Completing the Klangfarben Trilogy

Writing novels in a series is a bit like Sisyphus and his rock: you work hard getting a novel started, then you finish it but then you realize you need to start writing another one so you start all over again, pushing that rock.

This past Wednesday morning, I finished the last remaining bit of the third novel in my series of classical music appreciation thrillers, the “Klangfarben Trilogy.” This began about four years ago with The Doomsday Symphony (which you can read, beginning with this link) and then continued last year with The Lost Chord and has now concluded with The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben which I began writing last September and completed this past June except for its... well... prologue, of sorts.

(Two excerpts from The Labyrinth have been posted on the blog: the story of the villain Nepomuck and the murder weapon, a white viola (you can read it, here) and the self-contained “Tale of the Master and of His Belovéd” about Beethoven and the Immortal Belovéd as told by a friend named Rainer Knussbaum who was also a figure in the second novel, The Lost Chord (you can read that excerpt, here).

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The Doomsday Symphony, set in the summer of 2012, introduced the unlikely hero, composer and retired music professor Dr. T. Richard Kerr, who, attending a house-concert in which a seemingly new work by his mentor, Sebastian Crevecoeur (who'd died, like, 24 years earlier) was being given its first performance. The mystery deepens when Kerr sees the completion date at the end of the manuscript – only a few months before – and then their host (the composer's son) disappears along with the manuscript.

From there, it involves rabbit holes that take the unsuspecting Dr. Kerr and his friends to a parallel universe where not only do they meet the late Sebastian Crevecoeur, they also end up at Stravinsky's Tavern where many of the late great composers go to hang out. You see, this is Harmonia-IV where dead composers go but continue composing.

Crevecoeur, it turns out, has discovered a plot in which a disgruntled musicologist named Klavdia Klangfarben has found a way she can go back in time and kill off the great composers of the past. What will happen to Classical Music as we Know It if the music written by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and other works inspired by them no longer exist? And so he prevails upon Kerr and his friends to chase Klangfarben and her Harmonian accomplice, the lawyer Abner Kedaver, to undo all the changes they have managed to influence.

In the process, one of Kerr's friends, a frustrated but mild-mannered assistant conductor named Rogers Kent-Clarke (and who dreams of becoming a super-conductor) runs into Mahler who has just completed another symphony, this one inspired by the impending Mayan apocalypse. Kent-Clarke steals the score with the idea he would give the work its world premiere (back on Earth), unaware that the climactic chord in the final movement could actually initiate the much-hyped End of the World on December 21st.

Did I mention this is a comedy?

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The Doomsday Symphony was my first attempt at writing a more-or-less original “comedy thriller” based on Classical Music – speaking of “niche audiences” – following two earlier parodies on Dan Brown thrillers that became The Schoenberg Code (after Brown's The Da Vinci Code) and The Lost Chord (after his The Lost Symbol).

But when I realized I didn't really like this second parody, I was reluctant to just throw it away, especially given all the wonderful characters' names I'd come up with.

So I then set about completely rewriting it, keeping many of the names while changing specific plot details but keeping, confusingly, the title as well. Since there are already numerous uses of the title “The Lost Chord” in music, itself a perfect parody on Brown's title, it didn't seem as much a rip-off of a popular novel as a reference to, say, Sir Arthur Sullivan's hymn, “The Lost Chord.”

Considering one of the main aspects of the plot concerns inspiration and creativity, this Lost Chord takes on a deeper meaning.

Using some of the same characters as The Doomsday Symphony, this new Lost Chord version started out as just a second book until about two-thirds of the way through when I decided to introduce a new character who could be one of the villains from the previous book, the ill-starred, would-be femme fatale and former forensic musicologist, Klavdia Klangfarben. Having failed to achieve her mission, she ended up sending herself back in time to rescue her mother only to find herself stuck (cheap batteries) as an observer of her own childhood without any way of getting back to the present except to wait it out.

By the time she catches up to Dr. Kerr whom she essentially blames for foiling her plot, she's pretty pissed off, living all those years as a homeless person in Manhattan. But her attempted revenge fails.

I'll spare you the synopsis of The Lost Chord except to say there's musical-political intrigue behind the murder of Kerr's friend, composer Robertson Sullivan, placing his cousin, LauraLynn Harty, in grave danger. Also, there's a madman who calls himself Tr'iTone who is seeking the Fountain of Inspiration which Sullivan apparently has knowledge of. And there's a secret journal that had been kept by LauraLynn's great-grandfather, Harrison Harty, when he attended a summer music camp held at the legendary Schweinwald Academy with his friends Gustav Mahler, Hans Rott and Ethel Smyth and which could reveal information about Beethoven's Immortal Belovéd, perhaps one of the greatest mysteries in classical music.

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Even before I had finished this completely revised Lost Chord with its director of the ICA (International Composers Agency) Yoda Leahy-Hu, the villain Tr'iTone and the bumbling SHMRG agent, Garth Widor, the next novel in the series began to form itself in my mind.

And for this one, I returned to The Schoenberg Code, my original Dan Brown parody, again primarily to keep many of the names I'd come up with, most of them musical puns – especially agents from the International Music Police like Inspector Hemiola, Mimi Solfeggio or Ben Rubato, the conductor Hans-Jörg Schnellenlauter and his companion Frieda F. Erden, among others – and then completely altered the plot (or at least, most of it: there are some plot details that are so typical of the genre, it would be hard to avoid them) after finally finding a way to make Klavdia Klangfarben, once again, the main villain.

It went through several working titles until I decided on The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben which also altered the details of the ending which I'd left vague hoping “inspiration” would somehow fill in the blank.

Again, let's leave the plot synopsis at “it continues the quest for the identity of the Immortal Belovéd and discovery that she and Beethoven had a child.” Was the conductor Hans-Jörg Schnellenlauter murdered because he's about to conduct the opera that got its composer, Robertson Sullivan, killed – or because he knows who the Heir to Beethoven is?

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The other thing was, for matters of structure and proportion (which I won't go into, here), I didn't just need a “prologue” for this novel which, in its entirety, was to be a little less than 150,000 words: it required a semi-independent short story of about 27,000 words which I wanted initially to just be an “interlude,” perhaps a short mystery of its own. And since I'd decided the novel would open with Kerr, on a train, awaking from a dream and then, ultimately, close with Kerr, on a train, falling asleep, it seemed logical that this short story would be a dream-sequence. And in this, it would bring together various elements of the earlier novels – memories of the visit to Harmonia-IV, especially, and tying in some characters from The Lost Chord that were not as developed by the time they've shown up in The Labyrinth, like LauraLynn Harty's cousin Maurice who gets a nice Momento Maurie here.

The initial plot for this short-story was left very vague as I began the novel that would actually follow it: I decided I wanted to write the complete novel and discover what sorts of things might need a little more explanation – especially the fact that Kerr keeps thinking Phlaumix House (the great 18th-Century English house where most of the novel is set) was familiar though he'd never been there before.

Then, better yet, I decided to introduce plot-elements into it which would seem completely unrelated – a separate, self-contained case. It involved Kerr attending the premiere of his latest composition, a long-form piano piece he entitled “Labyrinth” but everything that could go wrong was going wrong. Around this were various sub-plots, some of which recalled elements in the previous books or looked ahead to what would (or might) happen in the novel itself. One of these involves a symposium about the pendulum-like changes in classical music styles attended by many of the great dead composers organized at some great old English manor house by Sebastian Crevecoeur.

This interlude – or “Intermezzo,” since I'm using musical terms – is primarily set at a community college in suburban Philadelphia. I had quite arbitrarily placed the home of Dr. Kerr in a fictional part of Doylestown, PA, but when I was half-way through The Labyrinth which is set in England, I discovered there is a town – more officially, a township – outside Philadelphia called Marple. Well... with a nod to Agatha Christie, I had to set my next mystery, there.

I created St. Sisyphus Community College whose football team is called “The Rocks” and whose mascot is a large stone without arms or legs, and where the student lounge serves “Rolling Rock” beer.

Finally, I hit upon the idea that the basis of the story should become the central plot of yet another novel and would involve Kerr's old friend, another composer and soon-to-retire professor named Tom Purdue who has inexplicably disappeared. Hence, the new novel will be called In Search of Tom Purdue.

For those who know their Proust, this is a take-off on In Search of Lost Time. “Lost Time” in French is temps perdu.

An Escher-like Illusion

Since the final scene of The Labyrinth takes place in a vast, round room with a giant pendulum which opens to reveal a possibly four-dimensional labyrinth, images of M. C. Escher came to mind and it occurred to me that a dream sequence, which has little logic to it anyway, could easily reflect not only labyrinths but also Escher-like optical illusions (or, in this case, optical allusions) so everywhere Kerr went, the paths were too long and convoluted or he'd walk through a door and end up in a different building across campus.

Another “allusion” would be to Edgar Allan Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” one of my favorite stories from my childhood (I'd set it as a chamber opera when I was in my late-teens). There are frequent references to passages from Poe – including the weird all-white underground passageway in one of Roderick Usher's drawings – the use of particular adjectives in particular ways. The President of the college where this takes place is Roderick Ulster; the Dean of Fine Arts is Madeline Wilsher (in the concert program, she is mis-identified as “Dead of Fine Arts”), named after the ill-fated twins Roderick and Madeline Usher. Even the name given to the otherwise anonymous narrator in a film version of the story appears as an assistant to the President. In the end, it is revealed that Tom Purdue (who has yet to be seen) has been diagnosed with Usher Syndrome, a condition that leads eventually to blindness and deafness.

And the house where Kerr is staying on campus is owned by the foundation who'd commissioned his piano piece, the dePaula Escher Fund. The house is itself a cross between the optical puzzles of M.C. Escher and Poe's tale, a very dark fun-house of a place.

So, the title of the short-story became “The House of dePaula Escher” which nearly mirrors “The Fall of the House of Usher” as close as I could get. Granted, dePaula is an odd choice for a name but I needed something to reflect the vowels and rhythm in “the fall of...”

I had completed the “novel proper” on June 12th and now the short-story that would become the “Intermezzo” between the second and third novels was finished on August 20th, in so much as it “ends” (it's a dream-sequence: basically he wakes up before anything is realized).

(And yes, “The Klangfarben Trilogy” consists of three novels and a short-story... Deal with it.)

Normally, I like to wait a couple of weeks before going back to read through the rough draft and start the editing process, giving it a little time to settle.

But I want to get the second novel posted on-line even though it's been through two drafts already – I just haven't gotten around to it. So I'll do the third draft of the second novel and post it on the blog before I do the second draft of the third novel before starting on the first draft of the fourth novel.

- Dick Strawser

Beethoven's Christmas Carol: The Last Installment

In this fourth and final installment of "Beethoven's Christmas Carol," a parody of Charles Dickens' holiday classic (which began here), Beethoven receives more than just a visit from the third spirit that Schindler's Ghost had told him he would receive.

CHAPTER FOUR: GHOST the THIRD

He had hardly found himself back in bed before the bells began to chime again and the room became even chillier than it had been when the other spirits approached. It was not so much that something approached him this time as the walls of his room dissolved only to be replaced by a blackness so intense, there seemed to be no substance anywhere about him, the absence of matter, only void.

And then, something - he could barely tell what - began to form at the foot of the bed.

“Spirit that I can barely see, you swirl of misty, fading light, you are the spirit of Christmas Future?” He felt he should raise his arms as if to protect himself but from what, he had no idea.

