This is the prayer that Beethoven composed for himself on realising that his deafness was incurable and unrelievable. He was 32. His life was his music. He had composed his first published piece before he was 12 and in the ensuing 20 years, he was to hold a royal appointment as assistant music master and harpsichordist, and compose a choral mass, two symphonies, three piano concertos and a host of other works.
He had achieved fame - and now, as he put it in a letter to his brothers, his body had been "thrown by a sudden change from the best condition to the worst". Not an easily sociable man, with a string of failed relationships, he called on God for help in his desperation.
His situation is reflected today in so many personal disasters. There is the horror of losing someone you love; the trauma of young people incapacitated through accident or military service, who despair of their future, the fear of parents who realise that the newborn child they had longed for is severely disabled; the shock of losing one's job or livelihood; the desperation of not knowing how to carry on; the hopelessness of the addict, the prisoner, the bedridden; the desolation of loneliness.
It is reflected, too, in our realisation of our own human failings - anger, arrogance, addiction of one sort or another, having time only for ourselves, troubled relationships - when we desperately need God's help.
At these times, what better than to echo Beethoven's prayer: "O God, give me the strength to be victorious over myself?" With this strength, Beethoven broke any chains that existed in his mind. His deafness did not succeed in chaining him - he went on to write most of the works that we enjoy.
They were not composed by steely determination alone, although there must have been some of that. He so wisely asked that his soul, "transported though God's wisdom, might fearlessly struggle upward in fiery flight."I like that "fiery flight". Beethoven from all accounts, was a man of fiery temperament. Good music, like good works, is not produced by grinding out scores in a mechanistic, determined way. It comes from the soul - just as the loving care of a disabled child or the ministrations to a dying loved one come from the soul. Beethoven needed his soul and his life, to be lifted up in inspired and spirited - yes, fiery - flight. And they were.
There are times when we all need our souls and our lives to be lifted up from the depths of depression. Let us be encouraged by Beethoven's prayer and God's answer to it.
Paul Cooper is Parish Librarian at St Clement and All Saints, Hastings
faith
prayer for the week
O God, give me strength to be
victorious over myself, for
nothing may chain me to this
life.
O guide my spirit,
O raise me from these dark
depths,
that my soul, transported
through your wisdom, may
fearlessly struggle upward in
fiery flight.
For you alone understand and
can inspire me.
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)
