Beethoven

Starred review from July 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.”

Starred review from June 15, 2014
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.

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March 15, 2014
Winner of the PEN/Winship Award and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Swafford's "Ives" is a wonder of music biography; the author, who teaches at Boston Conservatory, re-created the very sounds surrounding Ives in childhood to help us understand his daring musicianship. Here, Swafford offers a study of Beethoven, ten years in the making, that investigates the ideas tumbling through the air in Enlightenment-era Bonn so that we can see how Beethoven and his music were shaped. With a 25,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
There is such an abundance of personal documentation of Beethovenletters, other papers, press notices and reviews, acquaintances' memoirsthat, while eschewing musical analysis, John Suchet was able to write an excellent 400-page biography without too much speculation. There is such an abundance that Swafford, incorporating lengthy but not highly technical discussions of the most important compositions, produces a 1,000-plus-page life without exhaustingindeed, further piquinginterest in the most consequential musician who ever lived. For readers of both Suchet and Swafford will find many nonmusical details in the latter's account that Suchet didn't mention. Also, the two biographies differ in emphases; for instance, Suchet stresses that Beethoven's own bad habits contributed to his physical and mental anguish, whereas Swafford fingers coincidental factors, such as lead poisoning and injurious medicines, for the composer's virtually lifelong indigestion, nausea, diarrhea, and other internal complaints. But Swafford, whose Charles Ives (1996) and Johannes Brahms (1997) rule the roost on their respective subjects, so deftly intertwines biography and musical explication that anyone capable of matching a motif in musical annotation and a cording of it will revel in his Beethoven. Indeed, such readers will want to refer to the book often when they listen to Beethoven. A marvelous achievement.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2014

Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life with Music) has produced a monumental biography of the most iconic composer in the Western classical tradition. Written in an engaging and entertaining style, the book includes much illuminating context, such as the effect on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) of late 18th-century Aufklarung (Enlightenment). The identity of the "immortal beloved," the often difficult interactions with patrons and friends, and the fraught relationships with nephew Karl and his mother Johanna are presented in an evenhanded manner; the author is neither in awe of a romanticized "Beethoven myth" nor overly revisionist. The book includes music analysis and examples, devoting more than 25 pages to Missa solemnis (solemn mass). The nearly 100 pages of notes include much detailed discussion of Beethoven's life and music that add greatly to the work's quality. While there is no dearth of titles on Beethoven (such as Maynard Solomon's well-known Beethoven), Swafford's volume promises to become a standard biography on the composer, taking its place beside Alexander Wheelock Thayer's classic Life of Beethoven. VERDICT Beethoven aficionados and lovers of classical music will want this book, as will readers interested in biography and the artistic milieu of late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe.--Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., Kingsville

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.