Brilliant Beethoven bio

Review of Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

With my music-loving parents, Beethoven was one of the first composers that I really “got”. He was different from Bach and Mozart, whose stylistics seemed nice but did not pierce my heart the way that lovely, lovely Ludwig van could. Why was this? What historical context did he operate in? Were the “tortured genius” images of him close to the truth or not? This wonderful book addressed these questions in great depth.

Beethoven was born into a middleclass household, the family business being music. With a distinguished grandfather as Kapellmeister in Bonn, Ludwig was brought up and extensively trained with the expectation that he would become a professional musician, quite similar to Mozart in some ways though not quite a child prodigy. Beethoven was also lucky – at that moment, the piano was really coming into its own, a far more complex and expressive instrument than the harpsicord, and he had the talent to extend its range.

His family life was difficult. Though very close to his mother, who died young, his father was an increasingly dissipated alcoholic of mediocre talent. In his teens, Beethoven took responsibility for bringing up his brothers, the start of a struggle to make ends meet that lasted his entire life. Their relations were always troubled. According to Swafford, this may have left him emotionally crippled, unable to truly understand the feelings of others and thus thinking only in terms of himself, a trait that psychologists might call narcissistic personality disorder or borderline. (These are my words. Swafford strictly refrains from psychoanalyzing Beethoven.)

Surprisingly, instead of the quintessential “Romantic genius” of popular myth, Swafford argues that Beethoven was a typical German Enlightenment figure, trusting in reason and hoping for benevolent despots to implement progressive reform. He was in no way a democrat, despising the rabble and composing primarily for elite connoisseurs. The move to Vienna for him was traumatic, in that he lost the enlightened milieu in which he had taken part in Bonn and never found anything comparable.

While making his money as a performer, Beethoven was an immediate success in Vienna, then music capital of the west. Mozart had died and Haydn was viewed as more of the past than the future. Exploring the exciting possibilities of the piano, Beethoven began to experiment with multiple forms, in particular with the symphony, but also extending the range of the cello. Rather than background music for light entertainment, Beethoven’s symphonies became complex, multi-facetted thought pieces that required effort and even multiple hearings. In other words, the audience was challenged to absorb a deeper experience – it was introspective, even developed themes that could be construed as political or philosophical, often about heroic struggle both in the outside world and from within. Most important: the wellspring of his work was to convey emotion, disregarding conventional flourishes and audience expectation; this fundamentally distinguished him from Mozart and Bach and represented a new path forward. In this way, I see him as a transitional figure into Romanticism with its concentration in viewing life and art as an organic whole, bound in emotion.

It is here that Swafford starts getting into very great technical detail, interpreting Beethoven’s works in judgmental language but also in a vocabulary that is way beyond my musical knowledge. (For example, chosen at random: “The C-minor nonscherzo comes back altered, the base theme turned into a staccato parody”.) If it is Greek to me, this will interest musicians. To be sure, it is a level that can be explored and re-read, about 1/10 of the book I’d estimate. For the pieces I knew very well, much of the description was illuminating for me; of many I didn’t know, such as the 3^rdSymphony, I feel motivated to get to study them and will certainly do so while re-reading sections of the book.

The Beethoven that emerges in the book is not an appealing character. He was irascible, paranoid, delusional, slovenly and unkempt. All of his relationships were eventually disastrous, including a litigious interlude as guardian to an unwilling nephew. His endless search for a wife followed a sad pattern: they were always somehow unattainable, either for reasons of class or marriage status, and yet he hoped for perfection with every new infatuation.

Shabby and unwashed, he was frequently mistaken for a vagabond or madman and once, when incarcerated as a “suspicious character” while walking the countryside, his protestations of being Beethoven were met with disbelief and derision. Swafford covers his various illnesses discreetly and thoroughly but not excessively; if the worst was his gradual loss of hearing, which soon made it impossible for him to earn a living as a performer, he also suffered from chronic gastrointestinal ailments and liver disease due to alcoholism.

His inconsistent political views were determined by his solipsism. Admiring Napoleon as a self-made genius operating in an aristocratic world, Beethoven’s 3^rd Symphony was according to Swafford supposed to be a paean to his heroic struggle to master and better the world as an Enlightenment avatar. Only later was Beethoven disillusioned by Napoleon’s megalomania and tyranny, when he crowned himself Emperor and installed family members as Kings throughout Europe. Beethoven’s income remained dependent on aristocratic patronage, which he chafed under yet accepted and continually sought; resenting his social exclusion even while exalted as a genius, he admired aristocrats and esteemed them as innately superior to the underclass.

This is a great artistic bio. Swafford is a wonderful writer and his mastery of the subject matter is second to none – the vantage point of being a composer himself makes this a unique reading experience, if too technical at times for me. If you love Beethoven’s work, you will learn a great deal from this book without diminishment of enjoyment.

That being said, this is one of those books that requires determination to finish. It has extremely dense analyses of separate pieces and opuses, too technical in spite of the author’s promises to discuss the details in back notes. Nonetheless, it is a wonderfully engaging read if you put forth the effort, in particular if you listen to Beethoven’s pieces to supplement the book. It was immensely rewarding for me and I found what I was looking for: biographical detail, context, criticism, the entire arc of a remarkable career. I see Beethoven differently now and my interest in his work is rekindled. It just isn’t for everyone and the general reader should know that perhaps only aficionados should persevere.

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