Publishers Weekly
03/22/2021
Balancing a historian’s fidelity to archives and a musician’s passion for composition, Padel (Alibi) offers a lavish poetic biography of Beethoven from his birth in 1770 to his death in 1827. The psychological and musical effects of the composer’s deafness are sensitively rendered: “The almost-nothing bone,/ that little house of hearing... the new/ shocked calm of Is it true. Is this/ what it sounds like, going deaf?” Drawing on letters, diaries, and the handmade “Conversation Books” (in which those Beethoven encountered wrote notes to him once he lost his hearing), Padel tracks “the domestic minutiae against which his late style—introspective, cosmic, radical—evolved.” The tumultuous inventiveness of his late style (“havoc on the brink, a jackhammer shattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow”) emerges in the contexts of Napoleon’s violent rise to power and Beethoven’s own illnesses, lost loves, and legal battle with his sister-in-law (whom he called the Queen of the Night) over custody of his late brother’s son, Karl. Padel grows increasingly intimate with her subject, often addressing him directly, and even attempting to intervene in his self-destructive spiral, “trying to cancel/ the mathematics of strain.” Aficionados of classical music may draw inspiration from this ambitiously conceived and realized reconsideration of Beethoven’s genius. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read . . . [The] poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble . . . Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
“With a conversational intimacy, much like the composer’s chamber works, it is the orchestration of one life through the prism of another, structured around Padel’s expansive empathy. Padel’s light touch recharges the reader’s perception of the unfolding drama of the composer’s life.” –Los Angeles Review of Books
“As fine a distillation of Beethoven’s biography as can be imagined: beautifully written, factual but elegant, touching, and funny too . . . Padel also includes a list of selected musical works, and it could serve perfectly for anyone wanting to listen to Beethoven’s most enduring pieces and to encounter, as she puts it in a poem, ‘the unquenchable spirit / that powers every note he [wrote].’” —Bruce Whiteman, The Hudson Review
“Two lives drawn beneath the lens, the composer’s and her own, interacting in ways that can be bold and, finally, breathtaking. On the Eroica Padel is spectacular. The composer is ‘fire-dust, gold-flight / winching upwards into pure light’ as he drives ‘forward into a new-world dawn / thrilling with dissonance, calling up wild-steel angels.’” –Paul Griffiths, Times Literary Supplement
“Profound reflections on Beethoven’s life and music.” —Catholic New York
“Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection, a tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music” –Tatler (Best Books of 2020)
“Balancing a historian’s fidelity to archives and a musician’s passion for composition, Padel offers a lavish poetic biography of Beethoven . . . Aficionados of classical music may draw inspiration from this ambitiously conceived and realized reconsideration of Beethoven’s genius.” —Publishers Weekly
“How to uncover from biographical details the mystery that is music? With precision,
heart-breaking beauty and lyric insight, Ruth Padel performs a miracle: Beethoven comes alive before us, the son of a drunk, who became a genius, and lost everything,
and found his way back to the center. And here we are, following Padel's own genius for composing the music of a story via lyrical means. You will find your heart shored up
/ by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes, she writes. Indeed.” —Ilya Kaminsky,
author of Deaf Republic
“Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection from Ruth
Padel . . . A tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music, and most of all the profound ways it affects listeners and performers.” —Francesca Carington, Tatler
“What a wonderful and unusual idea. Ruth Padel writes with true passion; her love for,
and understanding of, the man and his music shine through each poem.” —Steven
Isserlis, cellist
“Beethoven Variations is absolutely wonderful! Steeped in the music, and in aspects of his life we maybe never think about—a fascinating summation of Beethoven!” —Sean Rafferty, In Tune, Radio 3
“Beethoven’s music encompasses the entire blinding spectrum of human thought and emotion, from violent to ethereal, from chaos to sublimity. Ruth Padel’s poems encompass that uncontainable spirit to an astounding degree, and preserve the primal shock of our first hearing.” —Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise, music critic of The New Yorker
Library Journal
09/01/2020
As her subtitle suggests, poet/scholar Padel focuses less on Beethoven's grandly thunderous music than on the experiences and psyche of Beethoven himself, much as she did with Darwin: A Life in Poems. (Interestingly, she is a descendant of Darwin, and her great-grandfather studied with one of Beethoven's pupils.) Padel opens with Beethoven's unpropitious upbringing, as he "writes concertos/ pitching the wonders of modulation/ against his father's blows"; later, savvy Mozart is indifferent to the young man's playing until he improvises: "Watch out for this boy. He'll give the world/ something to talk about." The writing deepens with the story, as Beethoven's rise to heroic stature intensifies his world-wariness ("always that splinter of ice in the heart/ protecting the work, and the safety of not/ being loved") and brings the tragedy of hearing loss ("If you can't hear what you're doing/ … where does the newness go?"). Significantly, Padel weaves in her experiences of playing Beethoven with her family, a gracious reminder that his music keeps ringing through our lives. VERDICT A solidly appealing work for fans of poetry, classical music, and biography.
