A Meeting of Masters
Setting: A quiet study in Vienna, 1808. Beethoven sits at his pianoforte, manuscript pages scattered about. Shakespeare appears as if conjured from time itself.
Shakespeare: Master Beethoven, I hear you've been keeping company with my Coriolanus—or rather, a German cousin of him.
Beethoven: (turning, startled, then recovering) Herr Shakespeare! Yes, though not your version directly. Collin's tragedy—it premiered here in Vienna four years past. I composed an overture for its revival. The character... he seized my imagination completely.
Shakespeare: Ah, so you found something in that proud, impossible man? What drew you to him?
Beethoven: His defiance! His refusal to bend, even when bending would save him. (strikes a chord) There is something tragic and noble in a man who cannot compromise his nature, even for survival. Is this not what you intended?
Shakespeare: I intended a man whose virtues became his destruction. Pride, martial excellence, contempt for the common voice—all admirable in their place, yet fatal in combination. But tell me, how does one capture such contradictions in music without words?
Beethoven: (growing animated) The overture begins with force—unison chords, brutal and martial. This is Coriolanus the warrior, unyielding. But then... (plays a softer passage) here enters tenderness, pleading. His mother Volumnia, perhaps? Or his own suppressed humanity?
Shakespeare: His mother! Yes, she was his undoing. In my play, she kneels before him with his wife and child, and that proud heart finally breaks. No enemy army could defeat him, but a mother's tears...
Beethoven: Exactly! The conflict between these themes—the fierce and the tender—this struggle repeats throughout. Neither can triumph completely while both live. The music grows more desperate, more fragmented...
Shakespeare: As the man himself fragments. He cannot be both Roman hero and dutiful son, both conqueror and citizen. The world demands he choose, but his nature will not allow it.
Beethoven: (nodding vigorously) And so the ending—I wrote it to suggest his death, but not a triumphant death. The main theme disintegrates, grows quieter, slower... it simply exhausts itself and fades away.
Shakespeare: A whimper after all that roaring? How fitting. Though I gave him defiant words at his end—"Cut me to pieces, Volsces men!"—perhaps the truth is closer to your version. When a man betrays everything he believed himself to be, what remains?
Beethoven: Nothing. Silence. (pause) But there is grandeur even in that dissolution, no? The tragedy is not that he was wrong, but that the world could not accommodate what he was right about.
Shakespeare: You defend him more than I might! But then, you composers are romantics. You see a hero where I saw a cautionary tale—a warning about inflexibility, about scorning those you need, about letting pride master judgment.
Beethoven: (irritably) Perhaps I am no diplomat myself. Perhaps I understand what it means to refuse to play the game, to make my art as I see fit regardless of what patrons or public demand!
Shakespeare: (smiling) Ah, now I see why you chose him. You are composing your own portrait, Herr Beethoven. But take care—I gave Coriolanus no happy ending.
Beethoven: Neither did I. But for twenty minutes, his struggle lives in sound—pure, wordless, honest. Is that not immortality of a kind?
Shakespeare: (extending his hand) Your kind of immortality, perhaps. Mine required rather more words. But yes—we both understood that some souls are too large for the cages history builds for them.
Beethoven: And some stories are too powerful to tell only once.
Shakespeare fades back into time. Beethoven returns to his manuscript, adding a few fierce strokes of the pen.
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