After a pause with no response, Beethoven felt himself rising out of his bed. “Where are you taking me? Where are we going?”

This third spirit had not materialized into any recognizable shape but appeared to be merely light – not a bright light, really, but a swirling essence of pale, adumbrated light, gesticulating slowly and moving as if not moving at all, suspended in place as well as time, yet expanding and contracting like breath itself on a wintry day. But still, they seemed to be wafting through space, the infinite darkness of unimaginable emptiness combined with an unbearable lightness of merely being.

“Spirit, you take me where? If your fellow spirits have shown me the past and the present, are you, whatever you are, taking me into the future?”

The light swelled and glowed briefly in response. Then came a voice, a disembodied distant voice echoing down from the heavens beyond. Barely audible, more sensed than heard, it unwound slowly, as if after centuries of disuse it has found it difficult to speak.

“Yes, Ludwig.”

They traveled slowly, silently for several minutes – longer, it seemed – wrapped in coruscating mists.

Ahead, Beethoven saw a faint glow. They were headed indirectly toward it, now from the right, then from the left but as they approached, coming in closer, they took a more centerly route. The city – a once large city, judging from the expanse of it – was largely in ruins. Only the churches showed any sign of past prosperity.

There was snow on the ground, not much: perhaps a recent storm had left behind only a few inches, enough to coat the ground and fill the streets and sidewalks. The people he could see on the streets were not rushing about as he was used to seeing. They moved precisely as if regimented yet kept in step without appearing so.

“They all seem to be headed in one direction,” Beethoven noted.

But as they floated over the city, he saw people coming gradually out of the darkened, run-down buildings, all of them headed toward a central point. That point was the only welcoming looking building in the vicinity.

The streets, though snowy, were dark. There were no lights, certainly no Christmas decorations, at least not as he had become used to them. Perhaps it was early morning before the stores opened, but then he saw there were no stores – or rather, few stores: the ones he noticed were not ostentatious, simply designed with simple signs and clear-cut names, offering practical wares and necessities.

And he heard music – familiar Christmas music quietly wafting from the brightly welcoming building, simple arrangements of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” but also others, less interesting and not at all familiar. Above all, he noticed in them a single quality – consistency.

“Where are we, Spirit?” Beethoven was almost afraid to ask.

Slowly the pale, diffuse, long-strained voice unfolded the story.

“This,” it began, “is what is left of New York City after the Revolution.”

“But,” Beethoven protested, “the Revolution was hundreds of years ago: I remember reading about it when I was a young man just getting started in Vienna!”

“Not... that... Revolution.” The spirit proceeded to summarize the years since enough people, afraid of how quickly their world began to change, seized control of government and society to pass laws imposing their views on their fellow citizens. It was all done legally just as, in the past, a new President would be elected in a reaction against the last and then set about dismantling everything that had been changed.

“Yes,” Beethoven nodded, the constant yo-yo effect between the Right and the Left or now as it was trendily described, the Red and the Blue. “It was so tiring, listening to all the bickering: made me long for the days of my deafness...” He sighed. “But that is all part of – what do they call it, 'evolution'? Surely, there must be some way of finding a more balancing consensus!”

“Ah, fortunately the authorities below are unable to hear you, Ludwig, for you have just said one of the Banned Words. You could be arrested for merely speaking it, now.”

“What, 'evolution'?”

“No – 'consensus.'” That other word he'd mentioned no longer existed: like many other words, no one understood it any more since it had no meaning.

Beethoven was silent for a while. They floated over a dilapidated court house with its nativity scene on the front steps. They floated past Carnegie Hall, dark and ruined with great holes in its roof. Lincoln Center had been gutted by numerous fires and bombs where weeds and scruffy saplings grew around the long-silenced fountain, struggling through the blocks of pavement like a wasted field through which the winds of change now whistled ominously. People had been, for many years now, piling their trash there. The place stank.

“The great concert halls, desecrated! A shambles! An outrage!” He felt himself trembling, whether from the cold or the realization, he could not be sure.

“Do not exercise your spirit too much, Ludwig. It will do you no good. They cannot hear you, these people below. And if they could, they would ignore you – or, worse, report you to the authorities. Dissent is not allowed.” The voice sounded sinister in tone despite its seemingly disembodied state.

“That's absurd! What did they fight the French Revolution for, or their own American Revolution or even the Bolshevik Revolution before it went wrong?”

“One person's wrong is another person's right, Ludwig. And it depends on what is left, how well things should survive.”

“One thing I have learned in this world is that all things are temporary: Emperors and dictators fell in the past. Styles change only to come back again in some other guise. It may take time.”

“Perhaps, Ludwig. Perhaps...”

In the generation after the Palin Presidency, things had indeed changed, certainly, but it seemed a very long time to expect any change to revert back to the past he knew. Here, the freedoms they had fought for had gradually been redefined. They had, now, the spirit explained, the fundamental freedom of religion on which, it was often said, this country had been founded, the freedom to worship the one true God but only in the way the government allowed, the freedom from having to deal with dissenting opinions.

It was not just in religion that this great new freedom was being exercised. It manifest itself in all realms of society, of life in general. Here, among the ruins of a once excessive society, people today lived in apparent contentedness knowing their souls were well looked after by a God-fearing government who instilled that fear in their citizens to abide the laws. There were no longer divisions in the churches between Catholic or Protestant – these and their petty disagreements have all been subsumed (the spirit chewed over this word with a mixture of fear and delight) into the O.T.C. – the One True Church – and its political party, the S.O.M.

“The S.O.M.?”

“Yes, similar to Eve, created out of a bone, an ulna from the right wing of the G.O.P.”

“Does it... stand for anything in particular?” Beethoven was always leery of trendy acronyms and internet-speak with its fatuous abbreviations drove him to distraction when he read his e-mails, especially from people who should know better.

“Yes, it does: it stood originally for the Sanctity of Marriage party. Later, it became more inclusive of other issues to become 'Save Our Morality.' Those people who once joked that it meant 'Serve One Master' no longer exist.”

“Exist? What do you mean...?”

“I mean,” the spirit replied laconically, “they no longer EXIST. You can do the math.”

“But where did they go? What did they do with them?”

“By 'they,' do you mean 'They' who govern or 'they' who are governed? Your questioning will only get you in trouble, Ludwig. By law, you can use an indefinite number of exclamation points, but question marks must be used sparingly. It fosters an attitude with which the government is uncomfortable.”

“Ach! This music is terrible,” Beethoven blurted out, covering his ears. It pervaded everything, wafting over the streets in its innocuous blandness.

“It is not a question of music – or art – being terrible but serving its function. Art, such as it is these days, has a pre-determined role in society. Where as before it had been reduced to being merely entertainment, now it was meant to calm the emotions, to foster a sense of serenity – in short, to control peoples' behavior.”

“Soviet socialist realism! Bah, hogwash!”

“No, Ludwig, it's not the Soviet Union reborn. It is its own.”

Beethoven felt himself shiver.

“I don't even hear anything from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker! I thought that would never lose its popularity!”

“Given its consumerist frivolity, the ballet of which you speak no longer exists. In fact, none of your friend's music does. It has all been banned.”

“Banned!? What the hell for? I mean – sorry – whatever for?”

“Because Tchaikovsky was, they say, a... homosexual.” The spirit whispered this last word in a conspiratorial tone. Apparently it was not a banned word but one said in only a certain tone of voice which, Beethoven thought, the spirit must have captured just right for the implications were most chilling.

“But what does that have to with whether his music is good or not?” Beethoven was beginning to wonder about his quotient of question marks and was trying to think how he could word them so as not to deplete his meager allowance.

The spirit made a deep sigh and seemed to consume itself inwards before expanding again with his cautiously worded reply.

“You see, Ludwig, after the S.O.M. defeated laws and amendments in all those states that tried to promote what was known as 'Same-Sex Marriage,' their followers continued to elect their cohorts to state and local governments and finally took over the Congress and the Presidency. And soon they managed to institute other laws to protect the sanctity of marriage.”

“How could they... uhm, and they did this by... er...” Beethoven could not find the proper wording to make it a declarative statement, so he left his thought unfinished.

First, the spirit began to explain, after building the case on the biblical definition of 'marriage,' the newly reconstituted Congress with its now partisan majority began to pass other faith-based laws, initially with the support of many of the churches who had been so opposed to the Same-Sex Marriage bills and referendums. Once the abortion laws were repealed, there was the new law that made divorce illegal. There was a good deal of contention about this initially but the moderate American public no longer had the support of liberals who had been trounced in the elections and the gay population who saw no reason to stand up against something that didn't concern them: if you couldn't marry, what was the sense of exerting yourself over something else you couldn't do? They chose to repay disinterest in kind.

“The S.O.M.'s motto was 'We Tell You the Truth.'” The spirit veered sharply off to the right and Beethoven found himself scrambling to keep up with it.

“Truth? Whose truth!” Beethoven was incensed. Had he not written a great symphony to a hero only to destroy the dedication to a single man who became a tyrant fortified – deluded, even – by his sense of power? Didn't that single non-musical act turn it into a work of universal understanding about the spirit of the hero that lives within us all?

Eventually, the spirit dolefully continued, the S.O.M., supported by a population expanded by the Quiverfull Movement's success, eliminated the opposition. People who once considered themselves mildly conservative now found themselves branded as liberals by comparison.

“As for the real liberals, well...” the spirit explained, its already weak voice trailing off into the ether. Most of them were reduced to voices crying in the wilderness, the spirit explained, where they escaped to avoid persecution, those that couldn't escape to Canada or Australia or who managed to find some room in the crowded corners of Europe's numerous refugee camps.

Pointing to a barricaded entrance to a subway, the spirit added, “in New York, most of those who stayed went underground. In time, they will all die out completely – if they haven't already.” It shrugged its metaphorical shoulders, two soft undulations of light as if to say “but what could be done about it?”

Soon, the spirit continued to explain, laws were passed to make adultery a criminal offense, sending most of the politicians and many of the preachers to languish in prison along with thousands of fine, otherwise upstanding citizens and public figures. The prisons were too small and too few to hold them all, so they converted the department stores that now stood empty in the shopping malls – the ones that had gone out of business after the economy finally collapsed – or the old libraries which stood empty after most of the books had been burned. “There, these suffering souls are guarded by unmarried menopausal women wearing black robes and hoods who make the memory of those stern, ruler-wielding nuns in Catholic schools across America seem as benign as the Welcome Wagon from days of yore.”

Men who ran the government – since women were now barred from teaching and preaching much less running for public office – enacted more laws concerning virginity and marriage. Seat Belt laws were soon replaced by Chastity Belt laws. Public stoning was brought back as the execution of choice for crimes against morality.

But these were only part of a program to return society to its old moral foundations. Laws against eating lobster and shrimp, for example, may have ruined the fishing industry but, the spirit mentioned under its faint breath, “there was still a healthy underground business in some locations, especially in the remoter parts of Maine, where you could go to a 'speakeasy' to get a good lobster dinner, if you knew the right password – and had enough money.”

“But so many artists, so many musicians and composers are gay. How could art survive in America without them?”

A sweep of a pale, thin arm – a single ray of dessicated light – over the scene below them was his only answer. For a long time, government support for the arts had become a luxury, not a necessity. Who cared if children grew up never hearing an orchestra or acting in a play, painting a picture or singing in a choir? Or even reading the great novels of the past, much less writing one? Now, art has almost ceased unless it had a religious function.

