Whenever You're Near, I Hear A Symphony

If you mess with Beethoven at the Beethoven Open, he's going to mess with you

By Joe Queenan

Photo By Nathaniel Welch

March 2009

Contemporaries of Ludwig van Beethoven often found out the hard way that it was unwise to cross him. He briefly studied with Mozart and Haydn but thumbed his nose at both of them. Anyone who tried to go mano a mano on the old 88s with the barnstormer from Bonn got his head handed to him. When a group of noblemen tried to stiff him out of some cash, he took them to court -- this at a time when musicians didn't dare make waves, as noblemen could hire ruffians and cutpurses to break their legs.

Beethoven was such an arrogant man that when Napoleon Bonaparte, to whom he had dedicated his Third Symphony, declared himself Emperor, Beethoven ripped up the title page and changed the name to "Eroica." A compulsive spitter known to barrel into furniture and send the porcelain flying wherever he went, he never, ever forgot a slight. When he died at age 56, very few people were sorry to see him go. He might have been the greatest composer the world had ever known, but he wasn't much of a mixer.

Beethoven, however, was not the kind of person who could be slowed down by a mere trifle like death. And, as one group of golfers found out at the Beethoven Open, played at the Lake Winnipesaukee Golf Club in New Durham, N.H., on Bastille Day, the spirit of Beethoven lives on, even 181 years after his death. And if you cross him, you do so at your peril.

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The Beethoven Open, now in its fifth year, is a fund-raising event at which the music of the master meshes with the genius of the golfers, mostly locals. It is the brainchild of Daniel Heifetz, a distant cousin of the legendary Jascha Heifetz, perhaps the greatest violinist of the 20th century. The venue is a privately owned 7,017-yard course, voted one of the Best New Courses in America in 2004-'05, that was built by a multimillionaire who fuses a passion for music with a passion for golf. As the course cost more than $12 million to build, golf might have a slight edge.

‘He hit a nice shot, so I guess you can say Beethoven composed him.’

Bernard Chiu made his first fortune in home appliances and his second with a firm that sells inexpensive musical instruments. His gorgeous course would surely be crawling with people were it not for the fact that it is 100 miles north of Boston, where there aren't all that many people. It is not quite in the middle of nowhere, but it's close enough.

The event raises money for the Heifetz International Music Institute, in nearby Wolfeboro, which teaches musicians how to play with emotion, not just play the notes. This is somewhat ironic, because nobody ever had to teach Beethoven how to play with emotion; quite the contrary, it was hard to get him to calm down. Music, widely reputed to soothe the savage breast, is the ostensible selling point of the Beethoven Open, where the music of the maestro is ubiquitous. When you arrive at the clubhouse, a cellist playing choice morsels by the great composer will be there to greet you. Inside, a string quartet will regale you with lilting melodies penned by the Titan. On each and every hole, music by the composer of the "Moonlight" Sonata will waft through the air, providing solace and balm for Open contestants who have just triple-bogeyed a par 3. And anyone sinking a hole-in-one will be rewarded with a Yamaha baby grand piano.

Well, that's what the press release led me to believe. The reality was slightly different. As I made my way up the steps to the clubhouse, I spotted a cellist playing a solo suite. The piece was a tad funereal, which was bad, and it wasn't by Beethoven, which was worse. The musician explained that Beethoven hadn't written any music for unaccompanied cello, so she substituted Bach. The assumption was that Beethoven wouldn't mind, and the golfers wouldn't notice. I wasn't so sure. I'd noticed. And mindful of Beethoven's prickly temperament, I'll bet he would have been pretty miffed.

Inside, as disinterested golfers milled about, a quartet made up of young musicians from Russia, Israel and Chicago played one of Beethoven's sprightlier pieces. Sprightly pieces are hard to come by in the Beethoven canon, as he, like Bach, was known to wax a bit morbid on occasion, especially after he lost his hearing and supposedly caught syphilis, which would take the bounce out of anyone's step. But at least they were playing Beethoven. Out on the course as the Open got underway, there was no Beethoven, no Bach, no Brahms, no nothing. All that could be heard were the sounds of silence.

"Dave and I were supposed to put boom boxes out on every green," a young man monitoring the fifth hole explained. "But then it rained."

"It's not raining now," I noted.

"That's true," he said. "We didn't put them out because we thought the rain would ruin them."

"If you don't put them out, the tournament's ruined," I reminded him. "If you don't have Beethoven's music, you can't really call it the Beethoven Open, can you?"

He agreed that one could not. But it seemed like a misfortune he was prepared to live with.

I asked a few of the golfers if they'd noticed the absence of music. One was Chiu, who mixed a passion for music with a passion for golf. He hadn't noticed. But then again, with a 16-handicap, he had other things on his mind.

I next asked a man playing the fourth if he'd noticed the absence of Beethoven's Fifth.

"This is the deaf hole," he said. "We're supposed to play one of the holes in silence in honor of Beethoven's deafness."