A review by atelierofbooks
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford

4.0

"I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely."

I really, really love Beethoven, even when he's kind of unlovable. Not only because he wrote lines like that, but more because he lived it.

This book isn't a mythologized account of Beethoven's life. Jan Swafford does a lot to poke holes in the romantic cult of genius that was already starting to pop up during Beethoven's lifetime. Yet it's not critical either. It's balanced, respectful, and warm without shying away from the facts. And thankfully there's little of the awkward psychoanalysis that so many biographers are prone to.

Some of my favorite stories are the ones where Beethoven embodies the stereotype. Like when he schools rivals in piano battles or frightens a herd of oxen with his wild gesticulating while taking a walk. But there's so much more to him than this; his struggles with deafness and poor health, the opposition to his music, his combustible relationships with friends, family, patrons, and princes (pretty much everyone).

If you're only interested in his life and letters then I'd give this a pass. This is extremely thorough and dense, almost to the point of unwieldiness. Swafford goes beyond the man and explores what was happening in Europe while Beethoven lived (politically, militarily, philosophically, and culturally) and how that may have affected him and his music.

There is also a considerable amount of musical analysis which admittedly involved a lot of skimming on my part:

"All but two variations are in the C major of the theme (also including the familiar minore, a turn to C minor), but within each variation he went for maximum harmonic contrast, much chromaticism, internal modulations. For one example of the tonal variety he injected into the theme, the C-minor Variation XIV has a passage in D-flat major, which is nowhere hinted in the theme."

*Whoosh* is the sound as that goes over my head. But he usually brings it around so it's not totally inaccessible:

"The Ninth Symphony, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, is itself Beethoven’s embrace for the millions, from East to West, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass soloist speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, Beethoven’s words are addressed to everybody, to history. There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends."

Without his music Beethoven is really hard to know, even with all of the facts of his life we can glean from letters and testimonies. I mean, I just read a thousand pages about the man and I still can't understand what went on in his head. So I appreciate what Swafford does here.

Still, I don't think storytelling is his strong suit. It's masterfully researched and constructed. Yet the writing is overly florid and can get repetitive. It's just not my taste and I think the story gets buried in the flowery language.

I'd like to read other (shorter) Beethoven biographies in the future but I'm glad that I read this one and have a solid foundation for future reads. I really came to appreciate and understand Beethoven's music so much more after this and genuinely do recommend it. Especially if you want to strengthen your biceps while reading because omg, it's so heavy.