The Beethoven CD that wasn’t there
This story has a happy ending, but it has a sad beginning: I lost my Beethoven CD.
I originally bought it a few years ago after seeing The Man Who Wasn’t There — a wonderfully sad film, with a wonderful tune that kept running through it which I wanted to put on repeat. But while the soundtrack was mostly Beethoven, but I didn’t want to spend £15 on a CD of snippets of incidental music. So instead I bought a Beethoven CD which contained a good selection of the music on the soundtrack, in full, and so would probably carry the music selected for the film’s theme.
Naturally, I misjudged. It turns out the film’s theme was composed specially for the Coen brothers by their long-time composer Carter Burwell. Also, the theme is actually only two and half minutes long (even though it seems to last much longer, as it comes and goes throughout the film) and only available on soundtrack CDs with snippets of other incidental music.
But still, the Beethoven CD was terrific, and then a couple of months ago it was gone. Hadn’t touched it for ages, but when I went to put it on it wasn’t where I expected it to be. I looked all over for it. Then I asked Anna, and we looked all over her place for it, even though we knew she hadn’t borrowed it. And then last week I watched the film again, and it turns out it isn’t full of Carter Burwell music, it’s full of Beethoven, and I missed my CD even more. So I resigned myself to a life without Beethoven, at least until I went out and bought a replacement.
Anyway, suddenly — just now, out of the blue — I found it again. It was in my CD collection. Under B.
There’s probably a moral in here somewhere, but I’m not going to search for it, because it probably doesn’t make me look very good.
