When I was 11 and a half and on the verge of adolescence, my parents gave me a box that would determine my future. It was gray and white, made mainly of laminated wood, and I set it on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom. From that exalted position, it began to confer understanding and solace on me—dim understanding, at first, and only a glimmer of solace, but a hint, at least, that this dying child, this embryonic grownup, this odd new I, might survive, proceed, and perhaps even learn to assuage from time to time the nameless, incomprehensible ache, or to fill in part of the vast pit of unintelligible sadness that had suddenly and for no apparent reason opened up in the center of life’s territory. Maybe, the box said, the ache and the pit would not be adulthood’s sole offerings. Maybe something could happen, during the years that stretched forward in an unimaginably long line, to compensate for the ambiguity of existence, something to counterbalance the attractively horrible dreams, strange yearnings, and stranger physical changes that had begun to inhabit me.
The box—a portable, four-speed record player with a single speaker no larger than a grapefruit—seemed to be telling me something important about the world in a language that I felt I had always known, and I sensed that if I gave the box enough of my attention, much that was obscure would be illuminated. I was amazed that there could be such fullness in the midst of such emptiness, such solidity amid such confusion, such immutability amid such an onrush of time. The box didn’t soften or sweeten the conflicts within me. On the contrary, it highlighted them and revealed that they were still deeper and more intricate than I had suspected. But it also stated them boldly, filled me with the powerful sensuality of thought, and made me feel that one day I might at least be able to grapple with my problems instead of lying stunned at their feet. The music’s ambiguous specificity spoke directly to me and forced me to respond. I “conducted” it, jumped around to it, and imagined that I was explaining it to the girl I was secretly in love with, talking to her about life and Beethoven, who was my alpha and omega. I spent my best hours familiarizing myself with a newly discovered region: inner Life.
Yes: alpha and omega. There was plenty of room for all the in-between letters, too, but my listenings generally began and ended with Beethoven. I had first played some of his easiest piano pieces when I was nine; at that time, Sibelius, the so-called Nordic Beethoven, was still alive; Stravinsky, the most celebrated Beethovenian (insofar as he was a revolutionary) of my grandparents’ generation, composed the Canticum Sacrum that year; Pierre Boulez, one of several important musical revolutionaries of the generation that was then coming into its own, turned 30, and the ink was hardly dry on the score of Le Marteau sans maître, his most influential work. I hadn’t heard of Boulez then, but through my record player I wanted to get to know all of the musicians I had heard of, from Bach and Mozart to Bartók and Stravinsky. I loved Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy Fancy Free ballet, which began with four gunshot-like drumbeats, but Beethoven seemed to speak to me more clearly, more directly, than anyone else, and I often thought about him, about his existence. His music, but also the simplified yet not wholly erroneous published accounts of his life that I devoured, gave me sustenance and courage. Never for a moment did I identify with his genius, and I probably already sensed that my fundamental gregariousness would prevent me from becoming as unbalanced in my human relationships as he had been; yet I was always a crowd-shunner, and the idea of the fist-shaking Beethoven making a cry of protest, of nonacceptance, for all to hear, appealed overwhelmingly to me. The older Beethoven (younger than I am now)—the Beethoven who sought transcendence—was a discovery I wasn’t capable of making at so tender an age. What nourished me then was the heaven-storming, middle-period Beethoven. He was my constant companion.
Increasing fluency at the piano keyboard and in reading scores was certainly one of my most important roads to Beethoven and other composers when I was in my teens, but just as important was the presence in my life of the Cleveland Orchestra: I was able to attend its rehearsals and concerts under George Szell and other conductors thanks to a family friend who played in the great ensemble’s violin section. My main highway to music, however, remained the little gray-and-white box in my bedroom in our house on Cleveland’s East Side. Among the earliest LPs given to me were Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies with Erich Kleiber conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and the “Eroica” with Szell and the Cleveland. When an aunt and uncle asked me what I wanted for my 12th birthday, in June 1958, I opted for the Ninth, and they gave me what, I believe, was the only single-disc version available at the time: Bruno Walter’s, with the New York Philharmonic. I must have listened to the whole work once or twice at first, but for weeks thereafter I listened over and over to the scherzo. After that, I familiarized myself with the first movement, then the finale, and only much later the third movement, which was too difficult for even the most enthusiastic 12-year-old to “feel” profoundly. The slow movements of the Third, Fifth, and Seventh had plenty of exciting bits, but in the Ninth’s adagio I had to wait too long for something to happen—or, as I would now say, for the sublimity to be interrupted.
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At 15 or 16, I thought of Beethoven when I first read Julius Caesar and came to Cassius’s lines: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves.” I knew that Cassius was speaking ironically and inciting Brutus to rebel against the dictator; nevertheless, those lines, taken out of context and at face value, seemed a magnificent description of Beethoven’s standing with respect to most of the rest of us human beings. Again, I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.
Beethoven turned up everywhere. I was 19 the first time I took off in an airplane after dark, and I thought, as I looked at the lights of New York City below, “Wouldn’t Beethoven have been thrilled by a sight like this?” I was able to project him into the present in a way that I could not have done, and never would have dreamed of doing, with the other composers I loved. His physical existence, which had come to an end nearly a century and a half earlier, colored my own, still fresh and young. And I know that at the outset of my adult life, when the government of my native country demanded that I participate in a war that I considered unjust, cruel, stupid, and tinged with racism, Beethoven and his resilient, universalizing music, which seemed to transcend all human tendencies toward disunity but also, simultaneously, toward mindless obedience—toward following the multitude to do evil—were among the main influences that made me decide to emigrate rather than do what was expected of me. That decision altered my life forever, damaging it in some ways but enriching it in many more.
Half a century has passed since I received the little gray-and-white box, and I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me.
A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence. The goal may prove impossible to achieve, but all the alternatives are doomed to failure.
