Beethoven’s 250th anniversary was not the year any of us were expecting, but, as symphony cycles and opera productions were cancelled, his music spoke to us in deeper, more intimate ways.
Recently, I experienced one of those moments when disparate bits of knowledge suddenly realign, and a connection appears, as glaringly obvious as it was hidden a moment ago. I was listening to Fritz Wunderlich’s glorious rendition of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). Those six songs are an outpouring of Romantic lyrical longing felt by the protagonist, facing the unbridgeable distance between him and his beloved.
If it had not been ennobled by the purity of Beethoven’s music, the cycle’s poetic imagery could have been banal. The verses speak of hillsides and valleys, birds and brooks, clouds and sunsets, all invoked as symbols of the singer’s longing, or as potential messengers from him to his beloved. Yet in the sixth and last song, a stronger link between them is found – music itself. The singer asks his beloved to sing the songs he himself had sung, artlessly, from the fullness of his heart. Then, he says, whatever has separated them will fade and their hearts will find each other. Beethoven expresses this thought first with a heartachingly beautiful melody, loving and tender, and then with near-delirious exuberance, depicting the joining of hearts.
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