Barclays Bank and Lake Baikal

The bank walks in at half past seven, dressed and unembarrassed by its sponsorship of Beethoven, the best

of music, Hammerklavier, here in its own town Darlington.

Demidenko, Nikolai, in concert, self-exiled, walks out of another world

like one who's wandered, handkerchief in hand, into the town to watch the hammer of the auctioneer come down

and then, instead, plays Beethoven

as if he were alone.

He looks like Silas Marner so intent upon his two thick leather bags of gold

he lost the world

we live in: cough, cold, cufflink and the ache and pain

of bone.

It looks as if the light, Siberian, is breaking slowly over Lake Baikal,

as if our ship of fools

and bankers, borne upon the waters

of a bare

adagio, may founder in a quite uncalled for and unsponsored

sea of solitude.

But not tonight, dour Demidenko, dealer in another world’s

dear gold –

for Darlington's recalled. At ten to ten the bank picks up its leather bag, walks out again.

GILLIAN ALLNUTT

Sonata

Evening. The wind rising.

The gathering excitement

of the leaves, and Beethoven

on the piano, chords reverberating

in our twin being.

‘What is life?’

pitifully her eyes

asked. And I who was no seer

took hold of her loth hand

and examined it and was lost

like a pure mathematician

in its solution: strokes

cancelling strokes; angles

bisected; the line of life deviating

from the line of the head; a way

that was laid down for her to walk

which was not my way.

While the music

went on and on with chromatic

insistence, passionately proclaiming

by the keys’ moonlight in the darkening

drawing-room how our art is our meaning.

R. S. THOMAS

From Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön

Miserere, Domine!

The words are utter’d, and they flee.

Deep is their penitential moan,

Mighty their pathos, but ‘tis gone.

They have declared the spirit's sore

Sore load, and words can do no more.

Beethoven takes them – those two

Poor, bounded words – and makes them new;

Infinite makes them, makes them young;

Transplants them to another tongue,

Where they can now, without constraint,

Pour all the soul of their complaint,

And roll adown a channel large

The wealth divine they have in charge.