“But, certainly, my music is still played and loved, here,” Beethoven said hoarsely, barely confident that he had now found a declarative statement he could feel fairly sure of.

There was a pause and the swirl of light faded as they descended closer to the ground, passing effortlessly through the roof of a large church. A large group of people, all dressed rather shabbily and similarly, sat there during Morning Prayers on their way to work, the first of three services they were required to attend each day.

Beethoven turned up his hearing aid so he could understand what they were singing. The tune sounded familiar enough.

Faithful, faithful, we surround Thee,
God who gives us everything;
Saving us from Hell's damnation,
God protects the wedding ring.
Banish sin from our surroundings,
Help us understand You well.
Take the evil unbelievers,
Let them burn and rot in Hell.

Beethoven hummed along, proud to know his tune had been chosen as the National Anthem for the European Union. But soon he broke off in utter confusion. “Why,” he declared in amazement, “that's my 'Ode to Joy,' but how could they sing such words to music inspired by love and universal brotherhood?”

“Your music is 'out-of-fashion,' now, Ludwig.” The spirit did not sound terribly concerned about this, despite the look of shock on his guest's face. “Too emotional, too grand, too demanding of the intellect without any true religious merit. Too... controversial!”

Beethoven stood there with his mouth agape.

“And your friend, Mr. Tchaikovsky,” the spirit asked simply: “where do you think he is, now?”

“Probably back at Stravinsky's Tavern sitting at the back end of the bar, I would imagine,” Beethoven grumpled indignantly. “At least, that's where he was earlier tonight, gloating over attending yet another performance of that blasted ballet of his...” Then he thought better of his smugness and shrugged his shoulders. “No, I guess he wouldn't be, then, would he? Not any more...”

“No, Ludwig. There are no bars and night clubs any more in all of America,” the spirit hissed. “They've all been rooted out with all the other Palaces of Sinful Excess.”

Beethoven could feel a rising dislike for this spirit but perhaps it was only for what he was telling him. Even though he could no longer feel the brutal intensity of the cold, he wished this visitation would soon end so he could return to the warmth and comfort of his old familiar rooms.

“And the children with their looks of joy and wonder, dancing to his music, Ludwig: what became of them, now?” The spirit took him away, rising slowly through the brightly lit church windows into the dim streets beyond. “Or to those who'd listened to your own music, whether struggling to play the Moonlight Sonata or listening to your Ninth Symphony...? What's become of them, now?”

“Now?” He thought back on the serious, single-minded faces of those he'd seen singing his melody without expression. “There is no joy in it. They have forgotten.” Suddenly, he felt very sad, his anger changed to dejection. “They have forgotten what art can do.”

A tear formed on his cheek and quickly froze. He wanted to bury his face in his hands out of shame, out of pity.

“Tell me, spirit, if you can speak of this,” Ludwig wanted to know. “These visions you have shown me this cold winter night: are they destined to become fact or may things still be changed?”

The light began to twist slowly and fade off into the distance with a soft moan barely audible over the wind that swirled around them.

“No, don't go, don't leave me here, spirit, alone in this inhospitable world!” Beethoven cried out in fear, clicking his heels together. He closed his eyes and began to chant, “There's no place like home! There's no place like home!”

CHAPTER FIVE: HOW IT ENDS

When he opened his eyes, he was practically fettered by the giant tangles he had made of his bedspread. It was a bright sunny morning and the snow outside his windows sparkled as he looked out on the familiar sight. Craning his neck to the far left side of the bedroom window, with great relief he could see the sign that pointed out his favorite haunt.

“Yes, it's still there. I can still read it! Stravinsky's Tavern hasn't been closed down!”

Jumping for joy in an odd little dance, Beethoven then turned on the television set and heard yet another car commercial with the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy tinkling away in the background. Usually, this would have just enraged him and he would have promptly taken out his hearing aids in disgust.

Instead, he thought “what a magical sonority Old Peter has created here – how delicious to have found an instrument that could make such wonderful sounds as that! Oh, to be alive today to be able to hear it!”

He ran to the now empty living room and threw open the window, seeing a young boy building an awkward snowman on the sidewalk below. Knowing the geezer-stooge who lived there was a cantankerous old man, the boy immediately dove for protection behind his snowman.

“You there, young man!” He recognized him as one of the neighbor's sons.

The boy looked around to see whom he was addressing.

“Yes, you, I mean. What day is it? Is it Christmas Day?”

Dumbfounded, the boy nodded that it was.

“Wait there, will you?” And Beethoven shut the window and sat down at his little writing desk beside his old piano. He scribbled out a quick note, stuffed it in a hastily addressed envelope and returned to the window, throwing it down toward the boy.

“Could you deliver this invitation to Tchaikovsky's house over on Floribunda Lane? Hah, I forgot to ask you, 'Please.' It's not far – oh, and wait...” He reached into the wallet he kept in the desk drawer and pulled out some crisp fresh twenties he'd gotten from the MAC-machine last week, and threw them down, too.

“Go to Da Ponte's Market down on the Square and reserve that great roast goose they'd had in their window yesterday. And have them deliver it here this afternoon, along with a plate of stuffing and vegetables – and some cookies – oh, and some gingerbread men,too (hah hah)... And, let's see.... a tray full of sugar plums and... ah!” He pulled out another twenty and threw it down to the gape-mouthed boy. “A plate of oysters, if you please – make sure they're fresh, will you? Would you do that for me, please? I would so appreciate it – and keep the change... no wait,” he stopped to calculate and threw another twenty after the last one, “that should be enough to leave some change for you. Merry... Merry...” His lips struggled to form the word. “Merry Chrillfimm... Merry...”

The boy looked up at him, holding the money in one mittened hand and the envelope in the other. “Merry Christmas, you mean, sir?”

“Yes, yes, that's it. Ha! Merry Christmas! Yes, indeed - that is exactly what I mean: Merry Christmas! Ha ha!”

And as the boy ran off in great amazement, Beethoven pulled the window snuggly shut and began to prepare the shabby little table for his impending guests. He knew there wasn't much space – not even chairs – so he would make it a buffet where people could stand around and talk. He threw a faded old oriental rug over the piano in case he needed any extra space for platters or dishes – at least for the oysters!

He went on-line and e-mailed additional invitations for his afternoon reception, apologizing for the spontaneity of it all. “Let's see,” he said clicking through his address book, “the Mendelssohns (both Felix and Fanny), there's Handel, Brahms... there's Mozart, Stravinsky and... well, he'd said they already signed it, but I'll include the Schumanns, of course, and the Mahlers and the Wagners, too... oh, and Bruckner, he'll do anything Wagner does... and Chopin: certainly he must sign even if he can't bring Georges Sand with him today... Who else...? Ah, I wonder if Britten is in town this weekend? I imagine Old Bach will be far too busy with all of his family, but... well, ask them, anyway.” And when he was done, he clicked on send, then began to search for a small Pennsylvania college he had remembered the second spirit mentioning what seemed like only moments ago.

Meanwhile, across town, there was even more amazement in the wake of the boy's hurried dash, stopping first at Da Ponte's where old Lorenzo smiled not only at his request but at the money he had offered him; then, moments later, at Tchaikovsky's house on the East End of town.

Bob Davidov thanked the boy and took the envelope, its address barely legible, out to the kitchen where his uncle and their friend Ravel were wrestling with the Christmas turkey, arguing about whether the stuffing should be cooked inside the bird or in a separate bowl, entendrés aside.

“Uncle Peter, this just arrived.” He handed it to him with a quizzical expression. “I've no idea who it's from.”

“Why, with ink stains like that, it can only be from one person. Old Beethoven himself! I wonder what is so important he sends a note around on Christmas morning?” He dried his hands off on a dishtowel and carefully opened the seal. Ravel watched as if he half expected it to explode in confetti. The handwriting was difficult enough to read, as it was:

“MY DEAR PYOTR ILICH,

WOULD YOU, YOUR NEPHEW AND ALL YOUR GUESTS TODAY STOP BY AFTER DINNER FOR A RECEPTION AT MY PLACE?

AND PLEASE BRING YOUR PETITION WITH YOU AS I WISH TO SIGN IT AND CONVINCE OTHER FRIENDS TO DO SO, TOO.

MERRY CHRISTMAS,
L. van BEETHOVEN”

“As I almost live and barely breathe,” Tchaikovsky said, stunned, handing the note to Ravel who promptly brushed his hands off on his apron before receiving the unexpected letter.

Nephew Bob laughed the loudest as Ravel joined in with them.

“I never expected a Christmas present like this,” Tchaikovsky said. And they danced around the kitchen, humming the “Ode to Joy.”

All across town, as people checked their e-mail, there was great surprise to be receiving something from the one they all called Maestro.

The Mendelssohns, the Schumanns and Brahms had all made plans to get together for some chamber music after dinner but they quickly changed them, agreeing it could wait until after Beethoven's reception.

Chopin opened his mail and immediately forwarded it to Georges with the heading, “You must join me! Please? I could never face him alone!”

Bruckner crossed himself and quickly sent a reply, “I would be most honored to attend.”

Britten was also surprised and with an arched eyebrow, called out to the kitchen, “Peter, come look at this!”

That's when Beethoven found what he was looking for. There, in the college's list of students was a junior composition major named Timothy... and only one piano major named Benjamin. “It must be them,” he said to the empty room. He knew they would not be able to open any e-mails from him since mortals beyond the town of Coalton were not able to see or hear these great composers anymore in human form, but he knew the message could be delivered in other ways, by a technology far more ancient than anything the internet had ever dreamed of – inspiration!

So he wrote to him anyway, to Tim, and told him to persevere when reality got him down: if he had doubts, to remember the anguish other composers have had to deal with and overcome. Oh, he knew it sounded all very trite and predictable, the musical equivalent of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, but didn't young musicians everywhere find inspiration in Beethoven's struggles to create his music? If he could only touch this young man, now, and give him some extra courage to face his demons – he was sure a man of 20 with a father like that would have demons, after all. But if he could find inspiration with the one he loved, with this pianist named Ben, who was he to deny him the courage to create what he knew in his brain and felt in his heart?

He sent the e-mail.

And as he did so, Beethoven heard a little ding: he knew, every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.

Later that day, in another small Pennsylvania town, when he stood up from the table after his father had started yelling at him again, Tim walked into his room, slammed the door and looked for his iPod. He chose to listen to his favorite piece – his mother had often said to him “if sound files could wear out like my old LPs did, you'd wear that one out, for sure” – and settled back to find not escape but strength to go on, in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

When he got to the variation with the solo quartet, he hummed along with the words he knew by heart in German:

Wem der große Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!

(Whoever has had the great fortune
To be a friend's friend,
Whoever has won a devoted wife,
Join in our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!)

That was when the idea came to him. It had nothing to do with Beethoven or his Ode to Joy: it just came to him out of the blue, mid-phrase, one of those unexpected epiphanies. Tim quickly jotted it down and knew right away it was something he could use for that piano concerto he wanted to compose for Ben. “Yes!” he said to himself, pumping his arm: “it's begun!”

As the men from Da Ponte's arrived with boxes of steaming food – Da Ponte himself carried the oysters – Beethoven felt a warmth he had not felt for well over a century. He put out plates and glasses, silverware and things like this he hadn't used for even longer, humming some of his own music, set to some of Schiller's words,

Join in our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!

The doorbell rang and Beethoven went down to greet his first guests. “Merry Christmas,” he practiced on the steps, “Merry Christmas! God bless us, every one!”

