Schneebett (Snow Bed) is a two-room environment that consists of a wax bed cast in bronze and kept frozen through an elaborate refrigeration system; a large painting made of tar and feathers depicting a snow-covered wooded landscape; tree branches that block the connecting passage between the two rooms; a poem, written directly on the wall; and a chair. On view for the first time from 17 October 2004-1 January 2005, it was the first art exhibition ever presented at the Berliner Philharmonie.

The installation within the Philharmonie allowed concertgoers to sit for a few minutes in the silence of the rooms or be rattled by the compressor sounds, before listening to the musical performance at the concert hall. This point-counterpoint relationship with the music was, perhaps, the conceptual heart of Schneebett. As it might have been for the composer who inspired Martínez Celaya, the music exists as a memory within Schneebett, a memory that is threatened with cancellation and re-consideration by both the silence and the anti-musical mechanism of refrigeration.

The title of the piece is taken from a poem by Paul Celan and is the final iteration of Martínez Celaya’s Beethoven Cycle, a three-part reflection on Beethoven’s death. The first exhibition, which was presented in Aspen, addressed the realization of the immanence of death and the second, which was shown in Paris, focused on reconciling a chasm in our lived experience, what Martínez Celaya called “the gap between the self and the part of the self that waits in the past for our return” (Lecture, American Academy in Berlin, 19 October 2004).

Schneebett addresses the final moments of Beethoven’s life, as the composer lays in his bed in Vienna, far away from Bonn, his childhood home and without what his biographer Maynard Solomon calls, “the fantasies and delusions of a lifetime” which he labored to strip away during his terminal years (Beethoven 1998, 359). Unable to play music, Beethoven’s art exists only as a memory for the composer and has its final purpose (and ultimate test) as a means to face death. Schneebett embodies the question, what can be learned from the death of another?