Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

I’ve never read a biography of Beethoven before. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, it was more that there were just so many other things to read, so I kept forgetting. The thing is, Beethoven is the ultimate tragic story. He had a pretty horrid life, and his experiences hugely informed the music he wrote. I think my favorite biography in the history of biographies is one I recently-ish reviewed on Van Gogh, who likewise lived a pretty tragic life which hugely informed his art. Reading that biography got me thinking about Beethoven, so I looked up a book and let it rip.Now, Jan Swafford writes biographies of musicians (I have another one, set to drop in December, on Mozart and it is amazing). The books, however, are huge. I mean, HUGE. He writes 1000 page explorations of the lives of such individuals as Brahms and Beethoven, Mozart (coming soon) and the like. Swafford is a composer and writer, and I believe (don’t quote me on this) he has also taught music theory. The guy comes to the game with a lot in his arsenal, and it shows. Biographies can be hard, especially when the figures are infamous, because sometimes it feels as though the individual being written about somehow supersedes the author and directs the book from his/her place in history. However, Swafford retained complete control over Beethoven throughout the book, which is no small feat, considering how large the man looms in history."At one point when she had lost a child, Beethoven invited her over, sat down at the piano, and said, “Now we will converse in music.” For more than an hour he improvised for her. “He said everything to me,” Ertmann later told Felix Mendelssohn, “and finally gave me consolation.” It must have been a heartrending scene, Beethoven making music for a bereaved woman who played and understood his work as well as anybody alive. He gave voice to her grief and offered her hope. Here was a microcosm of what all his music does: it captures life in its breadth of sorrow and joy, spoken to and for the whole of humanity. Beneath the paranoid, misanthropic, often unbearable surface, Beethoven was among the most generous of men."I will say that a background in music is not necessary for enjoying this book, but it is helpful. I have played the piano for thirty years, and the French horn for just under that. Music put me through college via scholarships. I’ve played in more symphonies than I can possibly ever even attempt to remember. I know music, and still, some of these deep dives describing Beethoven’s various music could be, at times overwhelming. It does help to listen to the pieces as Swafford describes them, so you can kind of follow via audio what he is detailing in the books, but I anticipate that this might be the part of the book that will either make or break the reader. Now, before you freak out and say “I don’t want to read this” understand that Beethoven was as much a man as a musician, and to understand his life, you really do have to understand his music because that was how he communicated with the world. And yes, you can skim lengthy musical discussions.An example of some of the musical lingo here:"In a long-unfolding melody of various phrasing, without hurry it drifts down from B-flat to D below the staff, then over the next twelve bars slowly wends its way up to B-flat above the staff, then sinks down an octave."Swafford, as I’ve said, holds mastery over his subject. While everyone seems to know at least one thing about Beethoven, Swafford seems to know everything. The book is filled with details, with nuances, with all those things that makes the man feel like less a looming historical figure, and more a human who actually existed in the world. Furthermore, while I do think he lingers a bit long on some of the musical analyzation, Swafford never really gets bogged down by any one part of the story as a whole. He tells a very well-rounded story of his subject, painting him as a sort of misunderstood genius, a man who was chronically out