Beethoven, Ol' Possum, & me

(p.s. turn the volume control way down before you play this!)

Followers of this blog might have learned how much I adore Beethoven's late String Quartet in A minor (Opus 132). It has turned up here & there in my poetry... never fails to move me. So I was amazed to discover, just this evening (in a NY Times article about a performance at Lincoln Ctr last night), that this work meant a great deal also to TS Eliot; some consider it a major influence on his Four Quartets. (The concert was a dual reading/performance of both works. Wish I could have been there!)

Anyway, this got me so excited I went & pounded out an improvised bing-bong Henry version (or massacre) of a couple themes in Op. 132... please forgive the Russian-bell effect...