Before we discuss your selection of Beethoven books, a couple of questions. First, 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of his birth. what kind of commemorations will be held to mark that (although I’m guessing most have been canceled or moved online due to coronavirus)? second, could you tell us about your upcoming beethoven novel, immortal?
The commemorations were quite global in the music industry. It is one of the biggest anniversary celebrations I can remember. everyone loves beethoven from what i can tell. it’s just universally admired and loved and remains relevant through thick and thin.
You are reading: Best books on beethoven
in england, the oxford philharmonic is organizing a year-long festival, or was supposed to be, which is perhaps the largest and most comprehensive in the whole country. they are making as much orchestral music as they humanly can. the piano festival in the summer was also going to cover many of the sonatas and various associated piano pieces, but I don’t know if that will go ahead or not. there are lots and lots of recordings coming out. hopefully many have already been done and will be on their way. Just about every record company worth its salt is putting out Beethoven recordings this year.
there were to be numerous performances of the opera fidelio. I have already been lucky enough to see a fabulous staging at the royal opera house. I hope that maybe the opera festivals that were going to be presented this year can still do it next year.
are there big festivals in vienna and bonn?
the beethoven house in bonn is the world center for beethoven research. They had a huge symposium in February that covered Beethoven from every conceivable angle. they are very much a focal point for everything. there is also an annual beethoven festival in bonn. I imagine they were planning to have a jamboree this year. We’ll see if that’s going to happen or not.
“The last string quartets are, for many people, his last masterpieces. dusinberre has dedicated his entire career to delving into these pieces and he writes very clearly and beautifully about them”
there’s something strange about vienna: when you go to vienna, usually all the churches, cathedrals, shops and tourist destinations are putting out mozart for all it’s worth, but you actually have to be pretty smart to find a beethoven. it is as if he were a permanent foreigner. one thing i discovered when i was writing my book is that although he spent probably 30 years of his life living in vienna, he never really fit in and never really liked the viennese. i think this generalized image we have of his character, rather negative, gruff and unpleasant, is probably because he’s just a rhenish in vienna, he’s a north german who speaks very directly and sees right through the social niceties and the hypocrisies with which he was surrounded. by.
It’s a different culture. That said, you can see a lot of Beethoven in Vienna. There are wonderful Beethoven museums and Beethoven walks and Beethoven statues. But to really hear Beethoven’s music, you probably need to go to the Musikverein, the largest concert hall.
tell us a bit about your book on beethoven. what is it about? It’s about a love story that she had, right?
yes, it is called immortal because of the letter “immortal beloved”, which was found in beethoven’s apartment after his death. He discovered it in a hidden drawer containing various documents, including the Heiligenstadt Will, the long and very distressed letter he wrote to his brothers when he realized he was going deaf. with him, they found a love letter, the recipient of which is not named. it is unclear whether he ever sent the letter or not. musicologists took about 200 years to get to the bottom of the matter, because the identity of this woman was very well protected. there is a date of July 6, but the year is not mentioned in the letter and he addresses her only as her “immortal beloved”. he doesn’t name her at any point, and I think it was probably because he was protecting her from her.
Over the following centuries, some work on watermarks succeeded in proving that this was written in 1812 and the possibilities gradually narrowed. I think the most likely candidate is someone whose family was not happy with the way he behaved and I think they were trying to distract people. there is an illegitimate child involved; Photographs of her survive, and she is the spitting image of Beethoven.
“He was a genius and he also recognized the strength of his own genius. there is no false modesty in him”
this woman’s name is josephine von brunsvik. She is a Hungarian countess who became Beethoven’s student in 1799 along with her older sister Teresa. Therese is a fascinating figure in her own right. she was a pioneer feminist in the 19th century, which is quite incredible, and she founded the hungarian kindergarten system. she was passionately devoted to education, especially girls’ education. she was a very eccentric but very forward thinking figure and she really was the person who had to come after josephine and clean up everything and clean up all the mess.
I have written the book from therese’s point of view, so she can be quite a lively observer and very personal. and since what we rely on with the story is circumstantial evidence rather than 100 percent certain proof, there is a chance that she is potentially an unreliable narrator. The book begins a little before 1799, the main part of the story begins in 1799 and continues until the end of Beethoven’s life and a little beyond. It covers around 30 years, and it’s a rollercoaster story, both in terms of the position of women in society, and how Josephine and Beethoven really loved each other for many years, but society kept them apart. . one was an aristocrat and the other was a commoner and there were two different sets of laws. Josephine would have lost custody of her children from her first marriage if she had married a commoner.
All of this takes place against a backdrop of Napoleonic wars, various economic collapses, and the redrawing of borders. it was an incredibly seismic moment for changing priorities and the beginnings of romance. It’s been very exciting to write, I have to say, and I hope it’s exciting to read too.
I look forward to it. Did they keep in touch until she died?
josephine died in 1821, so beethoven outlived her by six years, but there are all sorts of traces of her in his music, even in his last piano sonatas. there is a josephine motif. you can find it in the piano sonatas associated with it, but also in all sorts of other pieces of music that seemed extremely relevant. people say that only music matters. yes, maybe it’s true, but her life helps us understand it better.
let’s move on to the beethoven books, because that last point will come up in a lot of them. Let’s start with Beethoven: impressions of his contemporaries. This book is a collection of portraits of Beethoven from people who knew him and wrote letters about him, or memories of knowing or meeting him. is that so?
These are mainly accounts of people who knew him and remember him, some shortly after meeting him, some looking back after many years, having known him as children. is the most wonderfully vivid and evocative collection of personal stories. it brings it to life and shows it in many facets, in fact, many more facets than we would ever find represented in any other medium.
what image emerges of beethoven in the book? Is there a clear difference between how his servants or people who knew him casually during his lifetime perceive him, and the portraits of him by his musical and artistic contemporaries (rossini, liszt and goethe) that also appear in the book?
there is a fairly consistent image. together, the accounts make an impression and he is someone you really feel like you know in the end. I think he had a lot of integrity; I get the impression that he showed that integrity to most people he met in one way or another. he had some spectacular fights and yet at the same time he could also be very, very kind and generous.
I really didn’t know the meaning of money. he was bad enough to keep track of him. he is also definitely very eccentric. there is a wonderful account of him taking a bath in his apartment in vienna and then just jumping out of the bathroom to go and open the window and wondering why everyone outside was pointing and laughing. everyone says that his apartments were total tips. she was not a neat housewife at all, although she did like his baths. there are all kinds of wonderful stories. he got along quite well with the servants because he had a bad temper and was deaf. at one point he fired a long-time housekeeper and decided he was going to cook everything himself, and he invited some friends over for dinner and they all sat around the table trying to be awfully polite when he served up a completely inedible fish. Soup. You don’t think of Beethoven as someone about whom there are funny stories, but there really are.
Beethoven’s cliché image is as the classic romantic genius, completely oblivious to the world, with his deafness enhancing it by tragically imprisoning him and isolating him from the source of this joy he gave to the rest of the world. is that an accurate picture? Was he a crazy eccentric dedicated to his art?
He was totally dedicated to his art, but I don’t really think he was mad at all. I think he’s one of the sanest individuals you’ll find in the history of music. he was very aware of the world around him, even if he had some difficulty relating to it due to his deafness. he read avidly, enjoyed political discussions, and was very focused, in fact, more than he has sometimes been given credit for.
He also recognized the strength of his own genius. there is no false modesty in him. he completely disliked the divisions in society he was up against. Somehow, I feel like he weaponized positivity: even when he was at the lowest point of his personal life and his despair over his deafness, he still embraced the joy of living. there is as much joie de vivre and love of life in it as there is despair. the two things actually offset each other.
and does the book suggest that beethoven was a lovable character? It was obviously difficult for his servants, but did it engender much personal loyalty and affection among his peers, his family, and his friends?
well, his family was very difficult. so that was a continuous battle for him. but between his friends and his fellow musicians, people absolutely loved him and were incredibly loyal and devoted to him. later in his life, people say that beethoven did this or said that in “old age”, but he died when he was 56, young people absolutely adored him. the young musicians who came into his life in his later years were very devoted to him and very concerned about him. he was kind to them and they were devoted in return. they were very good friends for him.
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so yes, I think he inspired a lot of love and there were even young girls in love with him. he is not the kind of ogre that posterity has made of him.
he seemed to fall in love with a succession of women above his social position, with whom in one way or another he could not get together, often due to social class. she never married. Did she have any successful and lasting love affairs?
I have the impression, and this will come out in immortal, that he really only had one fully dedicated love affair, which was probably only consummated once, the “immortal beloved” incident. he basically, he had been quite in love with josephine from the time he met her in 1799 until the end of her life. she was the big one.
“these are absolutely beautiful poems, very beautifully written…it is an absolute masterpiece. I love it in pieces”
Meanwhile, at one point he courted his first cousin, Julie Guicciardi. Julie was a terrible flirt. he dedicated the moonlight sonata to her, but that might be more because her piano was one of the best in vienna and she wanted to try some special effects on it.
at various times he wanted to settle down. she needed stability and wanted to get married. He courted Therese Malfatti, a merchant’s daughter (Beethoven befriended her uncle, who was a doctor and later treated Beethoven), but she also rejected him. he was 42 and she was 18, so you can’t blame her. She courted many women without much success, but also without much conviction, I think, because her heart really belonged to Josephine.
was her doctor’s daughter, therese, the therese from ‘für elise’?
There are a couple of different theories on this. she could have been. there is also a theory that the dedication of ‘für elise’ was actually elisabeth röckel, who married the composer, johann hummel, and she was someone he liked very much and was very attracted to, but married someone else instead composer. no one is absolutely sure.
one of the amazing things about beethoven is that even though he’s probably the most famous composer in history, there’s still a lot we don’t really know.
Let’s move on to your next choice of books, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life by Ruth Padel. she’s not just writing about her music, right? Do the poems also reflect her life?
yes, they do. these are absolutely beautiful poems, beautifully written, individually written, filled with the most wonderful imagery. This book of poems really delves into Beethoven’s imagination and the whole world of hers in so many ways.
it’s come out very recently and it’s certainly made me want to go and read all her other work as well because she’s very sensitive and very in tune with all sides of beethoven that she can just nail in a sentence or capture in a nutshell. when I read it I thought, ‘oh god, why bother trying?’
“He wrote the heiligenstadt will to his brothers, saying he was so desperate to lose his hearing that he had even considered taking his own life”
She is not restricted to only Beethoven and his life. she also relates it to her own experience of her music and of her vienna. so, there are poems where she will be describing something in vienna or a trip to vienna where she suddenly realizes that from this or that house, the nazis kidnapped and deported someone. she has a wonderful way of surprising you with hindsight, atmospheres and context. I think it is an absolute masterpiece. she loves me to pieces.
It’s very difficult to write about music well, isn’t it?
yes. I’ve spent 32 years trying to do exactly that. I don’t know who said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but it’s totally true.
paddle tennis is writing not so much about beethoven’s music but about him and his world. There’s a poem on page 71 called ‘India Dreams’ and it’s about Beethoven’s interest in Indian culture and music, which is pretty underrated. It is something that I have been very interested in discovering about him. and he describes it so exquisitely that he is absolutely perfect.
turning to beethoven for a later life: the journey of a string quartet, a book by edward dusinberre.
is the first violin of the takács quartet. this set was originally all hungarian, but is now multinational. I think they only have one or two of the original members left, but it’s one of the best string quartets in the world. their leader happens to be English, and he happens to write very well.
Part of it is his journey with the quartet because he joined so young. they deliberately wanted to take in a young, but extremely talented and sensitive violinist, so that they could mold him according to their own vision.
Beethoven’s string quartets are some of the most demanding ever written and definitely the most rewarding. the last string quartets are, for many people, his last masterpieces. they are full of mystery and extraordinary sound worlds. dusinberre has spent his entire career delving into these pieces and he writes very clearly and beautifully about them. i write program notes and find writing about late beethoven one of the hardest things you can do, but he makes it sound effortless. he conveys the wonder of playing these pieces, the sheer ecstasy of mastering them and being one with them. therefore, it is a book that anyone who loves music can read and enjoy. there is a bit of technical terminology, but you can still share this beautiful journey that he is experiencing.
I think beethoven wrote 16 string quartets. How many count as the last widely regarded as his crowning achievement? and were the last things he wrote?
is not as easy to answer as all that. i think the tsar of russia commissioned him to write five quartets and he premiered them in saint petersburg. so the last five string quartets are the ones that are generally classified as late works, but then there’s a little bit more because he wrote this incredible thing called grosse fuge, the great fugue, which was going to be the finale of op. 130. his editor contacted him and was like, ‘you know what? no one will be able to play this. for the love of god, replace it with something a little more manageable.’ and beethoven nodded very unusually. he wrote a new ending and then they published the thick fugue separately as an op. 133. So, it’s a question of whether you consider that a work in its own right, or whether it belongs to quartet no. 13. That’s why it’s a bit difficult to number them.
And is the book also about the working life of the string quartet, or is it very focused on playing the music?
It’s very much about life in a string quartet. the two complement each other beautifully, I think.
the next book is the biography of john suchet, beethoven. John Suchet is not a professional musicologist and I think this is a very well written book for the general reader interested in Beethoven who may not be particularly technically savvy. would that be fair?
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I think that’s correct. It is a very good book and a very enjoyable introduction to the life and work of Beethoven. it is compulsively readable, which is not the case with many of the larger books.
really makes it jump off the page in a very immediate way. When people ask me to recommend a good solid non-technical introductory book to Beethoven and his world, I always recommend that one. I think it really nails it.
We’ve talked a bit about your personal life and its influence on your music, but what about the larger political context? he is a kind of transitional figure from the classical period to the romantic period. you could see mozart as this kind of archetypal product of enlightenment culture in a way, and beethoven similarly embodying the romantic character. he’s a byronic hero in a way, isn’t he? Was he aware that his art served some larger political or cultural purpose?
I think there was one significant occasion where this was true, but possibly only one. I think that was the case when, at the beginning of the century, he decided that he was going to leave his old methods to find a new way of composing. the great pioneering work in this part of his life, now generally known as the “heroic” period, is the “heroic symphony” and that was really the turning point.
It began as what we would now call a symphonic poem and was to be titled ‘bonaparte’. it was actually a direct image of napoleon, his life and his motivating forces. beethoven was a great admirer of napoleon bonaparte until napoleon decided to declare himself emperor, at which point beethoven realized that he was a fallible and probably not very good human being, like everyone else. he erased the symphony’s dedication so forcefully that he left a hole in the page.
That definitely started out as a political statement. but after that, I don’t think he ever tried to be so overtly political again. I can’t say I blame him.
In fact, for most of his life he had to serve aristocratic patrons of one kind or another. In that sense, it was a pretty old-fashioned musical existence, wasn’t it?
well, this is the wonderful paradox at the heart of beethoven’s working life. she didn’t want to be like her grandfather, a choirmaster, serving a princely patron and basically a servant. Beethoven wanted to be autonomous. he wanted to be an independent artist, but that meant that in order to achieve independence, he had to depend on many different people, instead of just one. of course they were all princes and aristocrats of one kind or another and this was a situation that had many ups and downs over the years. When he had a fight with one, like his massive fight with Prince Lichnowsky, he immediately lost a quarter of his annual income, because Lichnowsky had been extraordinarily supportive and had given him 600 guilders per year. the fallout was never really repaired.
after that, there was a consortium of three princes and archdukes trying to give him an annual stipend so he wouldn’t have to leave vienna and get a job elsewhere. then came the Napoleonic wars, the currency collapsed and the princes went bankrupt. so after that he had to live a daily existence, trying to find commissions that would pay him. so around the time of the vienna congress you find him writing some pretty bad pieces of music because these things, like ‘wellington’s victory’, were being brought up to try to please people. and he was never really at his best when he was doing that.
I hadn’t appreciated that. so really, the fact that she had all these aristocratic patrons was really a gamble on his own freedom.
yes. he had to make a living if he wasn’t going to have a job as choirmaster, and he couldn’t have had a job as choirmaster anyway because he couldn’t hear. he had to find a way to eat and that was how the system worked at the time. he was very exposed to the ravages of fate, and when there were financial problems in society in general, they hit him quite hard.
How long were you deaf? How old was he when that really became socially and musically difficult for him?
he was in his 30s, possibly even younger, because he had hearing problems for a few years before facing them, which is what happened in 1802. he wrote the will of heiligenstadt to his brothers, saying he was so desperate to lose his hearing that he had even thought about taking his own life. it was all downhill from there.
really picked up after the will of heiligenstadt. she didn’t get her hearing back, but it didn’t go away at the rate she thought it would. he tried all sorts of weird things to combat it. there were trumpets and a kind of hood that was on top of his piano; she could put her head under it and it would amplify the sounds. and there was a piece of wood that he could put against the frame of the piano, with the other end against his jawbone or the bone behind his ear, which would transmit the vibrations to his inner ear.
He was always trying to fight it. he used conversation books, making visitors write what they wanted to say to him, in order to interact with them. but he was quite young when he started, and he struggled with it for almost half his life.
half his life, that is, most of his adult life.
and it was a terrible problem for him socially. deaf people have trouble at parties and cannot interact with people in noisy situations; he was quite a sociable person and was forced to live in solitude. it probably made him a much less attractive prospect for the women he tried to persuade to marry him. it’s very sad.
then when he adopted his nephew, he couldn’t have conversations with this little boy. it’s a very extraordinary episode in her life, which I think hastened his death. part of the problem with adoption was: how can you have a child if you can’t talk to them and they can’t talk to you?
The next book we have is Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford. this is a more academic work, I think. what does it add or how is it different from john suchet’s book on beethoven?
well, first of all, it’s huge. you could use it as a draft excluder. It’s over 1,000 pages. it’s huge. he writes about life, but he also writes about music. I love this book because it writes in a very interesting way about music. you’ll need a bit of technical savvy to get around it, but he also writes very engagingly. it’s not hard to read, it’s just that sometimes you need to chew on it to really appreciate what it’s saying.
“The young musicians who came into his life in his later years were very devoted to him and very concerned about him. he was kind to them and they were devoted in return. they were very good friends for him”
there’s a great chapter, for example, on the ‘heroic symphony’ and how beethoven’s whole approach to how he writes music is transforming, and how this relates to the development of romanticism and the figure of Napoleon as a self-made hero who is continually remaking himself, how Beethoven is continually remaking music in the same way. he’s full of stuff like that and I find it very vivid and very fresh.
swafford is a teacher and writes professionally, but very well. this is very, very good writing.
so, is it very readable?
yes, it is, but you’ll need a bit of technical knowledge to get past it. if you want something that will keep you busy for a long time and is more detailed and musicological than john suchet’s book, i’d say this is a good one.
the book also talks a lot about the intellectual background of illustration in bonn when beethoven was growing up, doesn’t it?
yes, a lot. it gives you a real depth of context for the whole thing.
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