What do Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and every baseball game ever played have in common?
The quest for self.
Sound lofty? I'll explain.
Monday afternoon, I went to the Columbus Clippers' last game of the season. What better way to spend Labor Day, I figured, than by lounging around taking in America's pastime?
Maybe it was the relaxed and pleasant crowd. Maybe it was the sweltering heat. I don't know, but yesterday's game got my brain clicking, and with diamond-like clarity I was struck by some bold realizations about baseball, Beethoven and the meaning of life.
First, baseball. I'm certainly not the first to say it, but baseball is a fine metaphor for life. In its broadest outlines, the game is about leaving home and trying to get back.
Once you're off home base, you meet all kinds of infielders whose only goal in life seems to be to thwart your progress and knock you off your game. The journey back home is almost always a long one, and you might have to try and try again to reach your destination. And once you do get home, you're not the same as when you left, and (here's where, admittedly, the metaphor breaks down a bit, but work with me) home isn't the place it once was – or at least it isn't the place you once thought it was.
You can understand almost any Beethoven symphony with the help of this baseball metaphor. Really, you can understand almost any symphony by almost any composer with the help of this metaphor, but I choose Beethoven here because his music speaks to so many.
Baseball is a powerful symbol of the American spirit. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is an equally powerful symbol of the indomitable human spirit writ large.
And so we begin our journey through Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the work's iconic four-note opening: buh-buh-buh- BUHHHHM – which repeats - buh-buh-buh- BUHHHHM. This is the now-famous "fate knocking on the door" motive. And a persistent little devil fate proves to be - all of the rest of the symphony is based on Beethoven's ingenious permutations and spinning-out of the initial four-note idea.
The symphony also begins in the key of C minor, but we quickly leave that key and wander like nomads - or like so many designated hitters lost between bases - through others for the rest of the piece. All of the rest of the symphony is driven by the quest to get back to the original key - to get home, if you will.
Like life - that great, ineffable strategic pitcher - Beethoven throws us a few curve balls along the Fifth Symphony's long journey home. We endure almost unbearably obsessive repetition of the four-note motive in the first movement, all sorts of “wrong” notes and surprise gestures that take us farther and farther away from our home key. And no seventh-inning stretch in sight.
But then we see the light at the end of the tunnel – that exultant final movement. The four-note idea no longer consists of the banality of three repeated notes followed by a different note, but instead has shed its plain-Jane skin and transformed itself into a soaring and valiant melody.
The movement unfolds squarely in the key of C – not the C minor "home" key of the opening, but instead an exultant C major, no sharps or flats muddying up the key signature, but a vast horizon free of obstructions. It isn't just you who makes it back to home base – you take the whole team with you.
In Monday's game, there were moments of trial. There were moments of frustration. There were moments when getting from one base to the next didn't happen. There were moments when our players, and theirs, didn't even have a chance to get home. And as the sun angled low over the course of six (but who's counting?) extra innings, there were many moments when it seemed that, quite literally, no one – not the players, not the spectators – would ever make it home again.
But we did.
And if baseball and Beethoven have taught me anything about life, it's that taking in the strange and harrowing and sublime details on the path home is at least as important as getting home itself. For in taking in the richness of the journey, you find out what stuff you're made of - in short, you find out who you really are.
To close, here is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the hands of the inimitable PDQ Bach (a.k.a. Peter Schickele). It's only the first movement. Now go make the rest extraordinary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg
