Beethoven

Anguish and Triumph

Jan Swafford

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571312573
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year

'Magisterial, warm, and engaging . . . A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity . . . Jan Swafford is to be saluted.' Independent

Jan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.

This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Bonn, Electorate of Cologne
• 2: Father, Mother, Son
• 3: Reason and Revolution
• 4: Loved in Turn
• 5: Golden Age
• 6: A Journey and a Death
• 7: Bildung
• 8: Stem and Book
• 9: Unreal City
• 10: Chains of Craftsmanship
• 11: Generalissimo
• 12: Virtuoso
• 13: Fate’s Hammer
• 14: The Good, the Beautiful, and the Melancholy
• 15: The New Path
• 16: Oh, Fellow Men
• 17: Heaven and Earth Will Tremble
• 18: Geschrieben auf Bonaparte
• 19: Our Hearts Were Stirred
• 20: That Haughty Beauty
• 21: Schemes
• 22: Darkness to Light
• 23: Thus Be Enabled to Create
• 24: Myths and Men
• 25: My Angel, My Self
• 26: We Finite Beings
• 27: The Queen of the Night
• 28: What Is Difficult
• 29: The Sky Above, the Law Within
• 30: Qui Venit in Nomine Domini
• 31: You Millions
• 32: Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
• 33: Plaudite, Amici
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright