earl of Oxford, Hank Wittemore, Forever Press, 2016

In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire, Laurence Bergreen, HarperCollins, New York, 2021

Shakespeare Suppressed: the Uncensored Truth about Shakespeare and His Works, Katherine Chiljan, Faire Editions, 2011

Is Shakespeare Dead? Mark Twain’s last, insightful and funny book from 1909, lost in the mists of all such books, uselessly suppressed

The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality, Charlton Ogburn, EPM Publications, Inc., McLean, Virginia, 1984

The Pirate Queen: Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers and the Dawn of Empire, Susan Ronald, Sutton, Stroud, 2007

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem, Diana Price, Greenwood Press, 2001

Thunderclap, Laura Cumming, Scribner’s, 2023

Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic, Marq de Villiers, Walker Publishing, 2004

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Pitzer, Pegasus, 2013

“

The Form of Paradox as the Paradox of Form: Beethoven’s ‘Tempest,’ Schlegel’s Critique, and the Production of Absence,” Edgardo Salinas, The Journal of Musicology, 2013. This is a postmodern structuralist critique, meaning it is unintelligible, but what it hides beneath its posing is one of the few clear looks at Beethoven’s unfocused time in Heiligenstadt

The website shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org contains a wealth of research into the compelling evidence that the works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere.