Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

I've never heard any of Jan Swafford's compositions, though I go quite often to concerts and recitals here in Manhattan, but I can say unequivocally that he's a truly excellent biographer.  I'd previously read his Charles Ives: A Life with Music in which he treated a difficult subject with sympathy and honesty.  The same can be said of his more recent opus, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, an exhaustive study of the man who, along with Haydn and Mozart, was one of the greatest composers of the Classical period and, for that matter, of all time.  If anything, the level of scholarship and writing is even higher than in the previous work.

The narrative begins in Bonn where Beethoven was born in 1770, the grandson of another Ludwig van Beethoven.  The elder Ludwig served as Kapellmeister in the court of the imperial elector Maximilian Friedrich for a dozen years and was a highly respected bass singer.  His position and talents made it inevitable that his grandson should take up a career in music.  Swafford duly notes the lessons given the younger Ludwig by his alcoholic father Johann, the child's early display of virtuosity at the keyboard and his first attempts at composition, all of which eventually led to his appointment as violist in the Bonn court orchestra.  But Swafford goes far beyond a mere recital of the youth's accomplishments.  The author goes to great pains to fully detail the intellectual life of Bonn at a time when Europe was caught up in a wave of intellectual awakening and consequent social unrest.  This was the famous Age of Enlightenment, referred to in German speaking countries as Aufklärung, and liberal Bonn was at its epicenter during Beethoven's adolescence.  He was first exposed to its principles by his tutor, the composer Christian Neefe, a Freemason (as was Mozart) and a member of the Order of Illuminati.  The importance that Aufklärung ideals held for the young Beethoven cannot be overstated.  They influenced him all through his years in Vienna and continually found expression in his musical works even so late as his Ninth Symphony, the Op. 125.  Swafford convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to fully understand the composer without taking these humanistic principles into account.

Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna in 1792.  Though he spent the greater part of his life in this city with which he was always to be associated, he had no great love for it.  Nor for its inhabitants.  He was always at odds, sometimes violently so, with his aristocratic patrons, with his publishers, with his friends and admirers, with in fact just about everyone with whom he ever associated.  Though he could be generous and warm-hearted, Beethoven possessed a violent temper which he was never able to keep in check.  Like many artists, he was a tortured soul who could never really feel at home in the world into which he'd been born.  Part of his misery was due to ill health.  Aside from his encroaching deafness, he was tormented by pains and sickness that Swafford suggests may have been caused by lead poisoning.  He also was afflicted in his youth by typhus, and though he recovered this may have been one of the causes of his loss of hearing.

Beyond his physical ailments, Beethoven suffered from a failure to find someone to love and to share his life.  If this sounds trite to better adjusted individuals, it was devastating to the composer.  When finally, after the break with his Immortal Beloved (who was almost certainly not, whatever Swafford's claims to the contrary, Bettina Brentano), he realized that he would never marry and have children of his own he engaged in lengthy and ill advised litigation to gain sole custody of his late brother's son Karl.  The legal proceedings were ruinous to whatever peace of mind he still possessed.

In spite of all his trials, many of them self-inflicted, Beethoven triumphed over adversity to become one of the great creative geniuses of all time.  Swafford's analysis of practically all the composer's major works is detailed and authoritative without ever becoming pedantic.  The author's own thorough knowledge of music allows him to describe the works in a manner that, while erudite, is thoroughly understandable to the layman and brings the pieces vividly to life.  He also quotes from the scores themselves for the benefit of his readers who are also musicians.  For those who are not there is a useful appendix that offers a synopsis of the various musical forms with which Beethoven worked.

By the end of the book the reader has an in-depth appreciation of Beethoven both as an artist and a man.  Surprisingly, it is in the latter role that he most commands our attention and respect.  He emerges as a Job-like figure who struggled valiantly to overcome handicaps that would have driven lesser souls to despair and suicide.  And in the end Beethoven, borne up by his humanist ideals, succeeded beyond expectation by not only surviving but by creating a body of musical works that will most likely never be surpassed.