Beethoven Anguish and triumph : a biography

Review by Choice Review

Swafford (Boston Conservatory) drops no biographical bombshells in this ambitious production, which is just a tad shorter than the indispensable Thayer's Life of Beethoven (CH Sep'64)-written by Alexander Thayer in German, English edition rev. and ed. by Elliot Forbes (1964)-and nearly half again as long as Swafford's Johannes Brahms: A Biography (1997). Like the Brahms book, the present volume covers life plus music; Swafford's reflections on various Beethoven works and the currents and notions exposed in those works are interspersed with the biographical material. The tone is resolutely nonacademic, although some of the (excellent, convincing) musical talk will lie beyond the reach of readers without grounding in music theory. The research behind the text appears to be copious, albeit mostly from English-language sources. Though Swafford is not afraid to speculate on some critical issues, he stops well short of Solomon-style psychoanalysis-cf. Maynard Solomon's Beethoven (CH, Jan'99, 36-2676). Readers looking for more compact coverage will be content with Lewis Lockwood's fine Beethoven: The Music and the Life (CH, May'03, 40-5129). Nonetheless, every institution with a music collection should have Swafford's volume. Despite an idiosyncratic index, this is the big Beethoven book of our time and not to be missed. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Bruce J. Murray, Miami University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

IN THE SHOW "30 Rock," there was a running joke about tragedy. A character appears, reveals her tearful past, then brightly adds, "They made a Lifetime movie about me" - the credential of an absurdly pathetic story with a redemptive payoff. Of all the great composers' lives, Ludwig van Beethoven's seems the most made for Lifetime. The curtain opens on a difficult childhood: an abusive alcoholic father, a boy genius mocked for his dark skin. He survives, makes his way to Vienna for fame and fortune - only to be stricken by (gasp) deafness. In addition, we have impossible passions for mysterious beloveds, side themes of class struggle, freedom, individuality, the backdrop of Napoleonic conquest and a score (what a score!) surging with alternating storminess and tenderness. Beethoven's story is almost too good to be true, and almost too bad to be television. Jan Swafford's new biography of Beethoven, a personal and loving contribution to the literature, even has a Life-timeish subtitle: "Anguish and Triumph." The triumph, of course, is the triumph of will through artistic creation; the anguish is copious failures of the body: "deafness, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, a variety of infections, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice and at the end chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver." When Beethoven's body wasn't betraying him, he was destroying himself, sabotaging his most important relationships, succumbing to destructive obsessions. Between these willful and fateful destructions, he squeezed out the miracle of his music. (Lazy readers, I just saved you 1,077 pages; you're welcome.) Swafford's voice is genial and conversational, that of a friend who loves to tell you about his fascinations: the foibles of court life, logistical problems of the musician. He supplies a generous chapter on the German Enlightenment, connecting threads of the 1770s and '80s, opposing currents of rationalism and expressive release: Schiller, Kant, Goethe, the American Revolution. He nods toward Beethoven's unhappy childhood, but emphasizes "the golden age of old Bonn's intellectual and artistic life" and "the town's endless talk of philosophy, science, music, politics, literature." The narrative acquires momentum when Beethoven reaches his darkest hour (Heiligenstadt, 1802). In one of the best chapters, Swafford considers the tune of the last movement of the Third Symphony, an englische, a dance connected to democratic ideals (according to Schiller, it was "the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the assertion of one's own freedom and regard for the freedom of others"), then heads off to the wider European stage to watch a dubious moment in democracy: Napoleon being proclaimed first consul for life. Swafford's craftsmanship shines in the meeting of these contrapuntal lines: Beethoven's personal heroism against illness and adversity, Napoleon's world-conquering heroism, both seemingly servants of broader freedoms. This 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, often bewildered, and occasionally furious. The descriptions include the clinical, but trend Romantic: A climax of the "Waldstein" Sonata is like "a gust of wind that shocks the listener into a sense of the joyous effervescence of life." There is silliness: The last movement of a sonata "begins with a couple of can't-get-started stutters followed by sort of a