BEETHOVEN

by Maynard Solomon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1977

The music world has been waiting for a definitive modern Beethoven life-and-works to place alongside Thayer's 1866 standard biography; George Marek's 1969 effort didn't measure up, and neither does this ambitious study--although it does offer tremendous scholarship, consistent intelligence, and an honorable but mismanaged attempt to link the man with the music. Following the example of Editha & Richard Sterba's Beethoven and His Nephew, Solomon puts stubborn, moody, withdrawn Ludwig on the psychoanalytic couch, emphasizing the ""Oedipal issues"" that gave rise to his delusions of illegitimacy (and royal blood), his passions for unavailable women (""bachelorhood was apparently a necessary. . . condition of creative achievement""), and his ""quasi-psychotic"" behavior (the primal triangle with sister-in-law Johanna and nephew Karl) in late middle age. These speculations are logically developed, but they're hardly convincing or consistent enough to support Solomon's psychoanalytic slants on the music: e.g., the underlying themes of the Eroica Symphony are ""patricide and fratricide""; the traumatic Karl-Johanna episode dissolved his defenses and bared his conflicts, ""perhaps thereby laying the groundwork for a breakthrough of his creativity""--the post-Heroic late style. The failure to carry off this enormously difficult construct, however, does not obscure Solomon's virtues. He discusses the music (non-technically) in period-by-period chunks following each biographical phase, giving a dramatic pattern to Beethoven's reach--beyond established modes--toward ""music which appears to be self-creating, which must strive for its existence."" And, notwithstanding the Freudian drift, Solomon's strongest motifs are compassion, balance, and (to a fault) documentation: all the possible interpretations of Beethoven's ambivalence toward patrons, toward teacher Haydn, toward hero-villain Napoleon; all the evidence for Antonie Brentano being the much-debated ""Immortal Beloved."" An unassimilated concept and an academic tendency may keep this generally readable portrait from being wholly satisfying, but it is provocative and sensitive as often as it is tenuous or tedious--hardly definitive but definitely worthy of serious attention.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1977

ISBN: 0825672686

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION