Motivic consistency beethoven biography book

Following Jan Swafford through the thousand-plus pages of his new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven is hardly as exhilarating as listening to the music of the peerless composer. But the stately rhythm, carefully etched detailing and oceanic sweep of this ambitious book mirror the complexity and richness of Beethoven's revolutionary Romanticism.

It may be hard to grasp, but surrender to it and it's easy to be swept away. That's because Swafford comes marvelously equipped to take on the enormousness of Beethoven's life and work — his heights of inspiration, depths of suffering, the roots and range of his masterworks. The author of acclaimed biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives, Swafford is also a celebrated composer, musical scholar and teacher whose empathic vision of Beethoven extends far beyond the typical biographer's focus on the facts of a life.

Since those facts were well-mined by Alexander Wheelock Thayer's massive 19th-century Beethoven biography, Swafford seeks to take us inside the composer's music as only a composer can, with challenging yet compelling deconstructions of Beethoven's key works. Passages of sheet music are reproduced, and while those who can read them will be edified, even those of us who can't will gain a more theoretical understanding.

Dahlhaus's Beethoven book (presented here in a fine translation) offers readers perhaps the steadiest and most reliable van-.

The gesture has a tradition going back to Bach and beyond. It is the voice that is new in this sonata, the emotional immediacy… As a revelation of individual character and emotion, it was a kind of democratic revolution in music. In a handful of sentences, Swafford delivers a great deal of information: how familiar musical gestures — a half step down on the third beat — can be transformed by a unique sensibility, how the "new immediacy and subjectivity" of the music was revolutionary, and how this expressiveness defines Romanticism, an all-too-familiar word that too few of us can easily define.

Fortunately, Swafford's Beethoven: Anquish and Triumph doesn't drown in its musicology so much as achieve a buoyant balance of technical and human detail. Written, as Swafford admits, in the spirit of Thayer's biography, it seeks to chronicle "the man and musician, not the myth.

And with remarkable consistency, these geniuses have been white men in American society.

And so the reader is given a well-focused tour of all things Ludwig — from his birth in Bonn, Germany, in , to his death in , during which he grew from child piano prodigy not unlike his musical forebear, Mozart to gloomy titan, casting the thunderbolt sonorities and elysian beauties of the 5th and 9th symphonies, the "Pastorale," the darkly lyrical concertos.

Along the way, there's more anguish than triumph. Beethoven tended to love above his class, ever unrequited, enamored of young countesses.