*** THE END ***

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

Beethoven's Christmas Carol: Chapter Three

In the previous installments (Chapter One and Chapter Two), Beethoven, following an uncomfortable discussion with Tchaikovsky at Stravinsky's Tavern and a visit from Anton Schindler's ghost, was visited by the first of three spirits which took him on a quick flight through the past. But now, as this parody of Charles Dickens' holiday classic continues, it is time for the appearance of the next visitor Beethoven is to receive this cold winter's night...

CHAPTER THREE: GHOST the SECOND

In the midst of a deep snore, Beethoven once again awoke to a sense of chill in the air. His room was silent, there was nothing he could see or, he noticed, hear, not even the faint sound of bells he recalled from what could only have been moments ago. Not a creature, he was certain, was stirring, not even that mouse he occasionally heard scrabbling around in the ceiling.

But gradually a light began to show underneath the frame of his bedroom door. Someone was moving around in his living room. What is this neighborhood coming to that some low-life would break into someone's home to rob them on Christmas Eve?

Quietly, he got out of bed and tip-toed to the door, turning the knob as noiselessly as possible so he could surprise the intruder.

It was not what he expected, someone dressed in black with his grubby hands on the TV set. Instead, the room was completely different from any way he had ever seen it before, decked in boughs of holly with ornaments and candles everywhere he looked. There was a tree covered in lights and tinsel in the corner, a miniature train circling a tiny village beneath it. Plates of cookies and a bowl of punch filled the elegant mahogany coffee table with its scrolled edges replacing the cheap and well-worn bench he had long been using. There was even a stocking marked “LUDWIG” hung by the chimney with care.

And in the midst of the room stood a handsome young man, jolly and blond and dapperly dressed in what clearly was gay apparel designed by Don Wienauer.

Beethoven stood in the doorway in amazement at how his room had been transformed.

“Oh, hi – you must be Beethoven,” the young man said when he turned and saw the grumpy old man in his night-shirt.

“And you, I take it, are my second visitor tonight?” he said, half wearily.

“That's right: I'm your Christmas Present!” He threw his arms out in a well-practiced theatrical gesture and beamed. “Ta-daaah!”

“Hrmmph,” Beethoven said, shuffling over to the tray of sweets. “I hope you mean the 'Ghost of Christmas Present.' Otherwise, I would prefer it if you were a young lass named Helga.”

“I can do that! But seriously, honey, if I had any lesbians working for me tonight, I'd've been done here in half the time! You've got to try one of these brownies. They're faaaabulous!” Beethoven nibbled at it cautiously, careful not to be standing under any mistletoe, but nodded his approval enthusiastically as he reached for another one.

“Mmmm,” he groaned, “speaking of sin: these are delicious!”

“Ah! Time to join the party,” the spirit said and rose a foot or so off the floor. “Here,” he said, holding out his scarf, “hold on to this: careful, it's classic Gucci – silk, too!”

Classics, he understood; Gucci and silk combined with scarf meant nothing to him. Young people, these days...

And in a moment, they had left the would-be party behind. The building he lived in disappeared beneath them but soon they arrived at another house, a newly built one in the pricey subdivision across town. It wasn't necessarily more stately or lavish as more detailed and elegant than the rest. Inside, the rooms were beautifully painted: the parlor with its marble fireplace had walls painted a shade of rich, deep red, almost purple but not as intense, offset by blindingly white trim and silver decorations. Even the tree was decorated in silver. The dining table had been expanded to accommodate everyone and was piled high with the remains of a great feast, much like Beethoven's simpler room had been when they so suddenly left it.

It was Tchaikovsky's house and he sat at the head of the table, his nephew Bob Davidov to his right and his close friend Camille Saint-Saëns to his left. Beethoven realized it was almost entirely men, with the exception of Dame Ethel Smyth dressed rather manishly and almost unnoticeable amidst the likes of Samuel Barber and Gian-Carlo Menotti, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Ravel, Reynaldo Hahn, Poulenc, Schubert and Telemann, making in all an even dozen, whether it read like a Naughty List or not.

Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns were laughing about their performance of Pygmalion and Galatea, the French composer playing the leading lady complete with tutu, while Nikolai Rubinstein played the piano for them on the empty stage of the Moscow Conservatory after-hours.

“And your 'Swan,' of course, is one of the most beautifully danceable melodies every written,” Tchaikovsky concluded.

“What is one swan to a lake full of them, my friend. But you wounded me, you know,” Saint-Saëns added with a mock-serious tone, waving his fork at him, “when you came to Paris the next year and ignored me.”

“You had just married that nineteen-year-old woman, you know – what's her name” (and at that, several of them laughed), “so I figured the last thing you wanted to be reminded of was your little Pygmalion!”

“And who would have guessed the year after that that you yourself would have gotten married!?” Saint-Saëns left out a great guffaw. “But then, in those days, women were all we could marry, you know,” he turned, looking down the table toward the others.

“I would have been very happy marrying a woman,” Dame Ethel announced quite seriously and again they all laughed.

“Yes, yes, all well and good,” Ravel began once the hilarity died down, “and here we are, over 130 years after your little pas de deux, and women are still all you could marry – no offense, Ethel.”

“What was that sign I saw on the news last week,” Poulenc interjected, “one of the protesters in New York – 'If I can't marry my boyfriend, then I'll marry your daughter'? I loved that!” He raised his wine glass in a toast which was answered by several of the guests.

“Well, you've all signed my petition about this Same-Sex Marriage bill, not that it will do any good, I'm sure.” Tchaikovsky put his wine glass down and everyone became quiet.

“If they really want to protect the 'sanctity of marriage,'” Reynaldo Hahn interposed, placing quotation marks around the expression with his fingers, “perhaps we should propose they pass legislation abolishing divorce and making adultery a criminal offense?”

“That would get rid of most of the politicians!” There seemed to be general agreement that, realistic or not, the idea would present the legislators with a conundrum.

“No, no,” Davidov piped up, indignant at the argument. “We don't need any fatuous gestures like that, wasting our energy and losing focus on the real argument. We need to get everybody motivated to get out and campaign for it, get it on the ballots and convince everybody to vote for it – that's how democracy works in this country.”

“And it worked so well in California and Maine, didn't it?” Saint-Saëns answered with clear disdain.

“If it hadn't been on the ballot in Ohio in 2004, John Kerry might have become President,” Samuel Barber pointed out.

“But how can a bunch of dead composers influence the American political process,” Schubert asked, “even with our American friends, here?” Barber was clearly delighted to have been acknowledged by the master of German Song even though he was reluctant to get involved in politics, alive or dead.

“That didn't stop those Utah Morons from campaigning in California and Maine!” Ms. Smyth was getting hot under her collar.

“I believe you mean Mormons, Dame Ethel,” Poulenc corrected her with a twinkle. Even Beethoven, standing in the corner beside his guide, enjoyed that one.

“Please, please, I prefer ballets to ballots, myself,” Tchaikovsky pleaded, clinking a fork against his wine glass for their attention. “Just yesterday, we were sitting in the tavern – Bob and I – and Mahler said he and Alma would sign our petition; Wagner and Cosima, too. Schumann was rather reluctant to get involved but Clara picked up the pen and signed both their names.”

“Good old Clara – always did wear the pants in that family,” Ravel interjected.

Tchaikovsky looked pleased with the progress they had been making and added, “Why, I think even Old Beethoven might come around.”

“Wha'!? You're joking?!” Saint-Saëns was dumbfounded.

“That old curmudgeon? I would've thought he had no interest in this!” Telemann spoke up distastefully. “I am so glad, I can tell you, that my career was over long before Beethoven was around: how you guys had to deal with his legacy, I'll never know.”

“Beethoven will never sign. All that stuff about Napoleon this and Eroica that – that was the old Beethoven. He has no stomach for politics today, I'm afraid. Sits on his laurels, these days.”

“But, Dame Ethel, that is all we can do, these days,” Saint-Saëns said, shrugging his shoulders at her. He thought of all the symphonies and operas he could have been writing in the eighty-eight years since he died.

“It's been a while since all those articles had come out about his own potential homosexual tendencies,” Ravel joked. “He's probably forgotten what it's like to under a microscope.”

“Homosexual tendencies? Ludwig? Do tell!”

“Oh, the fact he never married and had this thing for his nephew. Some of these modern psychologists even think because he had all this inner turmoil, he was conflicted about his sexuality, for some reason.”

“Well, I got married and I can assure you, it didn't mean I was straight!” Saint-Saëns poured himself some more wine.

“Hey, Beethoven could be a jovial enough guy, hanging out with his friends in the pub. It was rough, being deaf and all that,” Schubert added in his defense.

“Do we even know for certain if the Immortal Beloved WAS a woman?”

“Oooh, now there's an interesting twist,” Ravel chuckled. “Maybe we can plant a letter in some dusty archive somewhere with all masculine pronouns in it, instead! That'll give these scholars something to chew on for a while!”

“Please, please, it's Christmas,” Tchaikovsky said, trying to tone down the conversation. “A toast – to Beethoven!”

Several joined in with enthusiasm, others with reluctance.

“He's a genius, I'll grant you that, given all that incredible music he wrote,” Saint-Saëns said between sips.

Ravel raised his glass again. “And they called you the 'French Beethoven.' You should be honored”

“Hey, everybody remembers Beethoven's birthday: does anyone even recall that I died on the same date? Do they?”

And with that, the spirit shook his silk Gucci scarf at Beethoven, suggesting he take hold. As the conversation continued around the table, they rose back into the afternoon sky, a crisp sunny day even if he felt, at the moment, a bit deflated.

“They used to call me Herr Dumpling, my friends at the tavern...”

In the distance, he could hear the voice continuing to intone words from the Bible. The spirit motioned to him to be silent and listen. Beethoven realized the innocent voice of the child had long strayed from the original Christmas story.

“Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law. And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.” (1 Corinthians: 14:34-35.)

The spirit, now in a more serious mood, commented how, today, scholars argued that these misogynistic statements conflicted with many of Paul's general statements about the equality of men and women standing before Jesus. Things like this were probably interpolated into the Bible by religious leaders in the first few centuries of the developing church. Did that reflect the society during the time of Christ or during the Dark Ages when the Church Fathers no doubt saw it is a reaction against Roman liberalism? If that is the case, who was “playing fast and loose” with God's Word when?

Beethoven was silent, not knowing what exactly this had to do with Christmas or, for that matter, with him.

The voice continued reciting:

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)

Beethoven thought for a moment: are not politicians like thieves? Does not all this worship of the Bottom Line make more than just some corporate executives greedy? How many people are getting drunk this week? Are not tabloid publishers, politicians and commercial writers also slanderers and swindlers, much less all that promiscuity and adultery that is part of our television entertainment? You never hear anything about them, no legislation to protect us from them. “One must move with the times,” he often heard.

They arrived at a house he did not recognize in a town he had never heard of with people he had never seen before sitting around a dinner table much like his own. It was smaller and far simpler than the one he had recently seen at Tchaikovsky's Christmas Dinner, but filled with a suitable feast for the family reunion on such a day. The home was simply decorated but the spirit of love between them all needed no such excuse to be expressed.

“Spirit,” he asked, “are these friends of mine that I have lost track of over the years, or people whom I might have met somehow?”

“The young man, there – his name is Tim – wants to be a composer some day and he studies at a small college in Pennsylvania. In his childhood bedroom, he had a bust of you on his desk and a volume of your piano sonatas on his piano at all times. They're still there.”

