Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford Narrated by Michael Prichard

Overview

Jan Swafford's biographies 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 imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and "fate's hammer," his ever-encroaching deafness.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Jeremy Denk

…a personal and loving contribution to the literature…Swafford's voice is genial and conversational, that of a friend who loves to tell you about his fascinations…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.

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/14/2014
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.)

From the Publisher

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice 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 "Impassioned and informed...Swafford’s exuberance is infectious, prompting the reader to revisit works both famous and obscure." –The New Yorker "[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 "An immersive, comprehensive view...The book has a biopic feel...Lively" –The New York Review of Books "This combination of gripping biography and readable analysis of Beethoven’s compositions is a book for all Beethoven enthusiasts, full of insights and memorable vignettes, old and new." –Washington Times "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 a —

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Indeed, readers will want to refer to the book often when they listen to Beethoven. A marvelous achievement." —Ray Olson, Booklist

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-05-27
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 Beethoven’s 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 composer’s scores). Although the music remains prominent here, Beethoven’s life and personality are also downstage. We learn about his contentious relationships with his family—especially with his nephew Karl, whom Beethoven took into his home when the composer’s 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 Beethoven’s enormous talent at the piano, an instrument on which he could endlessly improvise—and 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 Beethoven’s ferocious work ethic and his emergence from the substantial shadows of Haydn and Bach (he failed to acknowledge the influence of the former until Haydn’s death).Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170550890
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/05/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	973,321

Read an Excerpt

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.

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