Beethoven and the Devil's Punchbowl

        Last Sunday I heard Angela Cheng playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra.  Beautiful! The last time I heard the Emperor Concerto in concert was also with the Rogue Valley Symphony, years ago. I wrote a Jefferson Public Radio commentary about it, which I'll publish here on my blog because it says pretty much what I felt about the piece hearing it this time, too.

         

          A few weeks before I left for a trip to the Devil's Punchbowl, a high-altitude lake in the Siskiyou Wilderness Area, I went to a concert of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, the Emperor Concerto. At first I was disappointed that the program called for that particular piece, which I knew so well that I could sing it in my sleep (or so I thought), but such familiarity wouldn't keep me from going. The Emperor Concerto is a beautiful piece, and, besides, every experience doesn't have to be a new one. Because I have been swimming in a particular lake before, would I not go there again?

          But maybe every experience is a new one. On the one hand, I was surprised to be hearing what I had not remembered was there. Then would come those familiar passages that touched not so much the familiarity through memory as those depths where I had hidden the music because I had made it my own. I lamented not that it was so familiar it had lost its excitement, but that it was not familiar enough to reach those depths for its duration. Flashing fingers commanding the keyboard, bold and collective chords from the orchestra, themes pushing through swirling notes to emerge with clear beauty—those were fine moments, but the passage I must have actually been singing in my sleep because it was the one I woke up with was the simple soprano notes with both hands, the orchestra a forgotten background to the piano's individual experience with beauty, the small moments of exquisite pleasure in solitude.

          The next week I climbed to the Devil's Punchbowl, a 93-foot-deep cirque lake surrounded by jagged peaks. Snow from the peaks lapped at the lake's side. An osprey hung in high, hesitating spirals over the lake, the sun catching an occasional tilt of the wings. For a cold-water, high-altitude-lake devotee, it was water to swim in.

          But it was not water to throw oneself into with a splash and a yell. This environment importuned respect for sacredness. Gently I waded into the lake. Slowly I sat down on a submerged rock, till the cold water rose over my thighs, over my breasts, then over my shoulders, and with a gentle push with my feet, I was waterborne.

          Far out in the center of this perfectly circular lake, under the eye of the osprey, poised between the depth of the sky and the depth of the water and caught between the blue of both, there were those passages from the Emperor Concerto. There were the tinkling moments of beauty one experiences in solitude and brings back to those one loves, even as the piano and orchestra merged again.

          I wasn't thinking about Beethoven's concerto while I was swimming in the Devil's Punchbowl, nor did I think of a swim while I was at the concert, and I am not so naive as to think Beethoven meant to symbolize such events in his music. I only mean that for me there was an affinity between the two events that implied self-similarity. The music and the swim—that performance and that swim—were among those events that create a universality in my life, a common thread I can touch and know this is I.