of place, just enough of a step away from the social “norms” to make him feel utterly and completely out of sync most of the time.Perhaps one thing I took away from the book more than almost anything else was how incredibly sad Beethoven’s childhood was. His father, determined to make the next Mozart out of his son, basically drove Beethoven to eat, drink, sleep, and dream about music, forcing him to spend hours at the piano, sometimes in the middle of the night. Punishments were brutal, involving beatings and being locked away. While he had siblings he played with, and friends of a sort, he never really learned how to be a human in the world. Everything he did was focused on music, and so he never really learned how to communicate, how to interact with others. A harsh judge of himself, he imposed that same eye to the rest of the world, often finding that the world fell short of his expectations."Music was the one extraordinary thing in a sea of the disappointing and ordinary. Reared as he was in a relentless discipline, instinctively responsive to music as he was, the boy never truly learned to understand the world outside music. Nobody ever really demanded that of him until, disastrously, near the end of his life. Nor did he ever really understand love. He could perceive the world and other people only through the prism of his own consciousness, judging them in the unforgiving terms he judged himself."I also didn’t know that Beethoven was really one of the very first actual piano players of the world. Up to his day, most everyone who played, played on the harpsichord, and then moved over to the piano as it became more popular. Beethoven, however, started on the piano and stayed there.So much of the music Beethoven created was a reflection of not only his inner turmoil (I’d argue, the man was rarely, if ever, truly happy), and the political upheavals around him. Living in a time of the Enlightenment, Napoleon, and all the political and social changes that ensued, life was not short of such influences from which to base his music off of. While Swafford can go a bit deep in on the music, it was fascinating to read about a lot of these compositions and set them against the backdrop of such tumultuous times, health problems, mental health, and depression. It truly helped me understand what Beethoven was trying to say when he crafted some of his most recognizable, powerful pieces, which helps me appreciate his mastery of the musical language in a way I never truly did before reading this book.Some of the problem with Beethoven is that he’s larger than life, nearly mythologized, and that started happening even when he was alive. Doubtless, that made the man, who had always struggled with being part of the human animal, feel that much more an outsider. I also think it’s likely why I’ve always wanted to read a biography of Beethoven, but never quite got around to it. It’s hard to take someone so large and grand, and make them both human and understood, and yet somehow Swafford managed it, showing not just the musical genius that was Ludwig van Beethoven, but also the man behind the mask, the often tortured, darkly feeling, judgmental, out of sync human who seemed to be somewhat akin to the outsider looking in. And yet, despite all of that, he still managed to retain a generosity of spirit and hope for something greater that was always hinted at in even his darkest pieces.“There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.”This is not a small book. It weighs in at slightly shy of 1000 pages. It’s a beast, but I will honestly tell you, I’d sit down to spend ten minutes reading, and before I realized what happened, half the day would be gone. This biography sucked me in. I lost so much time to it, and I didn’t regret that at all. The only other biography that has managed to captivate me so thoroughly was the one I mentioned at the start of this review, on Van Gogh.I can truthfully say, I will never hear another Beethoven piece the same again. This is, hands down, one of the best biographies I’ve ever read.

