Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives) - Hardcover

Morris, Edmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060759747 ISBN 13: 9780060759742

Publisher: Harper Collins, 2005

Synopsis

“Brilliant....This book is a perfect marriage—or should one say, duet—of subject and author, every word as masterly as the notes of the artist it illuminates.” — Christopher Buckley, Forbes

“This is not just criticism but poetry in itself, with the additional—and inestimable—merit of being true.” — Washington Post Book World

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Dutch) is one of America’s most distinguished biographers, known for his rich, compulsively readable prose style. His biography of Beethoven, one of the most admired composers in the history of music, is above all a study of genius in action, of one of the few giants of Western culture. Beethoven is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins’ “Eminent Lives” series of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston.

Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

About the Author:

Edmund Morris is the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, and Theodore Rex (Los Angeles Times Book Prize). A pianist and private scholar of music, he has been studying Beethoven for a half century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Collins
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060759747
• ISBN 13: 9780060759742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256