Tim had just turned 20, the oldest of the three children: the others were Beth and Brenda, both still in their teens. Their father's parents had joined them for the day and the mother and grandmother had spent much of the morning preparing the feast with the ample assistance of all three of the children. Tim, it seemed, was growing into a knowledgeable cook and his mother was duly proud of him if for no other reason than, as she thought to herself, he would make someone a fine husband some day.

But the dinner discussion, as often happened, was beginning to turn sour when it hit upon a subject Tim knew was coming.

He missed his lover, Ben, a pianist he had met when they'd first started college. They had fallen in love from the very beginning. Together, they dreamed some day of being able to get married, but the recent news – from California, from Maine and just the other week, New York – disappointed them. Still, they made their plans to spend their lives together even if there was no piece of paper to make them 'legal' in the eyes of society. On the wall of their off-campus apartment (since it had been too risky to share a dorm-room, given the jocks on the floor who would certainly make their lives miserable), they had hung posters of composers and performers like John Corigliano, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and, over the faux fireplace, a portrait of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Tim's big dream, by this time next year, was that he could finish a piano concerto to present to Ben for Christmas which he could perform with the school orchestra in the Spring of their senior year.

His mother knew much about this without having been told and what she didn't know, she sensed, the way mothers do. Today, especially, she felt a tear in her eye, fearing how things will no doubt eventually turn since her husband strongly disapproved of Tim's chosen profession, not to mention his chosen lifestyle (if one 'chooses' either). Like his own father, her husband had raised his son, he constantly reminded him, to be a man, as if that were all his argument needed to stop his son's opposition.

Not long after Beethoven arrived, his guiding spirit now no longer as flamboyant as he'd first appeared, the arguments began. It was painful to see the young man brow-beaten by his own father, especially in front of the entire family, but Beethoven knew of this first-hand himself. He had hated his father and would see no reason to believe why Tim shouldn't hate his.

“The boy is 20, now, you say, yet he still lives with his parents. Why doesn't he leave and go out on his own?”

“In America, there is a small thing called College Tuition – well, not a small thing – but the general sense is, if the parents are still footing the bill, the child is still under their control, one way or another. Independence at 18 is only in the eyes of the law – well, some of them – since they're still not legally adults until they are 21. Oh, I know – they can die in the Army when they're 18 and even vote in a Presidential election but they aren't considered mature enough to drink in a bar for three more years – but many things don't seem fair or make logical sense.” Turning to Beethoven, he added, “Did they ever?”

Beethoven shook his head.

Along with the father's rising arguments, Beethoven now heard the voice of the child reciting scripture again:

“Suppose a man marries a woman, but after sleeping with her, he turns against her and publicly accuses her of shameful conduct, saying, ‘When I married this woman, I discovered she was not a virgin.’ ...But suppose the man’s accusations are true, and he can show that she was not a virgin. The woman must be taken to the door of her father’s home, and there the men of the town must stone her to death, for she has committed a disgraceful crime in Israel by being promiscuous while living in her parents’ home. In this way, you will purge this evil from among you.” (Deuteronomy 22:13-14, 20-21)

“But the argument is flawed,” Beethoven admitted.

“All arguments are flawed, Herr Ludwig. Climate Science, according to one side, is a myth; the Holocaust, according to one side, is a myth; that man landed on the moon, according to some, could be an elaborate hoax created in a TV studio... How are we to know, even if we see it with our own eyes?”

The spirit pointed, focusing Beethoven's attention back to the dinner table.

“And yet,” he continued, “Tim's mother knows his sister Beth, who's 16, is already having sex with her boyfriend. She just wishes her daughter would be careful but can find nothing to say against it, considering she herself had not been a virgin on her wedding night (her husband had seen to that). In fact, she was born only four months after her own parents' wedding.”

True, Beethoven had been outraged when his brother's wife gave birth to their son – his nephew Karl – only four months after their wedding. He constantly threw this back at her, this Queen of the Night, he called her, especially when he was suing her for custody of the child. And rightly so, he thought. She was still bringing her lovers into the house when the boy was sleeping. What kind of morality is that for a child to grow up in!? But still, it didn't seem enough to kill her for it.

The spirit continued. “It didn't seem like such a big deal, but Tim's mother wished her husband didn't think it was the end of the world that their son should prefer boys over girls: she just wanted him to be happy. There was enough to worry about in their lives – this seemed almost trivial, considering.”

She also knew there was a gift her husband had made her wrap for the boy – a rifle, of all things – despite the fact he was horrified of guns and violence. If anything, she feared the boy would lose his mind and shoot his father with it or, worse, himself.

Tim was trying to explain for the thousandth time why he wanted to be a composer, despite the fact it probably wasn't a very lucrative career choice. He also tried to explain about one of his favorite composers, Benjamin Britten, who'd lived together with his 'life partner,' Peter Pears, for forty years.

“Aw, isn't that too bad, forty years,” he chided in a childish little voice, “and no children.”

“I don't know, Dad, there's Peter Grimes and Albert Herring and A Midsummer Night's Dream and... and Death in Venice and...”

“Jesus Christ! What the hell is that?”

“They're operas that Britten wrote for his lover to sing – he created them for him and they're some of the best operas written in the 20th Century.”

Beethoven nodded in agreement on that one: he always envied Britten his talent for writing operas.

The father threw down his knife and fork and made a face, acting like a sissy and speaking in a high, falsetto voice. “Ooooh, opera!! Lah de daaaah!” The grandfather laughed but even the girls lowered their eyes in embarrassment.

“I raised you to be a man, boy, not to be some rotten little homo picking up fruits in a fag bar,” the father now shouted at his son.

Tim tried to control himself, and when he stood up, he was tempted to drop his pants and yell “Well, I AM a man, Dad, how d'you like those apples, speaking of fruit?!”

But instead he said “God bless us, every one!” and excused himself, going up to his room, slamming the door behind him and looking to his iPod for consolation. He suspected, meanwhile, Ben was going through a similar scene around his family's dinner table. And with that idea in his mind, he felt the warmth of love and friendship in his blood.

“You'll burn in hell, ya know – the Bible says so!”

“Dear, please,” the mother tried to protest, “it's Christmas.”

“And Christ would be pleased to see us sitting here celebrating his birthday with some little faggot? Jesus!”

Beethoven, indignant, raised his arms and intoned at the top of his lungs,

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Be embraced, millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.

Climactic lines from Schiller's Ode to Joy - but when he realized no one could hear him in this room today, his hands fell limply to his side. In the distance the reciting voice of the child continued:

"This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds. Then he adds, 'Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.' And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin.” (Hebrews 10:16-18)

“The New Covenant – that's right, the New Testament replaced the Old Testament's covenant and laws!”

Beethoven seem surprised to realize this, since so many Christians throw the Old Testament laws around at anything they disapproved of. It may still be a sin but there is a new covenant in effect – and that, he realized, is part of what they're celebrating on this feast day, not Santa Claus or how much money you can spend on gifts, not just the birthday of a boy, even if that boy was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but the birth of a whole new world, one built on – dare he say it in the presence of this particular father? – love and forgiveness.

The radio in the background had been playing Christmas carols but then a newscast crackled into prominence. The announcer continued, “And in other news this Christmas weekend, in Uganda, the legislators debated a bill that could sentence men to death for being homosexuals in an attempt to curb the spread of AIDS. Friends, family, even landlords and neighbors could be liable for seven years' imprisonment for failing to report them to the authorities. As one legislator commented, 'It is what we are told to do when our communities are struck by Mad Cow Disease or Avian Flu – kill anything that could be infected with the virus to keep it from spreading...'”

“No,” Beethoven shouted, “take me away from here, spirit, take me away!”

And with that, the spirit handed Beethoven the edge of his Gucci silk scarf, and off they flew, into the darkest night.

They stood in his living room as if they had never left his simple little apartment in downtown Coalton. The tables were still packed with food and bottles of wine – including something he hadn't noticed before: a plate of oysters!

“As I live and breathe,” he said to the spirit, “I love oysters! I thought how wonderful it would be to live someplace other than Vienna – perhaps Trieste which had the best, freshest oysters!”

“Well, dear, you got part of your wish – you are living someplace other than Vienna and these are fresh! I brought them myself.”

The distant recitation continued:

“These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat. And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination. Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.” (Leviticus 11:9-12)

Beethoven was about to pour some wine when he stopped to listen. “Whatsoever hath not fins and scales is an abomination? What does that mean!”

The spirit was busy filling up a plate and said nonchalantly, “oh, that just means you can't eat shrimp or lobster – or oysters, for that matter. Here, have some of this awesome pork roast!”

“Tell me, spirit, what will happen to Tim and his... his lover – Ben, is it? Will they be able to survive in a world so full of hate? I mean... as a couple...?”

The spirit looked at him and said sourly, “Why do these people feel the need to get married? Can't they just live their lives without having to have everyone pat them on the back for it? Why this need to imitate societal conventions...?”

Hearing his own words thrown back at him, he realized the room began to turn all wavy as the music swooped up and down the scale like a slowly building alarm. In a moment, everything went black.

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

Beethoven's Christmas Carol: Chapter Two

In the first installment, Beethoven, having gotten into an uncomfortable discussion with Tchaikovsky at Stravinsky's Tavern earlier in the evening, went home and was visited by the ghost of his former assistant, Anton Schindler, who warns him he will be visited by three spirits before the night is out.

(If this doesn't sound familiar, what planet are you from? Well, a little familiar - it's a parody of Charles Dickens' famous holiday classic. With a twist - or two.)

And now, it's time for

CHAPTER TWO: GHOST the FIRST

Beethoven awoke with a start in the midst of his pitch-black, freezing room. Nothing had happened: no strangers, no nonsense – it must have all been a dream! He looked at his alarm clock on the night stand, figuring it must be close to 4am but when he managed finally to focus on it, he saw the numbers slowly beginning to roll forward, then backward, then forward again, changing directions so frequently it almost made him dizzy.

“Cheap digital clock – must be a power surge,” he muttered into the air. “Technology... Bah! – ”

But before he could figure out what word to use next, the clock stopped at 12:59 and began to glow. Beethoven stared wide-eyed at the clock, trying to count the seconds. And when the numbers flipped over to 1:00 there was an immediate and simultaneous BONG resounding through his apartment as if the town's biggest church stood across the alleyway and its bell had set the house to vibrating sympathetically. It was so intense, he could feel it through the bedframe.

He let out a whimper as he pulled the cover up to his chin and tried desperately to close his eyes, hoping that if he could do so he would fall back asleep and all should disappear, all that he could barely see and all that he was afraid to see.

He heard it first – odd, after having been deaf most of his life that, now, in death, he could hear the slightest, even the most unwelcome sounds. Not footsteps on the stairs, no creaking open of doors nor lifting up of windows, though he thought sure, as cold as it had become, his spirit-guest must have been entering through an open window.

In fact, when he saw it, he did not see it entering at all: it was just – suddenly – there!

It stood to the side of his bed, at the foot. A strange apparition, surely.

Not knowing what to expect, Beethoven had assumed it would be like Schindler, some disembodied soul that perhaps he would even recognize, either friend or some distant figure he had known in life (Salieri came first to mind).

But no, it was merely a doorframe with its simple patterned, dark brown wooden door standing slightly ajar. There was no room, no closet behind the door but through the crack in it (and the keyhole) he could see the glowing of a dim yet febrile golden light.

For what seemed like several minutes, Beethoven waited for it to say something, anything, by way of introduction. Then impatiently, he began.

“So, spirit... do you come here often?”