sneeze." When Swafford described the middle movement of the "Appassionata" as "somber," I threw the book on the floor, Beethoven-style. The piece is the opposite of gloomy; its gesture, its reason for being, is to reach up in a gradual arc toward elation. Swafford repeatedly points out the way Beethoven cunningly derived pieces from a single, simple idea. This is not news - but it's worth meditating on. Beethoven preferred musical ideas of almost unusable simplicity, things that seem pre-musical, or ur-musical, like chords, or scales - not music, but the stuff music is made of. Imagine a building constructed of blueprints, or a novel based on the word "the." To demonstrate this, Swafford focuses on a magical aha moment: Beethoven has just figured out how he'll begin the Fifth Symphony, with a motif we know all too well. "Then something struck him," Swafford says. "He jotted down an idea in G major . . . the melodic line, virtually intact, of the opening piano soliloquy of the Fourth Piano Concerto." This other melody is built on the same rhythmic DNA, the same da-da-da-dum, but in place of agitation, you have the most gorgeous benediction, a melody of unbelievable tenderness. There they are, on facing pages: two of the greatest musical works of all time, born from the same piece of Morse code, a single unit of rhythm that was turned in Beethoven's mind (at the moment of creation!) to utterly opposing ends. In Mozart and Haydn, these same units, these triads and scales, are lurking behind the surface; but generally there is a film or veil concealing the girders from view. In Mozart, the ends of phraselets are often decorated with little dissonances, elegant deflections; in Haydn, the same role is often played by witty cross-accents, or unusual figurations. But you can notice, more and more, in later Beethoven - for example the slow movement of the last violin sonata, or of the "Archduke" Trio, both of which should be on any essential listening list - the way he purges his music of these artifacts of elegance, and prefers having harmonies on the main beats without decoration or deflection. THERE IS A DANGER in relying on rudimentary materials. They can be felt as an emptiness, a skeleton, a mere outline - Beethoven sometimes uses this expressive effect, calling our attention to the flesh that isn't there. But more often they are felt as a strength, a frame, something to hold on to. By the late years, an uncanny duality develops: On the one hand, the sense that Beethoven might do anything, harmonically, that he would venture to the far ends of the musical earth; on the other, always there, rock-solid, the triads, the tonic and the dominant, the familiar landmarks of classical harmony. The sense of the world dissolving into the modern, the ground disappearing beneath your feet, and yet . . . the ground reassuringly remains. Beethoven somehow gets to have it both ways - absolute liberty and total control. I found myself aching to replace the "Triumph" in Swafford's subtitle with "Consolation." Of course we love Beethoven's movements of triumph: the C major fanfares that conclude the Fifth Symphony, the lust for life in the dances of the Seventh Symphony, the "Ode to Joy." They are a crucial part of his persona, but not the center. As Swafford enumerates the endless romantic unfulfillments, the fevers and headaches and close shaves with death, you realize how much Beethoven needed the strength and consolation that he poured into his music. The pianist Leon Fleisher observed that Schubert's consolations always come too late; his beautiful moments have the sense of happening in the past. Generally, Romantic consolations tend to be poisoned by nostalgia and regret. By the modern era, consolation is mostly off the table. But Beethoven's consolations seem to be in the now. They are always on time - maybe not for him, but for us. When Beethoven's body wasn't betraying him, he was destroying himself. JEREMY DENK is a concert pianist; he writes the blog Think Denk.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 27, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* There is such an abundance of personal documentation of Beethoven letters, other papers, press notices and reviews, acquaintances' memoirs that, while eschewing musical analysis, John Suchet was able to write an excellent 400-page biography without too much speculation. There is such an abundance that Swafford, incorporating lengthy but not highly technical discussions of the most important compositions, produces a 1,000-plus-page life without exhausting indeed, further piquing ­interest in the most consequential musician who ever lived. For readers of both Suchet and Swafford will find many nonmusical details in the latter's account that Suchet didn't mention. Also, the two biographies differ in emphases; for instance, Suchet stresses that Beethoven's own bad habits contributed to his physical and mental anguish, whereas Swafford fingers coincidental factors, such as lead poisoning and injurious medicines, for the composer's virtually lifelong indigestion, nausea, diarrhea, and other internal complaints. But Swafford, whose Charles Ives (1996) and Johannes Brahms (1997) rule the roost on their respective subjects, so deftly intertwines biography and musical explication that anyone capable of matching a motif in musical annotation and a cording of it will revel in his Beethoven. Indeed, such readers will want to refer to the book often when they listen to Beethoven. A marvelous achievement.