Week 14: The Spirit Dance of Beethoven
One pianist's journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.
Tall guy, curly hair making him taller, leverages his cello case through the Banff Centre cafeteria. Sets it down near a big round table full of music and dance students, sheds his roomy cotton jacket, drapes himself around a chair, amps up the wattage of his grin. Felix. He’s a part of everyone’s mental landscape here, but it’s not for weeks, not until after I hear his enraptured, engrossed, virtuosic playing, that I find myself deep in conversation with him one day. My memory doesn’t hold the time and place of that exchange, just the animation of his face and voice. Wurman, I know by now, is his family name, Felix Wurman. He didn’t go to school growing up! His parents let him not go to school. My voice fills with envy and inspiration. How did that go, I try to find out. His voice in turn fills with enthusiasm as he tells me about a geodesic dome he has built, called DOMUS, and how he became part of a band of musicians who took it across the countryside playing chamber music concerts in it.
I am from Prince Edward Island, where draft-dodgers and back-to-the-landers engaged in similar projects while I was growing up, so I get Felix immediately. I have participated in some of them myself, liking doing free improv in an art gallery with a dancer and flutist, they their 20s, me when still an adolescent.
Felix and I were busy music students, and that exchange went no further than an hour of mutual recognition. He left for the States somewhere, I for other projects. Five years later, I was in Montréal, working as a freelance musician, when I was hired to travel with Nicholas Minn and Katia Breton, principal dancers of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, to a Chicago dance gala. There, we would perform a number from James Kudelka’s choreography of the Brahms piano concerto No. 2, together with the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra.
Wearing headphones pumping out the Brahms, I walked into the rehearsal hall through the musicians warming up, and sat down to an old nine-foot-Steinway, its lid removed for the concerto. Looking across the piano, there was the unexpected sight of Felix, sitting in the principal cello chair. At the break, we greeted each other with the old familiar camaraderie, and he invited me over to the loft apartment he shared with his partner. Later, his artist friends and I partied on the rooftop of the place, overlooking Chicago. Again, Felix and I talked of ideas. Again, I felt his poetic presence with others, like a spirit dance.
Years later, I was devastated to learn of the passing of Felix Wurman due to cancer. True to his nature, one of his enduring legacies was an idea: “The Church of Beethoven”.
Felix was the son of an Austrian Jew. The experience of the Holocaust apparently caused his family to find meaning in centring art in Felix’s life — even if that meant such prosaic activities as going to school falling by the wayside. Felix studied with great cellists, including Jacqueline de Pré. After his famed tours with the DOMUS ensemble and its geodesic dome, which seated an audience of 200, he took up his orchestra position in Chicago, but didn’t rest on his laurels. In an abandoned gas station, he started what he dubbed The Church of Beethoven, a regular Sunday morning hour of music followed by a social time with refreshments. Meaning no disrespect to the term “church” in the Christian religion, he sought to provide in music, rather than in verbal preaching, a communal contemplation of the divine that would transcend religious dogma. Each of these hours included two minutes of silence, as in a Quaker meeting. The idea took hold with many, and today there are still two “Church of Beethoven” series operating, one in Illinois and the other in Colorado.
As 2024 begins, concert presentation is top of mind for me. I’m planning for 2024-25, also envisioning my five remaining Beethoven house concerts to take place between now and August. I honour all those who, like Felix, will spend hours of their precious energy this year to create collective spaces and venues for music and art. Let me know if you have ideas for collaboration!