For my children, grandchildren, and their children, safe in the knowledge that all will know Beethoven's music
THIS IS AN ACCOUNT OF BEETHOVEN'S LIFE, in accordance with current scholarship and research. Given that new facts and information emerge constantly, there are some aspects of this book that will inevitably become outdated or even prove incorrect. This is true of all biographies of great figures. I have not let it deter me from setting down the life as we perceive it today.
I make no great claim to having unearthed previously undiscovered facts about Beethoven's life. Everything in this book has been published in source material or previous biographies. But I do believe that a substantial amount of the information I have included, particularly about his childhood, has not been published for many decades, in some cases for a century or more, and I am certain never in English.
Beethoven's childhood and teenage years, I believe, were the making of him as a man and musician. For that reason I have examined them closely, and some of his experiences I have recounted in forensic detail. His trip with the court orchestra up the Rhine, for instance, rarely merits a mention in biographies, or is accorded at most a line or two, yet it provided the youthful Beethoven with a bank of memories-and a physical artefact-that he treasured for life.
Of Beethoven it is perhaps more true than of any other composer that if you know what is going on in his life you listen to his music through different ears. Beethoven's life-its dramas, conflicts, loves, and losses, his deafness coupled with continuous health problems, his epic struggle with his sister-in-law for custody of her son, his nephew-is there in his music. Without such knowledge his music is still extraordinary, and I believe many people who today love it do so without any deep understanding of his life. But to know what is happening to him at the time of a particular composition puts that work on a different level for the listener. Beethoven's music is his autobiography.
My approach to the life of this great artist, as in my previous publications on him, is that of enthusiast and lover of his music, rather than musicologist. Consequently this book is aimed primarily at like-minded people, though I hope the academics will give it their approval. It is, for instance, of more interest to me that Beethoven initially dedicated the 'Eroica' Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte than that he chose to write it in E flat. At all times I have striven to set the music into the context of his life, to explain where he was living at the time of a particular composition, why he chose to write it, the reasons behind the dedication, the state of his health, his nonmusical activities, rather than present an analysis of the movement structure, key signature, thematic links.
In a nutshell I have tried to portray a difficult and complex character, struggling to continue his profession as musician despite increasing deafness, alienating friends with unprovoked outbursts of anger one moment, overwhelming them with excessive kindness and generosity the next, living in a city in almost constant turmoil because of war with France, rather than the godlike immortal portrayed in statues and paintings in heroic pose garlanded with laurel leaves.
He might have been one of the greatest artists who ever lived, but he was a still a man who had to live among fellow mortals, eat and drink, buy clothes, pay his rent. That is the Beethoven of this book.