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven, animating the composer's immersion in music and his tenacious grip on his ideas related to music's ability to deepen the world's beauty, tragedy, and comedy. Drawing on never-before-seen sources, Swafford chronicles year-by-year Beethoven's life and music from his birth and childhood in Bonn, his earliest compositions at age 12 to his deafness at age 27; his struggles to distinguish himself from his teachers and models, such as Haydn; and his composition of the great Ninth Symphony. By the time he was 20, Swafford points out, Beethoven was a "splendid young talent flexing his creative muscles, showing off a precocious knowledge of harmony, the orchestra, and operatic-style expressiveness." Swafford wonderfully describes Beethoven's going deaf: "For Beethoven, this was a decay from within: a slow death, the mind watching it, helpless before the grinding of fate. Fate would become an abiding theme for him, its import always hostile." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Starred Review. Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life with Music) has produced a monumental biography of the most iconic composer in the Western classical tradition. Written in an engaging and entertaining style, the book includes much illuminating context, such as the effect on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) of late 18th-century Aufklarung (Enlightenment). The identity of the "immortal beloved," the often difficult interactions with patrons and friends, and the fraught relationships with nephew Karl and his mother Johanna are presented in an evenhanded manner; the author is neither in awe of a romanticized "Beethoven myth" nor overly revisionist. The book includes music analysis and examples, devoting more than 25 pages to Missa solemnis (solemn mass). The nearly 100 pages of notes include much detailed discussion of Beethoven's life and music that add greatly to the work's quality. While there is no dearth of titles on Beethoven (such as Maynard Solomon's well-known Beethoven), Swafford's volume promises to become a standard biography on the composer, taking its place beside Alexander Wheelock Thayer's classic Life of Beethoven. VERDICT 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. Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., Kingsville (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A thorough, affectionate and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).Swafford (Music History, Theory and Composition, Boston Conservatory;Johannes Brahms: A Biography, 1997, etc.) brings a lifetime of study and passion to this remarkable work. Rich in biographical detail, the volume contains revealing excerpts from many of Beethovens letters and from the written observations of his visitors and family; it also contains detailed analyses of many of his most notable works, analyses that will no doubt puzzle readers unversed in music theory and/or unable to read music (Swafford includes numerous examples from the composers scores). Although the music remains prominent here, Beethovens life and personality are also downstage. We learn about his contentious relationships with his familyespecially with his nephew Karl, whom Beethoven took into his home when the composers brother Carl died. Rigorous and unyielding, Beethoven had a difficult time with the young man, who eventually learned to play his uncle artfully. We also see Beethovens enormous talent at the piano, an instrument on which he could endlessly improviseand an instrument he had to gradually surrender as his hearing worsened. We see the composer, too, as a homely man (his face scarred), often slovenly in his appearance and personal habits, an extremely proud man who considered himself the equal of all, a man who had a horrible time managing money and who never did find a woman who would accept him. (He invariably chose far younger women or women above his social standing.) Swafford highlights Beethovens ferocious work ethic and his emergence from the substantial shadows of Haydn and Bach (he failed to acknowledge the influence of the former until Haydns death).Due to the authors unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction 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. Excerpted from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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