The city and the country – 12 – Aug 3 2014

Much of the end of the week and the weekend spent in Phoenicia, where my Beethoven play opened on Friday at the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice – a festival truly international (despite its almost comical yoking to the tiny hamlet of Phoenicia in upstate New York) by virtue of the host of internationally renowned singers gathered together by the festival’s organisers, Louis Otey and Maria Todaro – themselves internationally celebrated opera singers – and the no less international classical pianist Justin Kolb. The festival had turned Phoenicia, a sweet one-horse town whose tubing-trips in the Esopus rivers were hitherto its chief appeal, along with the Shandaken Theatrical Society where we performed the Beethoven play, into a sought-after cultural venue and a vacation site of exceptional charm, written up in magazines and newspapers and chosen by travel writers as a top ten destination. (When I first heard the title, Phoenicia International Festival, I recalled landing at Charleston, South Carolina’s International Airport, in its earliest days, when a flight to Raleigh, North Carolina was as far afield as it offered.) Like the Charleston International Airport, the Phoenicia festival rapidly grew into its name, and I feel greatly privileged to have taken part in the past 3 years. This year I persuaded the triumvirate to commission a play from me, one that would use Justin Kolb’s striking resemblance to Beethoven (picture him with a Beethoven wig on that head) combining it with the fruits of a book on Beethoven that Justin had lent me, about Beethoven’s incessant hypochondria. This inspired me to condense the great man’s many doctors into one long-suffering and imaginary figure, and make tender fun of a genius’s foibles, under the title, Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven. Central to the concept was the prospect of Justin playing some of Beethoven’s piano works – a lifelong passion, on Justin’s part – and mixing in dialogue to produce a perhaps previously unknown hybrid: a combined piano recital and comic drama, the drama interwoven into the recital (or vice versa).

To my relief it was well received by full houses, and no one complained (to my knowledge, anyway) that they would have preferred more recital and less of the play, or the other way around. I feel as if I got away with a tightrope walk (made more perilous by the fact that I played the other character, Beethoven’s doctor), and we learnt a great deal, chiefly thanks to Claire, the play’s director, about where it can be very much improved by re-working, for a future performances at other venues. A good prospect! – all we need is a space with a piano in it, plus the maestro and me.