Books
Jan Swafford

Beethoven

Jan Swafford’s biographies of 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. Throughout, Swafford 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.
1,610 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Katarina Ningrumhas quoted7 years ago
    I don’t believe any person’s life is lived to be “interpreted,” by strangers, for money. Every person’s life is ultimately a mystery, even to him- or herself. That is the moral source of the humility with which I write biography. But art is created to be enjoyed, to move, to excite, to soothe and provoke, to teach, to be discussed, indeed to be interpreted.
  • Katarina Ningrumhas quoted6 years ago
    Before the Third Symphony, symphonies and concertos had largely been considered public and in some degree popularistic pieces written to be put together in a hurry, sometimes more or less sight-read in performance.
  • Katarina Ningrumhas quoted6 years ago
    What is emotionally profound and universal in Beethoven’s music is what he observed in himself.

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