Great Master / small boy – by Liz Lefroy

Book Review – August 2021

In the summer of 2018 Liz Lefroy and her son, Jonty, took a trip across central Europe. They visited Bonn and Vienna on the trail of art, architecture, history and sachertorte. They were also searching for Ludwig van Beethoven, which was why they chose to visit these particular two cities. Beethoven was born in Bonn and moved to Vienna at the age of 21 where he lived until his death in 1827.

Book Cover

Image © Beethoven-Haus, Bonn

In Bonn, formerly the capital of the West German corporate state, they find echoes of past Cold War tensions behind the city’s polite, bourgeois exterior.

Before Vienna, Bonn: an insignificant-enough city,

once fitted out for purpose as a temporary capital,

now shrunk, side-lined as a cold war interval.[1]

Beethoven, the small boy destined to become a great master, was reputed to be glad to leave behind his childhood and his drunken, overbearing father. Vienna, meanwhile, shimmers in the summer heat of 2018:

This city’s a miniature of empire – a lavish

half-continent heated up, compressed into stone.[2]

This new collection of poems by Liz Lefroy is inspired by that trip.  It comprises a series of short, linked pieces describing a mother and son’s quest in search of the great composer. The poems describe their physical journey, taking time to explore present-day Bonn and Vienna looking for echoes of Beethoven’s life in both cities. For Liz this is also a temporal journey, a very personal one, casting her mind’s ear and eye back to her childhood and memories of her mother, a talented pianist:

I’m grateful I saw my mother at the piano,

her hair unpinned, her eyes brilliant with joy.[3]

Sheet Music

Image © Bobby Seal

Liz is now a mother herself and Jonty, at the time of this journey, is eighteen. But she recalls the time just before he was born, establishing the corporeality of the process in just a few crafted phrases:

I’m in labour in the bath.

I’m a whale,

a ship in full sail

beached on the rounded island of myself [4]

Liz’s mother inspired Liz’s love for the music of Bach, a love which she passed on to Jonty, who also turned out to be a talented musician. But, for Jonty, the exalted position of Bach was usurped once he discovered the music of Beethoven.

Bach’s music sits in me like a torch, and I passed

it on to you, which means I became momentarily

 

lost for words the day we were in the car listening

to Beethoven, and you handed Bach back[5]

 

At which point, perhaps, this European pilgrimage became inevitable.

 

There and then I switched track, toppled Bach a little,

promised to help you search for Beethoven.[6]

Like Beethoven’s quest for perfection, their search ends in Vienna. This beautiful, cultured and cosmopolitan city, where dark memories of anti-semitism and the Holocaust are never very far away. They visit Beethoven’s former apartment at 18a Pasqualatihaus.

This is the birthplace of four symphonies, the violin concerto,

A clutch of quartets, his only opera, Fidelio [7]

They also learn, from a small card on one wall, that a Jewish family were living in this flat up to 1939 when they were forcibly expelled by the Nazis. The two children, Hedwig and Clara, managed to escape to England by the Kindertransport and later settled in the USA. The parents, Josef and Josefine, however, were sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered in 1944.

Josef and Josefine.

Hedwig and Clara.

 

I read to your end.[8]

Back Cover

 

Image © Bobby Seal

Dark memories, it seems, lurk everywhere. Liz and her son spend their last evening in Vienna at a jazz club.

Harri Stojka   gypsy swing guitarist   is playing tonight

at Vienna’s oldest jazz club

 

His music is joyful but, as Harri tells his audience:

       by 1945 only six

of the two hundred of his family   still lived[9]

This is a beautifully presented pamphlet which, to complete the family enterprise, was designed by Liz’s other son, Gabriel. It is not just a collection of poems. There is a unity here, an integrity that brings together the seemingly disparate elements of Liz, her family, Beethoven and central Europe. There is music in her words.

It’s a hollowed space, a refuge, place of hope

which shows us all our losses. It’s where I go

when I exhaust the words for love and sorrow.

It’s music.[10]

 

Quotations from the Poems

[1] Before Vienna, 2018

[2] Vienna, 2018

[3] A Guarantee Between Us

[4] Before You, 4th June 2000

[5] A Guarantee Between Us

[6] A Guarantee Between Us

[7] Beethoven’s Apartment, 18a Pasqualatihaus, Vienna

[8] Beethoven’s Apartment, 18a Pasqualatihaus, Vienna

[9] Jazzland

[10] Coda

Great Master / small boy

Liz Lefroy

Fair Acre Press

June 2021

UK – £7.50

About Bobby Seal

Freelance writer, poet and psychogeographer
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4 Responses to Great Master / small boy – by Liz Lefroy

  1. Maureen Joy Cooper says:

    I was so pleased you sent this inciteful piece on Liz Lefroy’s pamphlet which I have not long finished reading. A poem a day at breakfast, then time to ponder each. A haunting, many layered, personal set of poems linking people, places and memories in a way I found completely involving. It will stay with me

    • Bobby Seal says:

      Thanks Maureen. I agree wholeheartedly with your ‘haunting, many layered personal set of poems linking people, places and memories in a way I found completely involving’ comments!

  2. Elizabeth Lefroy says:

    Thank you Bobby – lovely to be so closely read and understood.

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