No response.

He tried again: “Are you, spirit, the first of the guests on Schindler's list?”

The light began to glow, hesitantly at first but not exactly warming to the topic.

“Yes.” Then, after a pause, he continued. “Yes, I am.”

There was another pause and Beethoven began to feel impatience welling up inside him, along with last night's dinner. Most of my life I was deaf as a post and now I'm trying to talk to someone – some thing – that's as dumb as a doorknob...

“Are you the first of the Three Kings from Orient R?” He had heard how they would travel around Italy, leaving gifts for the children on Christmas Eve.

“No.” Then, it added, “not exactly.”

“Ah. Pity...” He frowned for what seemed a few minutes, fidgeting with the bedspread. “So how many questions do I have to ask before you begin to pick up on this conversation?”

“Sorry,” the faint voice of the spirit said. “I'm a little shy at first.” Then, working up his courage, added, “I am the spirit of... of Time Past.”

“Of Time long past? Wait, not Christmas?”

“Well, yes... okay... now that you mention it, yes. Uhm...”

The spirit seemed a bit confused and Beethoven slipped quietly out of bed, trying to peer between the crack in the doorway, but the spirit turned self-consciously aside and he could see nothing. He was quite sure, however, there was nothing to be seen.

“Fly with me, Herr Ludwig,” the spirit said, leaning forward invitingly.

“But I cannot fly,” the composer protested, drawing back, “despite the flights of fancy I may make when in the throes of inspiration.”

“Then be inspired,” the spirit suggested, “and take hold of my doorknob - here.”

Beethoven did that and immediately found himself levitating off the floor a good half a foot or so. And soon, he and his mysterious but friendly guide passed through the wall of his house and floated over the fields and rivers and mountains that surrounded the town where he now lived. Soon, deep among the clouds, he could no longer see anything below him.

“Where are you taking me,” he asked, but the spirit did not at first respond.

“You will see. And hear.”

Ah, to hear, he thought. What a gift it had been to hear again.

In the distance, he heard a voice, a child's voice, reciting familiar lines. Biblical lines from the story of Christmas:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'” (Luke 2:8-14)

There was music, then, with the heavenly host, a familiar chorus.

“Ah, Handel, glorious Handel.” It was from his oratorio, Messiah. What Christmas holiday would be complete without at least the first part of Handel's magnificent oratorio? Such beautiful music, such a peaceful message: Peace on earth. So timely when he lived in Vienna, wracked by a generation of Napoleonic wars; so timely today as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to take their seemingly unending tolls...

In a matter of but a few moments, they were descending to a place quite familiar to him but distant in his memory. Why, yes, he responded, looking about, my childhood home – my mother, there, looking after me, bringing me a plate of food. And then, my father, too, pushing it away... “The boy must practice first,” his father growled. His memory soured at the recollection of his abusive, drunken, hateful father and the hours he forced him to practice in hopes his son would become the Next Mozart. Neighbors said they used to see the boy with tears in his eyes, practicing long into the night. The image faded and with it, his initial happiness at its recollection.

There was another voice, young and gentle, reciting other, familiar words: “But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:16)

The only music he heard here was his own awkward practicing of scales and arpeggios. Soon it gave way to more festive music, good for dancing – a steady beat, a lively spring in its melody, the good raw sound of musicians not well trained but playing joyfully from the heart.

It came from the Breunings' house – there was Eleanor and Lenz, two of the children to whom he'd given music lessons, and Stefan who was perhaps one of his closest friends. There was the Breuning's friend, Fräulein Honrath, with whom he'd fallen in love but who would soon disappear (the first of many such). And Dr. Wegeler, only a few years older than himself, who would also remain a life-long friend.

“Those were gay old times,” he nodded pleasantly, then thought perhaps he should correct himself considering the way that word was used in more modern times.

Years flew by among the clouds, skipping without comment over his carriage ride to Vienna with the threat of a French invasion behind him, over Heiligenstadt and the terrible realization of his deafness. When the next clearing came, Beethoven looked down to see the woods around Teplitz, the spa he'd gone to for his vacation in the summer he was 41.

“Ahhh,” he sighed, almost weeping at the realization. “There she is!” Tears welled up in his eyes as he saw his younger self walking with a beautiful woman he would not name but who is known to the rest of us merely as 'The Immortal Belovèd.' It was the summer he completed his Seventh Symphony, full of his most joyous music,

“You loved her, then? She made you happy?” For once, the spirit had spoken up.

“Yes, she made me happier than I ever remember being,” he answered with a certain, uncharacterstically tender warmth.

“But you didn't marry her...”

“No,” Beethoven said, wiping away a tear, “we couldn't...”

“Why not?” The light glowed a bit brighter, the door seemed to open a bit wider.

“I'd rather not talk about it” was all he said in response. The clouds filled in and on they went in silence.

Shortly afterward, Beethoven realized they were approaching the city of Vienna, a house he did not recognize, in fact a Vienna he did not entirely recognize and with good reason. The ghost explained, sensing his guest's confusion, that it was Vienna in 1857, years after Beethoven had died, and the house where lived one he knew very well – perhaps, it might be protested, not well enough.

The family sat around a modest dinner table in the midst of their comfortable apartment, a man aged about 50 with his wife and four of their children, all between the ages of 5 and 22 years of age.

The composer was unable to recognize them until he listened in on their conversation.

“I would not mind drinking to the memory of your uncle, dear husband, since he was, after all, a famous man, but he made your youth a living hell and I think the less said the better.”

“And I in turn,” the husband said, raising his glass, “did the same for him, I'm afraid. Yes, he hated my mother, I know but cannot understand that, for she was trying to be a good woman and mother to me, despite everything he held against her.”

Beethoven began to suspect the direction this was taking. His mouth dropped open in an unsightly gape.

“But,” the man continued, “there was no reason not to name our son after him, after all. And today marks the 30th anniversary of his death. So allow me, instead, to propose a toast to our son, just recently turned 18, and to the memory of our son's namesake – to Ludwig van Beethoven! My uncle always wanted me to think of him as my father, after my father had died - he often addressed me as his 'son,' so I guess, Ludwig, that makes you his honorary grandson!”

And with that, they all raised their glasses – be it wine or milk (young Ludwig was being allowed, in honor of his recent birthday, to have wine with his dinner, now) – even though the wife did so with some reluctance, responding to her husband's toast with a smirk.

“I could not imagine him being 87 if he were alive today,” the husband smiled. “Think of all the music he could have written since then!”

“And would it have made you any richer?” she asked him with no undisguised disdain, setting down her glass as if to end the conversation.

Beethoven burst into sobs and tried to hug the husband whom he now recognized as his nephew Karl, but under the circumstances, being an invisible spirit and all, he went right through him so it proved pointless. Still, seeing him again, all grown up, now, was enough to unnerve him.

“Karl... Karl, my son...” he said in between sobs. “So you have married and have a family – three beautiful daughters and a son! And, alas, a disapproving wife... Imagine...”

“Actually, four daughters,” the ghost chimed in as they rose through the ceiling and out again into the night sky. “The oldest was not present that night, dining instead with her husband's family. But yes, he turned out not too badly, after all you feared. Not a great man but a decent one. No great achiever but not a failure, either.”

“And my namesake, young Ludwig?” the composer asked.

“Ah, well... now there was a... how did they say it then? A 'mauvais sujet,' a 'bad subject.' The girls were all respectable and three of them married comfortable bank-clerks; even the youngest daughter became an established pianist. But the son – ah, he became something of a black sheep, I'm afraid.” Beethoven looked crestfallen. “He styled himself as Baron von Beethoven – using the 'von' instead of 'van,' you know – and in fact he did tell people he was your grandson. But you had sown the seeds for this, yourself, I'm afraid.”

“Yes,” he said with a modest chuckle, wiping away another tear. “I always wanted to believe I was not my father's son, that some member of Bonn's aristocracy had been my true father.” When he was suing his sister-in-law in the courts for custody of her son, he tried to pass himself off as noble-born and the decision against him was quite a blow to his would-be aristocratic pride.

The clouds closed in around him, but in a matter of minutes, Beethoven – citizen, not would-be aristocrat – found himself descending to earth, led by the doorframe that was guiding him. His hand was freezing but he was afraid to let go of the doorknob for fear he would fall.

“It looks like a funeral. Are we still in Vienna?” Beethoven looked around him, aware no one could see or hear him and somehow enjoying the opposite of what he had gone through in life when he was the one who was deaf.

“No, Ludwig. Not Vienna. This is St. Petersburg and many years later.”

“Prince Golitsyn, is it? He still owes me money for those three late string quartets of mine,” he complained with little sense of respect for the otherwise dead.

“No, not Golitsyn. It is your friend and fellow composer, Tchaikovsky, lying there.”

“Ah.” He remained respectfully silent for a moment. “I was just talking to him earlier this evening: he seemed cheerful enough.”

“No, this is his original funeral, when he died of cholera in 1893.”

“I see. He never really talked about that, though. Some of the gossip says he committed suicide.” Beethoven looked around at the sadness in the face of everyone. His Sixth Symphony had been a failure a little over a week earlier: a little extreme to commit suicide over that, he thought.

“No, it wasn't that that caused his death. You see, it was illegal in Russia, then, even if it was rarely enforced but the law was on the books.”

“Law? Which law?”

“The one about being a homosexual. Well, it was probably worded that BEING one was one thing but actually committing homosexual acts was what was illegal. Rumor had it that some nobleman found out Tchaikovsky had had... well, 'relations' with his son (who was probably gay, anyway) and was threatening to take him to court. To avoid the scandal, a bunch of the lawyers he'd graduated with from the Imperial law school said he should 'do the honorable thing,' at least in their eyes, and commit suicide. So people felt his drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic was his way of following through on it.”

“I've heard about that – ghastly! And did the aristocrat order his son to commit suicide, also?”

“Let's say that information has not come down to us...”

In the distance, he could hear the voice of a child, intoning more biblical lines, the steady reading of scriptures audible through the soft, soothing winds.

“Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD your God.
“And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you. 

“For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him. 

“And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. 

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:7-10, 13)

“I know he was depressed about many things during his life – all that tormented, anguished music, especially that last symphony of his – but really, is that any way for a genius to end his days?” Beethoven sighed. It was bad enough about the trivial things that had happened to many of his colleagues, beyond things like old age or disease: Franck dying after getting hit by a bus or Chausson falling from his bike on a sunny Sunday morning ride. And Tchaikovsky was only 53 when he died, despite his white hair and serious expression. One thinks of Schubert dying at 31 or Mozart at 35. One forgets those who died, like himself, in middle age...

The bells began to toll – deep Russian bells, layers of bells with different ranges, each tolling in slow rhythms, a texture of undulating tempos according to their registers. This was a sound unlike any Beethoven had ever heard when he was a young man in Vienna. It had been the sounds of nature – bird calls and shepherd song – he had missed most, aside from the music and the conversation of his daily life, but the bells had always seemed to him a voice from Heaven that found resonance here on earth to speak with the tongues of angels. These Russian bells were especially deep and reverberant: you could feel the lowest of them as well as hear them. No wonder a composer like Mussorgsky loved to imitate the bells of Russia in his music.

Gradually the bells began to fade, the bass notes disappearing and the higher ones going higher still, sounding more tinkly, like little brass wind chimes that finally dissolved into a distant nothingness. Before he realized what had happened, he was back in his own room again, sitting in his arm chair before the cold and empty fireplace.

