Immortal Beloved, the idea…
The initial impetus for the Immortal Beloved violin concerto was rooted in Denise Dillenbeck’s deep personal inquiry about Beethoven’s life and the impact of his music on her own life, but it is Northwest Sinfonietta’s vision and leadership as lead commissioner in an exciting consortium that made the project a reality. The organization immediately appreciated the multi-faceted potential in the idea of a violin concerto that is centered on the lives and stories of three women, one of whom might have been the recipient of Beethoven’s famous letters.
Musicologists like to argue the merits of seeing embedded biographical detail in instrumental music, but for this project, the tantalizing connections some of Beethoven’s music has to the women who could be considered candidates for the Immortal Beloved are too good an opportunity to pass up. I am using collage techniques and musical cryptogram to generate melodic and harmonic material (as I did in my 2020 piece In All Our Names) and I am setting the Immortal Beloved text to music in order to embed the text in the piece, as I did with Celilo Falls: We Were There (2022). Notwithstanding that the song settings may well have a life of their own, for the most part this is for my own benefit. Ultimately, these are merely tools for telling the story through character studies and the tracing of emotional arcs.
That last is a statement which begs the question: What IS the story? The mystery may never be solved, but this project is not about staking a position on the question. I want to spur reflection on our own responses to this story of two people in love with each other who could not be together because of both classism and the oppression of women. The shortage of biographical data is in itself a symptom of this oppression, as strict secrecy in these situations was necessary to protect the women from catastrophic opprobrium. What must it have meant to be a woman in Beethoven’s orbit, to be young and artistically inclined in the presence of such greatness? How maddening must it have been to admire egalitarian ideals as artistic and philosophical forces of the time but be incapable of acting on them in any way? To be married off as a piece of property, with no say in the matter? For me, multifarious musical possibilities emerge through deep contemplation of the lack of voice, agency and freedom experienced by even the most privileged of women in that time and place. My challenge is to find their voices in the shadow of one of the most powerful and compelling artistic voices of all time — which is in many ways emblematic of the very problem we seek to illuminate.
At a time when women’s rights are under attack, revisiting these events is a timely reminder that we are not done securing full rights and personhood for women. I have been aware for some time of the creative and consistent work Northwest Sinfonietta has been doing to engage with its community with equity and inclusion always top of mind and to deepen the connections of its artistic work to the issues of our time, so I am excited to see what partnerships and events they will create around this work’s premiere.