Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces

"This was to be the year of wall-to-wall Beethoven. One of the last things I went to a couple of days before lockdown arrived was a performance of Fidelio at the Royal Opera House. I suppose it was ironic that this great opera about freedom and liberty should be the last thing a couple of days before we were all effectively imprisoned. One of the things that I find quite strange about classical music is that people are very scared of it. It seems to frighten people in a way that almost no other art form does. I find this baffling, as someone who’s never had any formal education in classical music. I’ve never understood why it intimidates people in the way it does, but it does. It’s a great shame that a lot of the opportunities to think about Beethoven have been lost over the last nine months of this year as a result of the virus. There’s been Donald Macleod’s excellent series on Radio Three about his life. But I think people want a place to begin to understand his vast output. Laura Tunbridge has written this relatively short book. There’s a lot of learning in it, but it’s light. It sets nine works by Beethoven within their historical and cultural context. Some of them are very well known, including Fidelio on the theme of liberty, and some of them are not. “You don’t need any musical knowledge to enjoy this book. It’s a very interesting account of a great artist” She begins with a look at a work that’s not played very often, his Septet, which is an early work from about 1800, rarely performed. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it performed, but it was one of the most popular works of his lifetime. That’s because the way in which classical music was performed and the kind of events at which it was performed were very different to what we expect now. She’s very good at looking at how audiences have changed and how patronage has changed. Beethoven was really the first of the great composers who made a living through his work. He does get aristocratic patrons, but he’s not, in the end, dependent upon them. There’s a fee-paying public out there, an emerging bourgeoisie that wants to pay for his music. She looks at his relationship with chamber music, which tends to be on a smaller scale and at his relationship with people who would have played his violin sonatas and string quartets. She looks at his relationship with Napoleon, who completely bestrides this period. He is like the Colossus, above everything. One minute he’s Beethoven’s great revolutionary hero and then, when he causes appalling suffering in Austria—Beethoven was living in Vienna—and in his native Rhineland, Beethoven turns against him. Eroica , the great groundbreaking symphony, having originally been dedicated to Napoleon, is rededicated to ‘a great man’. It may have been Beethoven talking about himself. She talks about his love life—he’s one of the first architects of German Lieder, the song tradition. She talks about concepts of liberty, she talks about his religious views through his later choral masterpiece, the Missa Solemnis . And, of course, she talks about his deafness. I didn’t realise this, but the Heiligenstadt Testament only became public after his death. It is a great confessional letter prompted by his deafness, in which he laments losing the only sense that actually matters to him. He comes close to suicide but then, through some sheer force of will, he overcomes this. He becomes insular, so his very greatest masterpieces, like the late string quartets and the late piano sonatas, become these incredible internal works, that he never hears. They’re only in his head. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s the most monumental tragedy and then the idea of him as this irascible, difficult, semi-alcoholic figure suddenly becomes something else after his death. He becomes heroic, anticipating Freudian ideas of the individual and self. He becomes a more modern figure. It was only the testament, made public after his death, that made people realise that these great works were born of this great suffering. And he becomes this Romantic archetype of the artist as hero. Tunbridge covers all this extraordinarily well. Absolutely. And people who aren’t musicologists shouldn’t worry. It’s not a book mired in technicalities. She talks about it for the layperson. You don’t need any musical knowledge to enjoy this book. It’s a very interesting account of a great artist."