Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives) - Softcover

Morris, Edmund

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060759755 ISBN 13: 9780060759759

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. A lifelong devotee, Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence—a gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

About this title

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.

From The Washington Post:

When he isn't fashioning gigantic biographies of American presidents, Edmund Morris has often written about music, including a brief but distinguished tenure as a reviewer for this newspaper. Morris has the ability to impart genuine aesthetic and technical information to his audience without devolving into jargon; he recognizes that while the effect music has on us may be mysterious, any description of its processes shouldn't be.

Moreover, as a historian, Morris knows how to set a scene, tell a story, reconstruct a world. At 240 pages, his Beethoven is succinct but sufficient -- a deft, deeply satisfying mid-length compromise between the brilliant popular profile in Harold C. Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers and the exhaustive scholarly biography by Maynard Solomon.

Morris has chosen an apt subtitle, for Beethoven is indeed as close to a "universal composer" as our culture has yet produced -- a man who has occupied the central position in Western classical music for more than 150 years. There is hardly an orchestra on the planet that fails to include at least one of his nine symphonies in its annual schedule; the leading ensembles run through a complete cycle every few years. Conservatory applicants are generally permitted to choose their own audition programs nowadays, but all aspiring piano students are still expected to have at least one of Beethoven's 32 sonatas ready for performance. And then there are the concertos, the cello and violin sonatas, the 15 string quartets, masses, oratorios, songs and a single opera, "Fidelio."

Like most composers, Beethoven was writing music before he formally knew how. He was born on or about Dec. 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany, into what would now be considered a frightfully dysfunctional family. Father Johann was autocratic and abusive, and it is likely that his son's lifelong hostility toward authority of any kind dates from this initial filial rebellion.

Unlike such predecessors as Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart, all of whom managed to make some temperamental accommodation with their enormous gifts, Beethoven found his genius difficult to bear. As Morris puts it, "Ludwig's eruptive talent could be a curse as well as a blessing. Music was like magma inside him." He grew up to be prideful, ill-mannered and intemperate, and he not only burned but incinerated bridges with many who would gladly have helped him.

By the time he turned 30, it was obvious to Beethoven that he was losing his hearing. ("How could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection?" he wrote, miserably.) He was all but completely deaf by 1817.

Yet he continued to insist upon conducting his own music, and his players were forced to rely upon the movements of the first violinist for guidance while the composer flailed away in his own world. He died on March 26, 1827: The legend -- endorsed by Morris -- has it that his last act was to sit up in his deathbed and curse the thunderstorm that raged outside.

There is something profoundly human about Beethoven. More so than most creative geniuses, he seems one of us -- alternately suffering and exuberant, convivial and achingly alone. He was perennially disheveled, socially awkward, a heavy drinker. Nothing was ever easy for him: Even music did not come without a struggle (his notebooks reflect the exhaustive efforts he put into each work). And there are a few compositions by Beethoven that not only fall well below his own lofty standards but are bad music by anyone's accounting. (Take, for example, "Wellington's Victory," a putrid attempt at political propaganda, with a central theme that is best known as "The Bear Went Over the Mountain.")

But then there are those other pieces -- the works that give Beethoven his "universal" status -- and they deserve a critic with the vast reserves of feeling, fancy and intelligence that Morris brings to the task. Here, for example, is the most affecting description of the slow movement from the Piano Sonata in B-flat (Op. 106, "Hammerklavier") ever likely to see print: "Bach-like melodies flowering into unpredictable filigree, giddy key shifts, weird dance rhythms, shock silences, operatic changes of scene, Italian and French turns of phrase, plus sound effects unique to Beethoven: 'vault' voices in the deep bass, a constant interplay of damped versus undamped strings, and irregular, echoing monotones, like wind chimes. Most noticeable of all was the spaciousness of the harmony: the piano's highest and lowest registers seemed to have drifted farther apart than ever before, while held by the same center of gravity." This is not just criticism but poetry in itself, with the additional -- and inestimable -- merit of being true.

Reviewed by Tim Page
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0060759755
• ISBN 13: 9780060759759
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256