'I should like to get something of this into verse,' wrote TS Eliot about Beethoven. Katie Mitchell tells how she united the two artists' work ..
In 1994, on a dusty bookshelf at a friend's house, I stumbled across an old tape recording of Ted Hughes reading my favourite poem, TS Eliot's Four Quartets. I was struck by the power of hearing the poem read aloud. When you read it to yourself silently, you can appreciate Eliot's use of alliteration, or the way in which he cuts the cloth of his ideas in different metrical patterns - but the appreciation is cerebral. When you hear it spoken, the musical impact of the language, metres and rhymes crystallises the meaning and releases the emotion. The more I listened to Hughes' recording, the more I became convinced that the poem was written to be read out loud, and that hearing it made the material more accessible.
I began to wonder how you could make it into a live performance. With this in mind, I approached Stephen Dillane, one the few actors I knew who would not be daunted by the scale and potential loneliness of the undertaking. And so, three years ago, rehearsals began, fitted around our other work commitments.
It was only by chance that we discovered - in Lyndall Gordon's book on Eliot's later career, Eliot's New Life - that the poem was inspired by one of Beethoven's late string quartets. Once the initial connection had been made between the two pieces, I started to research them both, with a view to working out how to put them together. The idea of an evening that somehow combined a reading of the poem with a performance of the string quartet was born.
This discovery fed our work on the musicality of the poem, encouraging us to be as attentive to its form as to its content. Some days we rehearsed the poem exclusively with metre, rhythm and rhyme in mind, as if it were a musical score and Stephen were a singer. And we had to consider whether to do it in a theatrical or musical environment. The concert hall appealed more than a theatre, because the simplicity of a concert recital, with its emphasis on the aural more than the visual, seemed best suited to our purpose of communicating the poem without theatrical embellishment or illustration. Also, as this was our first attempt at presenting the poem, we wanted a protected environment in which to try it out.
Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-52. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement "a song of thanksgiving ... offered to the divinity by a convalescent", and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: "Feeling new strength."
Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: "I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die."
Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven's work, Eliot's poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale.
The first poem in the series, Burnt Norton, opens with an image of a couple walking in a rose garden and is full of regret for what might have been. At this point, Eliot's concerns appear personal. However, in 1939, when he was working on the second poem, East Coker, war had broken out and by 1940 Eliot was working in London as an air-raid warden during the Blitz. The climactic verse of the final poem, Little Gidding, is set at night in a London street just after a raid. By the end of the four poems, Eliot had moved from the personal to addressing what he described in the poem as the "distress of nations".
If suffering is the trigger for both pieces, then faith offers the shared antidote of "reconciliation and relief" that Eliot wrote to Spender about. Both men were practising Christians, and their belief underpinned much of their later work. Beethoven was a Catholic, and Eliot famously converted to Anglicanism aged 38, nine years before writing Four Quartets.
In 1933 Eliot said he wanted to get "beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music". I am sure that it was Beethoven's religious aims in the long and intense central movement of the quartet that Eliot had in mind when he wrote these words. Beethoven had been studying liturgical music - Palestrina in particular - while he was working on his Missa Solemnis, which he completed two years before starting work on the quartet. This study influenced the central movement of the quartet, which is based, unusually, on an ancient chorale melody and mode. Similarly, Eliot's poem had a strong religious purpose and referenced Christianity in many forms - from direct quotations of the medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich, to the setting of the final poem in the village of Little Gidding, which was the site in the 17th century for a persecuted religious community.
Interestingly, however, both men were also drawn to the philosophy of eastern religions, with which they supplemented their own Christianity. Eliot quotes from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, in Four Quartets. Beethoven was influenced by the older Hindu scripture, the Rig-Veda. In his diary the composer jotted down a line from the Rig-Veda commentary about the idea of God being "free from all passion and desire". Eliot expresses similar sentiments in his poem when he writes about:
The inner freedom from the practical desire
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.
Both men were at the peak of their creativity when they wrote these two pieces, and were determined to push the boundaries of their media. And both were aware of the time pressure placed on them by mortality, Beethoven because of his deafness and Eliot because of the war.
Other than the A minor quartet, Eliot's favourite Beethoven pieces were the Seventh Symphony and the Coriolan Overture. In 1949 he chose the second movement of the Seventh Symphony for his funeral, thereby cementing his connection with the composer. We will never know what Beethoven would have made of Eliot's poetry, but no doubt, the musician who wrote that he "would rather write 10,000 notes than one letter of the alphabet" would have appreciated the scope of Eliot's achievement with words in Four Quartets.
And perhaps Eliot's own ambivalence about the "letters of the alphabet" would have drawn the two men together:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years [...]
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one had only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
Indeed, Eliot's poem often celebrates the power of music almost as if it were a superior form to words in its ability to capture the timeless moment: "... music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts."
When I began envisaging how to put Eliot's words with Beethoven's music, it was impossible to imagine mixing the two up in the same cocktail - for example, with Beethoven providing the background music to Eliot's words. The cleanest solution seemed to be to perform each piece in its own right, separate from the other, with the words followed by the music. In this we were following Eliot's lead in letting music have the final say.
By:Katie Mitchell (Guardian) November 18 , 2005 ...