I became an admirer of Jan Swafford through reading his biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives. My admiration has increased with this wise and moving new biography, "Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph" (2014). Swafford offers much to think about in understanding Beethoven. For example, he discusses Beethoven's composition of the Ninth Symphony and of how the work spanned the composer's life from youth to age. Swafford writes:"The threads in Beethoven's life gathered. Twenty years before, he anguished in his Heiligenstadt Testament, `Oh Providence - grant me at last but one day of pure joy - it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart ` .... In age we often return to the ideas and inspirations of our youth. In the Ninth Beethoven returned to Schiller's poem that had been a motif of his life since his teens, to the Enlightenment ideal of `life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Rising from liberty, happiness transforms our lives and in turn transforms society."This short passage captures much about Beethoven's life and work. It touches the composer's anguish when he found he was becoming deaf and isolated and alone. Swafford captures the strong influence of the Enlightenment (the German Aufklarung)and on Freemasonry on Beethoven's music from the days of his youth with its emphasis on reason and on the power of art and science to transform life. Swafford shows how Beethoven became fascinated with Schiller in his youth and lived with the poet's work until writing the finale of his Ninth Symphony. In talking about how individuals often "return to the ideas and inspirations" of youth, Swafford reminded me of my own fascination with Beethoven since childhood and of how I continue to return to him over the years - most recently by reading Swafford's book.Swafford observes that even during his lifetime, Beethoven was becoming a mythological, romanticized figure rather than a living human being. His stated aim is to present the facts of Beethoven's life without the myth. Accordingly, the book describes a Beethoven who was a great artist but who did not know how to live in the many aspects of life outside of music. His Beethoven is solipsistic, angry, self-pitying, and petty. He is frequently taken as mad. He falls in love with unattainable women and, to his sorrow, is never able to form a lasting relationship. He quarrels bitterly with most of his patrons and friends. He spends much of his late years in a custody battle over his nephew, Karl, which nearly ruins the boy. Much of this story will be familiar to those who have read about Beethoven. Swafford may exaggerate the extent to which Beethoven has been put on a pedestal in an anti-heroic, skeptical modern age. Swafford's biography includes a great deal of focus on Beethoven's early years in Bonn. In particular, he emphasizes Beethoven's early exposure to the German Aufklarung from his teacher Neefe and from the Freemasonry movement and its offshoots. Swafford shows how this influence stayed with Beethoven.For the most part, Swafford portrays Beethoven as a conservative composer who deepened and expanded musical trends implicit in the works of Haydn and Mozart among others rather than as a revolutionary who overthrew the past. This characterization will surprise some readers. As the book proceeds, Swafford emphasizes the romantic character of Beethoven's music in the latter works. He offers fresh insights into the familiar three-period division of Beethoven's music - the first in which Beethoven was seeking his own path, the second or "new path" dominated by "heroic" music and the search for triumph over adversity in a political or individual way, and the third "poetic" path which became introspective, wandering, and spiritual.Swafford combines his treatment of Beethoven's life with insightful detailed treatments of many of his major works. His discussions include some technical musical analysis but readers without a musical background will still be able to learn a great deal from them. He devotes a lengthy chapter in the middle of the book to an analysis of the "Eroica" Symphony. He offers a lengthy analysis late in the book of the "Missa Solemnis", a difficult work which Swafford finds is a summit of Beethoven's art. Swafford thinks highly of the "Pastoral" Symphony, a work which lovers of Beethoven sometimes downplay. He sees the 32 piano sonatas and 16 string quartets as works written throughout Beethoven's life, each with its own individual character. Swafford also discusses many works of Beethoven that deserve to be better known as well as some of his potboilers such as "Wellington's Victory".Swafford summarizes his view of Beethoven in the discussion of the Ninth Symphony which has been discussed above and in his discussion of the late quartet in C -sharp minor, another summit of Beethoven's achievement. In his earlier heroic period, Swafford writes, Beethoven moved from anguish at the beginning to triumph at the end. In his later works, Beethoven came to realize that anguish and triumph were interrelated throughout life rather than a linear progression with a hero at the end. Swafford writes:"As Beethoven's increasingly hard-won labors transcended the anguish of his life, the triumph of the C-sharp Minor Quartet, its answer to suffering, is the supreme poise and integration of the whole work."This is a long book and many passages invite thinking about and lingering over. As I read, I wanted to pause and rehear music of Beethoven that I have not heard for some time, including the quartets, the Missa Soleminis and its predecessor C major mass, the violin sonatas, cello sonatas, and the string quintet, op. 29. The book also made me want to return to the piano to struggle again with learning some of the piano sonatas. Just as Beethoven's music has an immediacy while looking towards both the past and the future, Swafford's book helped me understand Beethoven as a person to be loved in youth, to be understood better as an adult, and to be inspired by in old age.Robin Friedman

El libro más actualizado de Beethoven, donde narra aspectos desconocidos o muy poco conocidos por la mayoría de los amantes del genio de Bonn. Muy buena narrativa

Extended biography of the greatest composer of all time.

Muito boa a descrição de como era a vida na época, envolvendo fatos históricos tais como as guerras napoleônicas. Por meio da descrição e dos detalhes, é possível ter ideia não só de Beethoven como pessoa mas também do seu método de composição em suas principais obras, deixando de lado a romantização e idealização.

Biografia muy bien documentada que relata tanto datos históricos, cuestiones de salud del personaje, sus estados de ánimo y el autor ubica al lector dentro de la situación sociopolítica de la época con los conceptos filosóficos

Well worth the price. Well bound, paper quality excellent. One of the definitive editions.