Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Black Beethoven
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C minor, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is bigger and better in Berlin’s Konzerthaus than anywhere else in the world. In a city famous for musicality, I am attending its premier concert venue.
The hall’s chandeliered elegance reverberates with Beethoven’s escalating bombast. My brain is a music chamber of crescendo and soothing chords. At intermission, I step out onto porticoed steps to overlook Gendarmenmarkt plaza.
A concertgoer next to me asks, “Are you enjoying the Beethoven?” He is my junior by twenty-five years, in unisex garb and, as tells me later, a college student studying music abroad. An African American. I never learn his name.
Before I can answer, he adds, “You know, Beethoven was probably a black man.” His tone is clumsy, joyless, a smidge belligerent. I can’t help but feel the prick of his microaggression. I’m not fully woke, but I’m not asleep either. I think I know what he means.
My skin coloration is all he knows about me, but it’s enough. I am white privilege, and he is not. If I were back in the faculty lounge at my high school, a teacher might be telling me to ‘check my privilege,’ and in an unspoken, slow burn I would be thinking ‘check your unprivilege.’
In Berlin, in the night coolness, the universal language of music morphs into a racialized entrapment—neither of us able to escape our skin color. My stomach churns.
He lives with ghosts and goblins past that I cannot begin to imagine. I want to discount his youthful rudeness, but it is rudeness all the same. Ignoring it is a dismissive condescension my inner teacher won’t countenance.
I am in Berlin for a holiday, not an interracial study group, but I am called to the teachable moment. I don’t care one whit about Beethoven’s melatonin, but I am provoked.
My neck muscles seize up. I stretch my head from side to side. A boxer limbering up.
“I’ve never given much thought to Beethoven’s skin color,” I admit. “Shouldn’t we simply listen to his music with open ears and blinded eyes? Will you hear Beethoven differently if his blackness is confirmed?”
His glaring silence goads me. He is flexing his wire rim glasses. I’m regretting not stopping at the bar for a double brandy.
I quote W. E. B. Du Bois who admired the operas of the notoriously racist Richard Wagner: “The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them….”
I’m filibustering a classroom lecture. Patronizing him. Not listening. Not giving him an opening to attack my identity. “Do you want sheet music color-coded by the composer’s racial heritage? Concert programs to detail each musician’s racial makeup? Resurrect Hitler’s cultural profiling?”
He is quiet. It is the sullen quiet of submission, not the comforting quiet of understanding.
The warning chimes ring, calling us to our seats. Next on the program, ‘Lilacs’ by Pulitzer Prize Winner George Walker—an African American.
