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More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.
A Christian Science Monitor Top 10 Book of the Month
"Swafford’s craftsmanship shines...The book is two books: a biography and a series of journeys through the music, a travelogue with an excitable professor. Readers will want to have a recording playing so they can match metaphors to sounds. I found myself engaged by his imagery, sometimes delighted and surprised." –Jeremy Denk, New York Times Book Review
"[T]he stately rhythm, carefully etched detailing and oceanic sweep of this ambitious book mirror the complexity and richness of Beethoven's revolutionary Romanticism...surrender to it and it’s easy to be swept away...Swafford comes marvelously equipped to take on the enormousness of Beethoven's life and work – his heights of inspiration, depths of suffering, the roots and range of his masterworks...Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph doesn't drown in its musicology so much as achieve a buoyant balance of technical and human detail." –Matt Damsker, USA TODAY
"Compelling...Despite the wealth of historical detail, this is no dry academic tome, but a biography full of colorful descriptions of the composer and his milieu...Comprehensive, detailed, and highly readable, this is an entertaining biography that should find favor with music lovers and history buffs." –Seattle Times
"Swafford creates the perfect blend of a historical person and musical genius...Monumental...A truly remarkable biography."–Christian Science Monitor
"Swafford’s writing on Beethoven’s music is perceptive and illuminating. But just as impressive is his sympathetic portrait of Beethoven the man. Swafford’s book, which should be placed alongside the excellent biographies by Lewis Lockwood and Maynard Solomon, does not diminish any of the composer’s flaws. Instead, it suggests that these flaws were inconsequential compared with the severity of the composer’s anguish and the achievement of his music." –Washington Post
"Swafford has a knack for bringing in the reader wholly unschooled in the technical vernacular of classical music. That skill is in evidence in this blend of biography and musical assessment. Even if you don't know the difference between a leitmotif and a lighthouse, don't sweat it, for this is, more than anything, a saga of a man at odds with so many things: convention, social mores, himself, women, his family ... If this isn't exactly the Beethoven that Schroeder of 'Peanuts' fame worshiped, it's a more believable characterization, and, more than that, one gets a better sense of how this roiling personality produced works to roil the human soul."–Boston Globe
"A highly rewarding read, with a lightness of touch that makes history come to life." --The Economist
"Magisterial, warm, and engaging...A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity... Jan Swafford is to be saluted." --The Independent
"Swafford traces the life and art of Beethoven in eye-opening, rational detail and gives you a more human, more fascinating portrait of Beethoven the radical evolutionary than even the Beethoven the Romantic of legend...When Swafford writes about Beethoven's raptus–the trance-like state friends remakred upon when he was most lost in his musical world–you feel as if you were there, listening to the improvisations flowing from the virtuoso's fingers...For those who cannot read music, Swafford's published excerpts can look daunting, but with a little work and a good CD collection, anyone can follow Swafford's journeys through Beethoven's journeys. The payoff is more than worth it."–Big Think
"Magnificent...Some of the most enjoyable segments of his book are the spirited and knowledgeable readings of Beethoven’s various compositions. These passages are so passionate that they virtually propel the reader across the room to the CD collection, to play the pieces being so smartly described...A stunning tour de force, a Beethoven biography to shine for a lifetime." –Open Letters Monthly
"Monumental...Engaging and entertaining...Beethoven aficionados and lovers of classical music will want this book, as will readers interested in biography and the artistic milieu of late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe."–Library Journal, starred review
"A thorough, affectionate, and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)...Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic."–Kirkus, starred review
"In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven."–Publishers Weekly, starred review
Ludwig van Beethoven, titan of Romanticism and sublime poet of music, was himself no poem. A misanthrope with a volatile temper and slovenly appearance, he was once mistaken for a tramp and hauled off to spend the night in jail. One of the women who rejected his marriage proposals described him as "ugly and half crazy." When the king of Prussia sent Beethoven a diamond ring in gratitude for a composition, the surly maestro did not write a thank-you note: he went and had the thing appraised. It turned out to be a fake, and had friends not intervened he would have made a dangerous snub and returned it. Beethoven's smothering, jealous affection for his nephew and ward, Karl, whom he raised as a son, led the boy to attempt suicide. Karl told the authorities that he did it "because my uncle harassed me so."
