As the sparks fly upward

At the flying club last Saturday, Tony not only presented us with a lavish barbeque with which to end the summer BBQ season, but also jazz as background music from live musicians who sang and played to us on trombone and keyboard under the stars. A convivial atmosphere soon developed under the willow tree in spite of the chilly air, especially when (well away from the aircraft and fuel tanks) someone lit a small bonfire and people began to cluster round it to chat or sway to the music and warm their hands, throwing in rolled up pages from back copies of the COPA newspaper to keep the flames going and watching the sparks disappear into the dark. Which brought to mind:

man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward

a line that must have had more of an immediate impact on the people who read it first, because wood fires were such a familiar part of everyone's life in those days.

You think of inevitability when you listen to Beethoven. A couple of days before she left Ottawa, I took my mother to a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery, where the Miró Quartet, an energetic and competent young group, played his Op.18, No.3 and his Op. 59, No.2.

The programme notes said:

The String Quartet became the first really serious form in which Beethoven took on the establishment, as he transformed himself from young pianist to famous composer. He wanted badly for his quartets to be absolutely new and outstanding, for by this time his career depended on them in more than one way: he had been hiding from everyone for the last two years the terrible secret that he was going deaf. Fighting depression, he saw his social life starting to unravel; and by the age of 30 he knew for sure he wouldn't be able to perform live much longer. The question of the rest of his career, really the rest of his life, seemed to depend on the answers he gave in these string quartets.

Beethoven is full of a sense of doom, but his music fights back with determination and often with exuberance, too. That's the spirit!