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I had a hard time trying to understand why Beethoven wrote the second movement of his Piano Trio No.5 the way he did. 

Though it was customary for the second movement to be slow, the beats in this one were insufferably slow. The melody was neither beautiful nor catchy. The whole movement was the epitome of “stuck in limbo”.  Some said Beethoven had in mind the ghost in Hamlet when writing this movement; hence, the nickname “Geistertrio”. At this, I shrugged an unsatisfactory “sure”: the Shakespearean ghosts were vocal and intentional, and this one was neither. 

I had the habit of matching concrete imagery to the music I played. When I was younger, passages in Paganini Concerto No. 1 were a girl with a floral dress dancing under the sun; when older, the opening lines of Dvorak Violin Concerto described Antigone burying her brothers with heroic faith in divine justice. I matched each frame with each note and turned music into moving pictures with story arcs and plot twists, co-directed by me and the composers.

But this time, trying to learn to play this bizarre movement of Beethoven, I saw no moving pictures. The elusive subject shuffled in slow beats and did not go anywhere. I marked down words such as “a ray of sunshine”, “gloomy weather”, and “determined attitude” on the music sheets as pointers, but these words seemed flat, imprecise, and obsolete. I felt lost.

Frustrated, I put the recording by Beaux Arts on loop. Listening to the motion of beats and chords with their everchanging and exquisite colors, I felt something, wanted to say something, but failed. 

Humanity has been playing with the inarticulate, dabbling with “forms”, the eternal, and the divine. Sitting in Dr. Riley’s philosophy class, I vaguely understood why Kant’s locking away prior knowledge and Wittgenstein’s sentiment of keeping silent did not stop humanity’s attempts to articulate the inarticulate. Contemplating Aquinas’ view on God’s nature did not make me understand infinity- I stared at it like a sailor at a familiar evening star, marveled, and felt not as alone while drifting in my finitude. I attempted to articulate the inarticulate not to only ascertain. It also felt natural. 

I paused the recording and picked up my violin…

On stage, there were no words written on my score. My trio exchanged glances and synchronized our breathing. In one bow, the cello and the violin drew two unisons in largo, ending with a taciturn eighth note. The piano then hummed a pensive tune, with heartbeats pronounced by the left hand. So it went.

In a tacit agreement, we carefully rendered each note in ways we haven’t yet given meaning to, and let the music give its own meaning. There was hope, longing, sorrow, and acceptance, with the questions of “for what?”, “of whom?”, “why?”, and “how?” left unanswered. The concrete images were replaced by the commonality of human experiences, in which the audience and the performer can partake in an act of surrender. Then, the sorrow and hope being presented were not just Beethoven’s, or the performer’s, or the audience’s, but the inarticulate sorrow of humanity. 

People stood up and applauded. “With shabby equipment always deteriorating/ In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,/ Undisciplined squads of emotion,” our trio walked out of the stage. Then, why Beethoven wrote the second movement of his Piano Trio No.5 the way he did seemed like a superfluous question.A musician grapples with the perplexing second movement of Beethoven's Piano Trio No.5, struggling to find meaning or imagery in its slow, liminal melody.