Beethoven "understood people little and liked them less, yet he lived and worked and exhausted himself to exalt humanity," writes Jan Swafford in his exceptional new biography, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. From Karl's tragedy came one of the most exquisite works in the canon, the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Opus 131. Wagner would later call its first movement "the saddest thing ever said in notes." But Beethoven did not merely transmute personal experience into art; he willed art into being, sometimes from the barest elements. Never as facile with melody as his predecessor Mozart or his contemporary Schubert, he turned trifles like an unremarkable phrase or a banal rhythmic motif into masterpieces. The famous "da-da-da-DUM" that opens the Fifth Symphony works this way: the simple motif builds and grows until it reaches gale-force velocity.
Swafford, a professor at the Boston Conservatory and himself a noted composer, helps us understand the nature and reach of Beethoven's genius. Even though he lived during the Age of Revolution — he named his Third Symphony "Eroica" for Napoleon — Beethoven was, according to Swafford, no revolutionary but instead a "radical evolutionary." He respected traditional musical forms but expanded them: "everything more intense, more poignant, more driven and dramatic, more individual, longer and weightier, with heightened contrasts and greater virtuosity." The orchestra required for the Ninth Symphony was twice as large as those customary at the time; the piece itself was twice as long as standard symphonies. The contrasts between movements in the late piano sonatas are like the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.
Anguish and Triumph is itself a challenging work, although not at all in the same way as Beethoven's irascibility. Swafford does not deal in jargon — he is a beautiful writer — but he does explore Beethoven's compositions at length and in detail, illustrating the discussion with extensive musical figures and lingering over concepts like chromaticism and key selection. Readers with some musical background or training will gain the most from his pages. Yet the book is geared toward general readers, and it seems right to ask those who wish to understand one of history's great strivers to push themselves and grapple with his art. Swafford is a reliable guide, dispensing critical judgments with brisk confidence. ("The Third Piano Concerto is audibly in Mozart's orbit and safely in his shadow.") He does not flinch from the many blemishes in his subject's character but nevertheless approaches him with sympathy and understanding.
Life was hard on Beethoven. He was perennially short of money and chronically ill with maladies that included cirrhosis, gastrointestinal distress, and probably lead poisoning. He desperately wanted love but never found it: his "Immortal Beloved," who apparently reciprocated his feelings but could not consummate them, remains anonymous to history. He was going deaf. When he realized that he must face life alone and in silence, Beethoven wrote the "Heilingenstadt Testament," a remarkable document in the nature of an unsent suicide note, vowing to carry on in the name of art. Swafford writes that "to suffer without hope, without believing that suffering has some larger meaning and purpose, requires great courage." Beethoven — never much of a religious believer — "had something near as much courage as a human being could have."
His loss of hearing was the supreme trial of his life. It seems unbearably cruel for a musician to lose the one faculty that is essential for the realization of his art. Compounding the tragedy, Beethoven's hearing disappeared slowly over many years, like a friend walking away over a great expanse. But while deafness devastated him, he came to see it not as a limitation but as another challenge to defy and transcend. As Swafford elegantly writes, "the fact that he could now hear music only in his head is surely what gave some of the late music an inward, ethereal, uncanny aura like nothing else." It's hard not to feel awe at a man who could, without ears, hear masterworks. But Beethoven's real triumph is a matter of humanism rather than art. What should amaze us is not merely his ability to compose in silence but his decision to do so when death beckoned so strongly. As hard as his life was, it was also an ode to joy.
Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer who lives in Evanston, Illinois. His reviews and essays appear in The Nation, the Washington Monthly, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.
Reviewer: Michael O'Donnell
There has always been a steady trickle of Beethoven biographies and always will be, as long as the fascination of the music and the man endures. That bids to be a long time. Like Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and a few other figures in our creative history, Beethoven has long since been a cultural artifact, woven into our worldview and into our mythologies from popular to esoteric.
A few miles from where I write, his is the only name inscribed on a plaque over the proscenium of Boston Symphony Hall, built at the end of the nineteenth century. In our time, a performance of the Ninth Symphony celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Japan, important occasions such as the opening of a sumo arena are marked by a performance of Daiku, the Big Nine. Around the world, the Fifth is seen as the definition of a Classical symphony. When I taught in a conservatory, there were few days when we didn’t hear Beethoven drifting down the hall. My Beethoven seminars were full of young musicians whose professional lives were going to be steadily involved with the composer.
