Review of new Beethoven book
From the N.Y. Times, Sunday, January 19:
'Beethoven': The First Modern
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
A review of
BEETHOVEN
The Music and the Life.
By Lewis Lockwood.
Illustrated. 604 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
He was short, thickset, pockmarked, maybe from smallpox, with a dark complexion. As a boy, he was called ''der Spagnol.'' His hearing, which worsened as he reached his 30's, never entirely disappeared, but he was forced to use an ear trumpet, then a conversation book, and he suffered from terrible earaches and ringing ears. He also complained of abdominal distress, chronic bronchitis and colitis, never mind his hypochondria and erratic, sometimes extreme temper.
As a domineering uncle, tending his dead brother's son and battling the boy's mother for control, he seems to have driven his nephew to attempt suicide. He never married. He pursued women who rejected him -- women of higher social standing, women who wouldn't ever have had him -- maybe because he knew he couldn't be a good husband and accomplish what he wanted at the same time. The only opera he composed, ''Fidelio,'' has as its subject the unwavering devotion of a good woman who risks her life to save the hero. Its subtitle was ''Conjugal Love.''
At his funeral, Ludwig van Beethoven was remembered by the dramatist Franz Grillparzer as a paradox, in his personal life discontented and alienated from much of society but full of love for humanity in his music. Baron de Tremont, who visited his apartment in Vienna in 1809, reported seeing ''the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable,'' the piano buried under dust and papers, an unemptied chamber pot under the piano. This was the same year Beethoven wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto, the noble ''Emperor,'' and ''Das Lebewohl,'' one of his most elegant piano sonatas.
more... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/bo...l?pagewanted=1
'Beethoven': The First Modern
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
A review of
BEETHOVEN
The Music and the Life.
By Lewis Lockwood.
Illustrated. 604 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
He was short, thickset, pockmarked, maybe from smallpox, with a dark complexion. As a boy, he was called ''der Spagnol.'' His hearing, which worsened as he reached his 30's, never entirely disappeared, but he was forced to use an ear trumpet, then a conversation book, and he suffered from terrible earaches and ringing ears. He also complained of abdominal distress, chronic bronchitis and colitis, never mind his hypochondria and erratic, sometimes extreme temper.
As a domineering uncle, tending his dead brother's son and battling the boy's mother for control, he seems to have driven his nephew to attempt suicide. He never married. He pursued women who rejected him -- women of higher social standing, women who wouldn't ever have had him -- maybe because he knew he couldn't be a good husband and accomplish what he wanted at the same time. The only opera he composed, ''Fidelio,'' has as its subject the unwavering devotion of a good woman who risks her life to save the hero. Its subtitle was ''Conjugal Love.''
At his funeral, Ludwig van Beethoven was remembered by the dramatist Franz Grillparzer as a paradox, in his personal life discontented and alienated from much of society but full of love for humanity in his music. Baron de Tremont, who visited his apartment in Vienna in 1809, reported seeing ''the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable,'' the piano buried under dust and papers, an unemptied chamber pot under the piano. This was the same year Beethoven wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto, the noble ''Emperor,'' and ''Das Lebewohl,'' one of his most elegant piano sonatas.
more... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/bo...l?pagewanted=1
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