re Belle

qu E

n E

fai T,

bo Hême,

c Onnu

Vite,

s' En

N'a

I crossed Beethoven as a spine with Bizet’s Carmen Habanera.

Well, first of all one could read it as the freedom of love which Carmen

advocates for her own love, i.e. love being and infant of the bohemia that never

met/understood/followed the law. Love is, in this sense, the “bohemian that makes the

rebel”, the meaning of the 5 first verses in french combined all together.

What does it mean to combine such a verse speaking of freedom? Here we

should remember that we are talking about love, so, naturally a feeling that sort of

aggregates people together. This implies that what it does to the people it also does to

the words: even though you don’t know it is there, love is still there, immanent, linking

everything together.

Then again, we also have Beethoven as the spine. Beethoven was one of the

most free spirited music composers of his time. Not only he expanded Sonata form a lot,

he also was stubborn like no one else. In fact, one could say that he was a free spirit,

free from on constraints and everything…except love. It’s a somewhat known fact that

he was a very, very sad person and he managed to stay alive only because he loved his

music. Love kept Beethoven together in the same way that the first five letters of his

name keep the characteristics of his savior feeling together, i.e. love.

We could also think that he was the “starter” of the romantic period in music and

yet another relation to love can be made. This qualifies him as an initiator of the

movement through which many of the musicians would know life through the ideas of

nationality, individuality, new reasons for marriage… would then know life (connu vite

from the poem) through love – be it love to one’s country, one’s freedom, and or to

one’s beloved other. It was this very movement that started to make us think of the other

beside us as much important as a great cause. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that

it was what made possible the other appear to us as it does nowadays through everyday

obsessive compulsion with affairs and love from one side and meaningful relationships

also full of love to the other side.

Finally, the other two words en( French for on) and n’a (a negation also from

French) are left as much open as Beethoven sonata forms themselves, i.e. it’s on a

negation of the common everyday experience – that negation being the possibility of

creating your own meaning and seeing it in reality - and through it that the openness of

the love which aggregates and makes nowadays life meaning is possible. “He who

divines the secret of my music is delivered from the misery that haunts the world” said

Beethoven. Same goes for those who divines the meaning they give to their world