Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)
by Edmund Morris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edmund MorrisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-04
ISBN: 0060759747
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Harper Collins
Book Reviews of Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)
Book Review: The Universal Composer
Summary: 5 Stars
For most listeners, myself included Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 -- 1827) remains the greatest of composers. Edmund Morris's highly readable brief biography, "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" tries, in a straighforward way, to explain the sources of the inspiration that listeners have found and continue to find in Beethoven's music. Morris's book is part of a series. titled "Eminent Lives" of short biographies of famous people written for nonspecialist readers. Morris has written biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, but he is, enviably, also a pianist and an amateur music scholar.
What is the source of Beethoven's appeal? An answer that Morris offers at the outset is that Beethoven, in many of his works, did not compose only for people with great musical knowledge or sophistication. He wrote, for the most part, as Morris says, "for the human community he embraced as 'Freunde' [friends] in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony." Referring to the people from all over the world who make pilgrimmages to see Beethoven's residences in Vienna, Morris observes further: "[w]hat draws them is Beethoven's universality, his ability to embrace the whole range of human emotion, from dread of death to love of life -- and to the metaphysics beyond -- reconciling all doubts and conflicts in a catharsis of sound." (p.3) Later, in his book, Morris discusses the tension and contrasts that pervade Beethoven's music: "he fought for a balance -- often precarious yet always managed -- between the rush of ideas and the constraints of intellect, between hyperactivity and ill health, gregariousness and misanthropy, ethics and mendacity, humor and depression, and other absolutes of character or fate. His very music ... consisted of a clash of opposites ... all was tension, everything had to be resolved." (pp 80-81) Even Bach and Mozart, the composers most often considered on the same level as Beethoven, lack Beethoven's stylistic variety, and emotional depth and range.
Morris's book focuses on Beethoven's life rather than on a detailed discussion of the music. He does not consider all Beethoven's important works, but what he says is frequently fresh and insightful. Even those who know Beethoven's music well may read this book with pleasure. Morris gives considerable discussion to Beethoven's youthful "Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II". He names a chapter after Beethoven's infrequently-heard ballet "The Creatures of Prometheus", and he offers short but good insights on the song-cycle "An die Ferne Geliebte", the Razomovsky quartets, the "Les Adieux" piano sonata and many other works. He also considers Beethoven's failures -- including "Wellington's Victory" and the cantata "The Glorious Moment." The musical discussion rekindled my desire to rehear Beethoven.
In considering the life, Morris finds that "Beethoven struggled against epic odds and prevailed with enormous courage." (p.5) The two chief obstacles Beethoven faced, for Morris, were his ill-health, including his ultimate deafness and many other ailments, and his loneliness. In particular, Morris describes Beethoven's lifelong sexual frustration and failure to marry. As do most biographers, Morris focuses on two extraordinary testaments Beethoven wrote that were discovered only after his death: the first written in 1802 the "Heilingestadt Testament" in which Beethoven expresses his intention to persevere upon discovering his growing deafness, and the 1812 letter to his "Immortal Beloved". Maynard Solomon has identified a married woman, Antonie Bretano, as Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved, and this conclusion has been generally accepted.
Beethoven was a difficult man, and Morris stays far from the hero-worship of some of the literature on Beethoven. He describes in detail Beethoven's pettyness, manipulativeness and propensity to violence. He devotes great space to Beethoven's relationship with his nephew Karl and to his struggle for custody of Karl of many years with his sister-in-law. Beethoven's behavior verged on the psychotic in his later years. But while Morris is not a hero-worshipper, he avoids the equally unjustified modern tendency to deflate. Beethoven emerges as a larger-than-life highly troubled person who composed sublime music.
Morris's short biography is obviously indebted to larger and more recent scholarly studies, including books by Solomon, Cooper, and Lockwood, as well as the standard biography by Thayer. But it would be unfair to consider Morris's book as purely derivative. He writes well and to the point and offers a valuable perspective on Beethoven in his own right. Beethoven's music and life are broad enough to encompass many approaches and points of view.
This book has much to offer to those who know a great deal about Beethoven. But its primary appeal will be to the new listener or to readers who want a short introduction to this great, universal composer. Whatever your prior knowledge of Beethoven, I hope this book will inspire you to delve more deeply into his music.
Robin Friedman
Summary of Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)
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."
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