“How did I get here?” he exclaimed. “I was sure I had gone to bed long ago!” But then he remembered – the face of his friend Stefan von Breuning and then his nephew Karl (ah, how wonderful to see how he had grown up, after all, everything so much better after that bleak miserable day he had attempted to commit suicide)... and then the pale sad faces of the mourners beside Tchaikovsky's casket, surrounded by candles. And the bells. Yes, he remembered all that – but it must have been a dream, right?

“How could it have been otherwise? Guided through the skies of space and time by a flying closet door! Really,” he chuckled at the thought. “Bah! Pathetic!” And he trundled heavily back to bed.

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

Beethoven's Christmas Carol: Chapter One

Today is Beethoven's Birthday.

This is the first installment of my parody of Charles Dicken's holiday classic, in this case called "Beethoven's Christmas Carol." It's part of a series of short-stories written for the rather surreal collection, "Stravinsky's Tavern." 

In all, there will be four installments: Chapter Two (Ghost the First) will be posted on Friday, then the remaining two installments next Monday and Wednesday.

CHAPTER ONE: Schindler's Ghost

Schindler was dead, we can be pretty sure of that, doornails aside. He had been Beethoven's assistant – call it what you will – for a year and a half until an argument over finances split them apart and then again, two and a half years later after things were patched over, for another few months up until Beethoven's death. Considering the brief amount of time he had been working for Beethoven, many people thought Schindler had an undue influence over the whole business of Beethoven's life both before his death but especially afterwards.

Yes, for it was Beethoven's misfortune that he would die with Schindler hanging around, protecting the Master's reputation while muddying the waters for future biographers. Whatever Beethoven's complexities might have been, Schindler himself consisted of various bundles of servility and hero-worship, mixed in no doubt with certain amounts of hatred (the Master, genius or not, was impossible to live with from one day to the next). For all his first hand information, he became a notoriously unreliable resource when it came to Beethoven's eternity.

Because, however much he was sure that Schindler was dead, Beethoven lived forever.

It was like any other wintry night, safe from the howling winds and biting snow that blew through the coal region of Eastern Pennsylvania. Snug in the back corner of Stravinsky's Tavern, Beethoven, like many of the regulars there, hated this time of year, so cold and uninviting. Only the Russians seemed truly at home, here.

But, he would think, it's the month of my birthday. Shouldn't that count for something? Yet this year, turning 239 was certainly nothing to feel cheerful about.

Every year, it was always such a fuss: Beethoven's Birthday this; Beethoven's Birthday that, especially during the big anniversary years when people started digging up more biographical material that he wished could just be forgotten. It had all become so commercialized, nobody really remembering the great variety of the music he created in that brief lifetime of his.

Of course, you could complain that it was the same with that other December birthday everybody celebrated one way or another: Christmas.

“Bah,” he mumbled distastefully into his beer, people arguing whether you should say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.”

He liked to use “Happy Holidays” not because he was denigrating the Meaning of Christmas but because he wanted to include New Years Day as well as the proximity of Channukah, however it was being spelled this year. And whatever this new holiday was which people called Kwanzaa.

“When I was living in Vienna, we hardly celebrated Christmas at all.” It was just another church holiday with a special service, beginning on Christmas Day – not like today with this 40-day period leading up to it and all the shopping and gift-giving and decorating and stuff.

It was mostly the stuff. He shivered thinking about the excess, not to mention the expense. What had once been called Advent, he now viewed as the Opposite of Lent.

What really got him going was all those people – the ones who complained about how the spirit of Christmas was being ruined by people saying “Happy Holidays” – all seemed to have life-sized Santas complete with faux reindeer made out of white-painted wicker outlined in tiny white lights all over their lawns and rooftops.

“Why don't they just call it 'Merry Santamas' instead,” he asked Stravinsky as he brought around another round of drinks.

The tavern's genial proprietor knew better than to get involved with Old Beethoven at this time of year. Besides, he observed the holiday according to the Russian Orthodox Calendar and enjoyed nothing better than going out to the After-Christmas sales to buy all the gifts and cards he needed at greatly reduced prices. He often argued it was as wonderful an excuse to convert as any.

It was a delicate business, Stravinsky sighed, maneuvering through his customers' various personal foibles and delicate egos. Where else on earth could you run a bar that had become the favorite haunt of some of the greatest composers who ever lived? It wasn't unusual to find them sitting at his counter talking about their past creative efforts or arguing about the merits of this musical idea over that one while nibbling away at a burger and fries in one of the booths, or downing a beer with a plate of his special Firebird Wings.

And not only were they alive and lively, but someone like Beethoven didn't have to worry about his deafness any more. He'd been fitted with the latest in hearing aids and now was able to be part of every conversation without feeling left out. He could enjoy everything on television as well without relying on closed captioning. Sometimes, though, he preferred using the mute button a lot, especially during the commercials.

He was still fairly miserly, going into a rage over several lost pennies just this past month, alone. But his latest rage was over the omnipresence of “The Nutcracker.” Even in the small town of Coalton, PA, there were two dance companies who seemed to exist just to put on their holiday production of the ever-popular ballet. One raised money to defray expenses of their year-round season – they did two smaller productions in the fall and spring – while the other primarily raised money to put on “The Nutcracker” every year. You heard it on the radio, even on the pop music stations. It was all over television whether it was part of a campy comedy skit or the background music of a car commercial, set against a winter landscape.

Just then, Tchaikovsky walked into the bar, wearing a stylish black top-coat and top-hat, followed by a young man he introduced as his nephew, Bob Davidov.

Nephew, riiiight... Beethoven noticed there were two empty stools just next to him. Please don't sit next to me, please don't sit next to me...

Tchaikovsky sat down right next to him and nodded hello. Beethoven barely responded, just enough to be civil – well, maybe not exactly civil: let's just say so as not to give the impression of ignoring him.

Ravel, dapperly dressed as usual, came over to say hello and be introduced to the new guy.

“No,” Tchaikovsky laughed, “he really is my nephew. He's in town to visit for a couple of weeks.”

Beethoven couldn't hear the chatter between Ravel and the nephew. Beethoven had not had the greatest experience with nephews.

“We were very disappointed with the vote in the New York legislature a few weeks ago. I would have expected more,” Tchaikovsky mentioned as he ordered some drinks.

Beethoven gathered they were discussing the recent defeat of the latest attempt to legalize Same-Sex Marriage. Please don't ask me what I think about this, please don't ask me what I think about this...

Tchaikovsky turned and asked him, “So, Herr Beethoven, what do you think about this?”

“About what?” he grumbled, knowing full well what he was asking him.

“About New York's voting down the Same-Sex Marriage bill.” Tchaikovsky cocked his head slightly, waiting for a reply.

Nephew Bob piped up that they couldn't rely on the courts or the legislatures to make it legal. They really needed to go to the people, get it on the ballots and then go out to convince everybody that it was a perfectly normal social evolution whose time has come.

Several other patrons in the bar, overhearing this exchange, cheered the young man. Some applauded. Only a few, like Beethoven, for whatever reasons, seemed to ignore him.

Bob and Ravel continued their discussion while Tchaikovsky waited for some response from Beethoven. It wasn't that he was baiting him: he really was genuinely curious.

Beethoven took a long slow swig of his beer and, without turning, said, “I never understood why you people feel it so necessary to get married. I never married... Brahms never married...”

“Ah, but you could have if you'd wanted to,” Tchaikovsky said. “It's not like you weren't allowed to marry...”

“What's the difference,” Beethoven responded cynically. “Today, young people live together out of wedlock all the time: 'living in sin,' they call it. They see no need to marry, even to have children.” He shook his shoulders in disgust. He had a flashback to his brother, marrying that horrid woman. Worse was his having to deal with the scandal of their son – his nephew – being born just a few months later.

“But you couldn't marry her because of the class restrictions, then. Didn't you want to marry the Immortal Beloved, to live together as husband and wife and raise your own family?” He began humming the duet from 'The Magic Flute,' when Papageno and Pamina comment about the joys of wedded bliss, “man and wife.” He knew Beethoven had written a beautiful set of variations on that tune: it was one of his favorite pieces for the cello.

“That was different – and long ago.” He looked at Tchaikovsky with contempt for having brought it up. He tried not to imagine what it would've been like raising a child or two.

Stravinsky tried to lighten things up by passing around a plate of sand tarts and peanut butter cookies. “Vera has been very busy in the kitchen this week, baking all kinds of Christmas cookies and brownies for everyone. Here, have some, Ludwig. Fresh from the oven!”

Beethoven took a small cookie and nibbled at it. It was soft and warm, tasting very pleasant. He nodded his thanks and approval.

“Do you have any gingerbread men,” Nephew Bob asked.

“Anatomically correct gingerbread men, he means,” Tchaikovsky said, nudging his nephew in the ribs. Stravinsky and Ravel both let out hearty laughs.

Beethoven winced, putting his unfinished cookie down and continuing with his beer. A comment like this, he groaned, from the composer of 'Romeo and Juliet' – not 'Romeo and Julian' – which contained one of the most romantic melodies ever written. What is the world coming to?

Just then, Gustav Mahler came over and congratulated Tchaikovsky on the performance he'd seen last night of the Coalton Civic Ballet Company's 'Nutcracker.' “Very nicely done, Peter,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder in genuine enthusiasm.

Mahler, of all people, Mahler of the Universal Symphony with its cosmic spirituality, Mahler fawning over the composer of a little ballet about a piece of wood turning into a handsome prince. What is the world coming to...

“Thanks,” Tchaikovsky responded. “I know it's only because it's Christmas time they're performing it, but still, it is such a thrill to see the look of wonder on those children's faces when the tree begins to grow like that in the first act. Or when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances her solo.”

“Ah, but your music, Pyotr Ilich – don't sell yourself short,” Mahler continued. “That music will be with them no matter how old they grow. Won't it, Herr Beethoven?”

Beethoven thumped at his hearing aid as if it were acting up and he hadn't heard what they said. It didn't always work but this time it seemed it had.

“I wish I had written something that popular and that good,” Mahler chuckled as he started to walk away.

True, it would have made Tchaikovsky's fortune, if he could still collect royalties on it, but it left him feeling a little unfulfilled. Better to be recognized for his operas like Wagner sitting over there or for his symphonies like Mahler or Beethoven. That's what he longed for, that kind of public recognition...

Then Mahler added, “Oh, by the way, Peter – Alma and I will be glad to sign your petition about the Sex and Marriage thing.”

“Uhm, that's Same-Sex Marriage, Herr Maestro, and thank you very much.” Blushing a little, Tchaikovsky turned to Beethoven and asked him if he would consider signing it, as well.

“I do not see the point in it, young man. You can live your life without having to have everyone pat you on the back for it. Why this need to imitate societal conventions when your lifestyle is, by its very nature, unconventional?”

“But surely, Herr Ludwig, can't you understand the human desire to spend your life together with the one whom means the most to you in the whole world and be recognized by your friends as equals?”

Tchaikovsky pressed forward but Beethoven was trying not to relinquish his space and sit back, yielding the point. Becoming more uncomfortable, he sat forward a little more himself until their foreheads almost touched over the plate of cookies.

“And what does love have to do with it?” He surprised himself with his own cynical tone. “Besides, I try not to get involved in politics any more.”

And with that, Beethoven, feeling older and more curmudgeonly than his years, pushed back his empty plate and glass, then wrapped his scarf around him – the bright red scarf with 'Bah Humbug' emblazoned on it – and hurried toward the exit.

