Beethoven: Anguish And Triumph

"A precocious kid leaves his alcoholic father to find fame in the big city. He succeeds. But as his star rises his body falls, leaving him weak, deaf and suicidal. And still he triumphs. No, it’s not an A&E miniseries; it’s Jan Swafford’s extraordinary story of Ludwig van Beethoven. The biography, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, is a clear-eyed view of the famed composer’s improbable life, the social and political context that framed it, and, of course, his amazing music. In the end, the book transcends the dark-skinned kid from Bonn, Germany, and sings of the resilient human spirit."

"Well, firstly, it is massive. You could use it as a draft excluder. It’s more than 1,000 pages. It’s huge. He writes about the life, but he also writes about the music. I love this book because he writes so interestingly on the music. You will need a bit of technical know-how to get around it, but he writes very engagingly as well. It’s not difficult reading—it’s just that you sometimes need to chew it over to really appreciate what he’s saying. “They young musicians who came into his life in his last few years were very devoted to him and very concerned about him. He was kind to them and they were devoted in return. They were really good friends to him” There’s a huge chapter, for instance, on the ‘Eroica Symphony’ and the way that Beethoven’s whole approach to how he writes the music is transforming, and how this ties in with the development of Romanticism and the figure of Napoleon as a self-made hero who is continually remaking himself, how Beethoven is continually re-making the music in the same way. It’s full of things like that and I find it very vivid and very fresh. Swafford is a professor and writes professorially, but very well. This is very, very good writing. Yes, it is, but you you’ll need a bit of technical knowledge to get through it. If you want something that is going to keep you busy for a very long time and that is more detailed and musicological than the John Suchet book, I would say this is a good one. Yes, very much so. It gives you a real depth of context for the whole thing."