There is, of course, great danger in that kind of ubiquity. To become more of an icon than a man and artist is to be heard less intimately. Unlike others of his status, Beethoven has been relatively immune to the usual historical ebbs and flows of artistic reputations. That has happened partly because in the decades after his death the concert hall evolved into more of a museum of the past than an explorer of the present. That situation too has its dangers. Instrumental music is in many ways a mysterious and abstract art. With Shakespeare and Rembrandt, we can be anchored in the manifest passions in their works, their racy jokes, their immediacy. It is that immediacy that is all too easy to lose when confronting iconic musicians like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.
In the two-century course of Beethoven’s fame, he has inevitably been batted about by biographers and other writers. He was born during the Aufklärung, the German embodiment of the Enlightenment, and came of age during the revolutionary 1780s. Many in his time saw him as a musical revolutionary and connected him to the spirit of the French Revolution. By the time he died in 1827, he was already a romantic myth, and that is what he stayed through the nineteenth century: Beethoven the demigod, a combination of suffering Christ figure and demonic icon. In his person rough, crude, and fractious, in his music everything from crude to transcendent, he became the quintessential Romantic genius in an age that established a cult of genius that lingers on, for well and ill.
Critical reframings and reinterpretings are inevitable, and like everything in the arts they reflect the temper of their times. After the lingering decay of Romantic myths in the twentieth century, writing on Beethoven during the last decades has largely risen from the academy, so it reflects the parade of fashions and shibboleths of that industry. Many present-day books concern ideas about Beethoven rather than Beethoven himself. The assorted theoretical postures of late twentieth-century academe took some heavy shots at him but do not seem to have dislodged him from his unfortunate pedestal, which I believe lodges him too far from us.
I suspect that many people still feel that in some ways the most effective Beethoven biography remains the massive late nineteenth-century one by Alexander Wheelock Thayer. That American writer set out with the goal of assembling every available fact about Beethoven and putting it down as clearly as possible. “I fight for no theories and cherish no prejudices,” Thayer wrote. “[M]y sole point of view is the truth.” In the 1960s, the book was corrected and updated, with a similarly direct agenda, by Elliot Forbes. For me it is within Thayer’s Victorian language that Beethoven casts the strongest shadow as a person, where I catch glimpses of him walking down the street, joking with friends, thumping the table as he composes, tearing into his fish dinner.
Without aspiring to the voluminousness of Thayer, the book you are reading was written in his spirit. Now and then in the course of an artist’s biographical history, it comes time to strip away the decades of accumulated theories and postures and look at the subject as clearly and plainly as possible, without prejudices and preconceptions. That as biographers we all have agendas, both known and unknown to us, does not change the value and necessity of getting back to the human reality of a towering figure. This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth. To that end I have relegated all later commentary to the endnotes. I want the book to stay on the ground, in his time, looking at him as directly as possible as he walks, talks, writes, rages, composes.
We will see that Beethoven was in some ways a hard man. The troubling parts of his personality, the squalor he lived in, his growing paranoia and delusions of persecution, his misanthropy, and later his double-dealings in business will be on display here roughly in the proportion that they were on display in his life. Likewise the plaintive history of his deafness and illness and his failed love affairs. Still, I believe that in the end there was no real meanness in Beethoven. He aspired to be a good, noble, honorable person who served humanity. At times he could be entirely lovable and delightful in his quirks and puns and metaphors and notions, even in his lusty sociopolitical rants. There was something exalted about him that was noted first in his teens and often thereafter. He was utterly sure of himself and his gift, but no less self-critical and without sentimentality concerning his work.
To the degree that I have a conscious agenda, it is this: I am myself a composer, both before and after being a biographer, so this is a composer’s-eye view of a composer, written for the general public. When I look at Beethoven I see a man sitting at a table, playing piano, walking in fields and woods doing what I and a great many others have done: crafting music one note, one phrase, one section at a time. I hear the scratch of a quill pen on lined music paper. I see a work coming into focus in page after tumultuous page of sketches. I see a man in the creative trance all of us work in—but Beethoven’s trance deeper than most, and the results incomparably fine and far-ranging.
In Beethoven I see, in other words, a person leading what is to me the familiar life of musician and composer, and so he will be viewed here. Like many composers of his time and later, he cobbled together a living from this and that, and he was deeply involved in the skills and traditions of his trade. The main difference is how thoroughly he mastered those skills, on the foundation of a gigantic inborn talent. In the course of my work I came to realize that Beethoven was in every respect a consummate musician, whether he was writing notes, playing them, or selling them. The often shocking incompetence of the rest of his life was familiar to history, to his friends, and to himself. That too was the incompetence of a man, not a myth.
Overview
Jan Swafford’s biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world’s most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and ...