Ravel and Tchaikovsky looked after him in disbelief. “Not get involved in politics?” the one said.

“And this from the man who wrote the 'Eroica' and... well, yes, 'Wellington's Victory,' admittedly, but still...” said the other.

Beethoven had barely gotten outside the door, trying to wrap his scarf and coat more tightly around him against the piercing, biting wind, when he felt a tug at his scarf. He looked behind him expecting to see he had caught his scarf in the tavern's door but instead came face to face with the ghost of Anton Schindler peering down at him, quietly disapproving. It was not like Schindler, usually so deferential, to look so bluntly argumentative.

Ah, but it wasn't Schindler, really, that he saw. His scarf had snagged on a little potted pine tree, set in an attempt at holiday cheeriness next to the tavern's entrance, a poor withered little pine tree long since past its particular prime despite its pathetic handful of plastic dime-store lights and decorations. Hovering overhead, taped to the inside of the tavern's dusty window, was a holiday advertisement for Olde Frothingslosh with a jovial Santa Claus touting the virtue of a “pale stale ale” so light, the foam was on the bottom.

Beethoven glowered at the ad – “well, no,” he thought, “you couldn't very well put the Christ Child on that kind of an ad, now, could you?” – wondering how the jolly smiling face had taken on the dour visage of his former assistant.

“Bah! Bilge-water!” he muttered, stopping briefly to think that didn't really sound as good as he had initially hoped. Stepping aside to let a group of young revelers by to enter the bar, he wasn't sure but he thought it was Carl Maria von Weber with a few friends. Since he was still rarely on speaking terms with him, Beethoven saw no reason to respond to the cheerily half-muttered greeting of a Merry Christmas, whoever it might have come from.

He muttered more and more as he pushed his way against the wind, working himself into an even fouler mood by the time he reached his apartment building at the other end of the block. It was a big, lonely old red brick house, renovated into apartments about fifty years ago and hardly refurbished since. Once again, the downstairs apartment was empty and the young man on the third floor was away for the holiday, visiting his family somewhere in the Midwest which to Beethoven could've been anyplace between Ohio and Nevada. His apartment was on the second floor and, letting himself in without looking about, he felt the wind rush past him, chilling the air in the tattered vestibule where the floor was already littered with mail for the previous tenant or his absent neighbor. A number of red or green envelopes no doubt meant someone was getting Christmas cards rather than bills. He rarely checked to see if anyone sent him anything.

The chill seemed to be waiting for him at the top of the stairs as he turned to unlock his door. Though his health got no worse as he aged these past dozen decades or so, he wondered if maybe it wouldn't be wise to move down to the first floor, now that it was vacant. It might possibly be warmer and certainly without the stairs to climb, easier to come and go. But he also thought of people peering in his windows, possibly even breaking in, considering the rash of burglaries that had plagued Coalton in recent years. No, he thought: better to stay put and deal with the familiar. Nothing was so bad it didn't gain acceptability with familiarity.

The thought of burglaries, however, reminded him to double-lock the door and secure the bolt. When he had first moved here, he felt in such a small town as this, such security was over-doing it, but recently it made him feel better, regardless.

The chill wrapped itself around him as he took off his overcoat, then lay his hat and scarf on top of it after draping it over the handlebars of his exercise bike. Perhaps the furnace was having some difficulty again (it wouldn't be the first time) but the place did feel colder than he remembered it from the day before. Cautiously, he made his way through the apartment, checking each window knowing he hadn't opened them in months, anyway: he could not imagine why there should be such a draft as he felt now.

No, not a draft, he thought, but an all pervasive cold that seeped out into the room from the very marrow of his bones. Dinner at Stravinsky's, he'd hoped, would warm him up but whatever affect it had on him and his system must have already worn off.

And so he settled down before the empty fireplace, taking out a book he had long been trying to read. Unfortunately, tonight it failed to hold his interest very long, Alex Ross's much-praised history of 20th Century Music called 'The Rest Is Noise.' He was closing in on the final chapter which he knew was bound to be annoying and he doubted he would even bother with it. “Beethoven Was Wrong,” indeed.

“Bah! Balderdash!” No, that didn't have quite the right ring to it, either.

Just then there was a ringing sound and he immediately went to adjust his hearing aid. “Damn,” he said to no one in particular, “I hate when it does that.”

But that wasn't it, nor was there any other explanation he could find.

It was a small, distant high-pitched bell, a bit like his neighbor's wind chime, except it was only a single note rattling freely without sense of pulse or meter, much like some of the new music he had tried to listen to but quickly dismissed.

It came from the kitchen at the opposite end of the house: a timer, perhaps? Maybe it came from next door, someone busy in the kitchen – like Mrs. Stravinsky – baking Christmas cookies for the holiday feast.

But he had no sooner assumed that and dismissed the noise than he heard a shaking like something vast and ungainly working its way up the steps but no footsteps to speak of. Clanking, perhaps. How very unlike Santa Claus. Had he forgotten to lock the door behind him and some wind had blown it open? It paused on the landing outside his door. All Beethoven could do was sit and stare.

And just as suddenly he was met by a vision, some apparition proceeding gradually through the door, a dim, totally faded image like something he would see when the reception was bad on his old television set, snowy and ill-defined. At first, it was just a head and then an arm, gradually a torso and finally the start of a foot followed by the attached leg. Beethoven swallowed hard.

In a matter of seconds, the entire figure had extricated itself from the doorway and, as if strained by the effort, stood momentarily looking around with some slightly dazed curiosity. He was dressed in an old frock coat, worn shiny and black, its wide collars frayed along the edges, his shirtfront dingy and unkempt, the cravat close to coming undone. The overcoat was tattered by both age and wear, patched on the elbows, the cuffs fringed by loose threads. His hair shown in a crown of spikes and wayward curls, sticking out from under an old wool cap. His eyes were deep and sad, the skin (what one could see of it) sallow and dull. The fingers of both hands, sticking through the numerous holes of long-worthless gloves, fidgeted despite looking as blue as icicles.

But despite the presence standing there, Beethoven could still see the doorknob, the bolt and every lock clear through him!

Around this unlikely visitor was strung a lengthy chain, heavy looking and rusty, from which dangled books and small boxes, here a bottle of wine and there something like a can of beer. It appears he'd been unable to extricate himself from a charm bracelet of vast dimensions that jingled as he moved closer into the room like a walking wind-chime.

“I think I know this face. Who are you?”

The voice was raspy, almost as rusty as the chains which bound him, a voice unused to speaking and hindered by years of bad sinuses.

“Do you not recognize who I once was?”

“No. Not for sure, anyway.”

“But then you died when I was only 32. I followed you in death some thirty-seven years later. You, on the other hand, Master, look remarkably well for someone who's been dead for one hundred and eighty-two years.”

“Schindler!” He recognized the obsequious tone of voice.

The vision smiled perceptibly, revealing a row of bad and crooked teeth.

“I don't need an assistant right now, Herr Schindler, though thank you for thinking of me.”

“That is not why I have come,” the apparition said, waving a hand in admonition and generating a wave of clanking from his chains. Beethoven covered his ears at the racket. “I do not have much time. I see you no longer need your conversation books.”

“No, since modern technology has given me these wonderful hearing aids which help immensely,” Beethoven said, pointing to both his ears.

“I destroyed many of your old ones – the conversation books,” Schindler's ghost continued. Pointing to a length of chain draped across his chest, he added “they have become some of my heaviest charms.”

“You should have destroyed all of them – oh, I'm sorry, except I didn't think they would weigh you down in the afterlife like this.”

“I was only trying to help preserve your image, Master.” He made a slight and clanking bow.

“There has been too much attention paid to things that have no bearing on my music, information no one needs to know. Why didn't you destroy that Immortal Beloved letter, too? You burned all the others to her I'd left behind...”

“Yes, the ones that actually named her – or mentioned the child.”

“Shh! Shhh!” Beethoven waved his arms at him, urging him to keep silence, as if anyone could overhear them.

“Those, I figured, gave too much away: that one added just the right touch of, shall we say... mystery.”

“Sure, until some ass-hole made a movie about it where they linked me with that wretched Queen of the Night and now people the world over think I was madly in love with my sister-in-law. Bah! Tommyrot!”

“Good times, eh, Maestro?” Schindler smiled his broken smile which seemed even more painful through the paleness of his skin and the cold draining off his body like a block of dry ice.

“Good times, not, young man! You have much to answer for but it looks like you have already been dealing with that,” he added, motioning toward the chains. It was then Beethoven noticed Schindler – or rather, his spirit – was standing about six inches off the floor. “I would offer you a seat if you could sit.”

“No need,” he groaned in response. “We shades and shadows rarely need to – how do they say? – 'take a load off'? The chains regardless are very wearying, though.” He sighed. “But I am not paying you a social call to wish you a happy birthday or, for that matter, a cheerful holiday.” The chains dragged across the floor, as substantial as his body was incorporeal.

“What do you wish me, then?” Beethoven stood up and placed the book on the mantle-piece.

“Let's just say I've come to warn you, Maestro.”

“Warn me?” Beethoven scowled. “Warn me about what...!”

“That it's not too late to change – to mend your ways.”

“Schindler, you ass, I'm already dead – it's just that I'm living here in this little coal town in America with all these other dead composers because we continue to live on – if you can call it that – in the minds of our fans through our music. If I could get out of here and be really truly dead, I would...”

Schindler stood and stretched his arms out full, the chains and all his books and boxes and beer cans clattering and clanking along with him. “You would join me, Maestro?”

“But then it really isn't so bad, here, you know, when the sun comes out...”

“Still, as your past social secretary, I have been sent to tell you to expect three visitors. Three...” He began to fade and float back toward the doorway.

“Oh swell... more company...” Beethoven hated the idea of such intrusions. Over the centuries, his solitude had only increased his general misanthropy.

“Three spirits will haunt you, Maestro.”

“Spirits! Ach, even better... a parade of ghosts!” At least they won't drink any of my wine...

Schindler – or rather, all that was left of him – gathered up a strand of the chain which seemed to be growing before Beethoven's eyes, and draped it around his neck and down over his shoulder as deftly as a man might wrap himself in a scarf. “You can expect the first one at the stroke of one.” His voice was faltering as he was being pulled back through the door.

“You used to keep people from coming to bother me when we were alive. Can't you do anything about these guys, now? I mean, at least get them all to come at the same time, get it over with?”

Schindler appeared neither apologetic nor concerned as he began backing through the door, disappearing until all he was was a head, a bit of torso and a pointing arm.

“Three spirits, Maestro – you must receive them all... and maybe you will escape... my...” By this time, all that was left was a pale ice-blue finger pointing directly at him. Then, from the hallway, the chilling drawn-out reverberation of the last word Schindler would speak to him this night: “...fate...”

Beethoven stood there, both speechless and motionless. He expected at any moment to hear the knock at the door.

The sound of wind subsided, the intense chill had already disappeared. He went and checked the door – both locks locked, the bolt still firmly in place, the doorknob, though freezing to the touch, latched and unable to pull the door open.

He was, at least for the moment, alone.

“Bah,” he said, half-heartedly, “Baloney! Heartburn, most likely...”

And with that he turned, changed into his pajamas and crawled into bed, determined to await the arrival of his first guest.

Below, the street was quiet after the last of the tavern's patrons passed beneath Beethoven's window. And soon, amidst the unexpected peacefulness of the night, he fell fast asleep.

To be continued...

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Dr. Dick
© Dec 2009