For classical musicians, even today, Beethoven is not so much a single mountain, more an entire range. Other composers, even the greatest, rise and fall on tides of taste. Bach was largely ignored for a century after his death; Mozart still not much enjoyed in a country as steeped in music as Russia.
Beethoven seems as eternally awe-inspiring as the Himalayas. Over the past two centuries thousands have attempted to scale his peaks. Every contour and crevice of his compositions has been mapped and minutely scrutinised. Two of his symphonies — the Fifth and the Ninth — have acquired a political potency that has been eagerly hijacked by regimes both benevolent and despotic. Others — the epic Eroica, the bucolic Pastoral, the frenzied Seventh — stretch the very concept of musical structure in ways that affected (or, often, overwhelmed) composers for the rest of the 19th century.
His string quartets and piano sonatas (particularly the enigmatic masterpieces he wrote in his final years) still rank as supreme tests of interpretation. His one opera, Fidelio, and his massive choral masterpiece, the Missa solemnis, are idealistic visions of humanity that make seemingly inhumane demands — yet each year the best conductors, singers, choirs and orchestras accept the lung-busting, mind-blowing challenge of unlocking their meanings and conveying their surging emotions.
And behind all this lies the tragic image of the man himself: deaf through most of his adulthood, ugly, ravaged by chronic stomach upsets, volcanically temperamental, continually beset by heartbreaking problems with his dysfunctional family, and spectacularly unsuccessful in love, mainly because he fell for females who were too young, too high-born, or (usually) both. “The greater the challenge, the more aggressive [Beethoven’s] response,” writes Jan Swafford in his enormous new biography. “He fought with most of his friends. He often improvised best when he was angry with the audience. He fell in love with unavailable women. His outsized reactions made him a chronically difficult man to get on with.”
Little wonder that he often fell into near-suicidal despair — most famously when in 1802, at 32, he realised what a catastrophic impact the onset of deafness would have on his career, which was then more as a virtuoso pianist than a composer, in a Vienna that had 300 professional pianists ruthlessly competing for patrons and pupils. That was when he wrote the letter, addressed (but never sent) to his brothers, that we now know as the Heiligenstadt Testament after the village in which Beethoven laid bare his soul. “With joy I hasten to meet death — If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will come too soon despite my harsh fate and I should probably wish it later — yet even so I should be happy, for would it not free me from a state of endless suffering? — Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely.”
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In fact Beethoven was not called upon to meet death bravely for another 25 years — a quarter-century in which he wrought a one-man revolution on music and changed for ever the status of composers from servants to lionised heroes. Yet Swafford sees in the Heiligenstadt Testament another central facet of Beethoven’s volcanic “anger”: an anger with fate, a massive determination to fight back, and most of all, a self-generated courage that permeates all his music. “To suffer without hope . . . requires great courage. For an artist to continue growing and working at the highest level without hope takes still greater courage. Beethoven had something near as much courage as a human being can have.”
Swafford himself must have some courage, or at least an unswerving appetite for hard work, to attempt what he does in this huge 1,077-page book. Following Beethoven’s life chronologically from birth in 1770 to death 57 years later, he weaves together four separate strands with skill and scholarship. The first is the minutiae of Beethoven’s abrasive dealings with the world, from the concert-hall triumphs to the hopeless consultations with quack doctors and the arguments with publishers, impresarios and patrons (who, on the whole, seem to have been a remarkably tolerant bunch).
Here are all the famous anecdotes vividly retold — such as the meeting with Goethe, when the poet stepped aside to let some passing aristocrats have the path, while Beethoven strode haughtily through them — and also a host of lesser-known incidents. I love the account of the premiere of Wellington’s Victory, a dreadful piece but by far the biggest commercial success of Beethoven’s life, with the composer presiding over an all-star band including fellow composers Spohr in the violins and Salieri, Hummel and Meyerbeer in the percussion section. It’s a reminder that Beethoven had the kind of celebrity pulling-power today reserved for film and rock stars.
Secondly, Swafford attempts to delve into Beethoven’s mental state — necessarily a much more speculative enterprise (though Beethoven’s torrid letters offer plenty of pointers), but a vital one. Thirdly, he puts Beethoven’s life in the context of his turbulent times. The Napoleonic wars started when Beethoven was in his early twenties and continued for 23 years. Brought up in liberal Bonn, steeped in masonic and particularly Illuminati ideals about liberty, fraternity and equality, Beethoven at first admired Napoleon, to the extent of dedicating the Eroica Symphony to him. And even to the end of his life (as his setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy in the Ninth Symphony showed), he clung to a naive belief that “all men are brothers”. Yet that became more and more detached from reality as he grew older, just as the composer himself increasingly withdrew into what Swafford calls his “raptus” (inner contemplation) to shut out the world.
And fourthly, of course, there is the music. Swafford examines Beethoven’s compositions in impressive detail. His contention is that Beethoven always had a picture or story in mind, even when composing his most abstract pieces, and this (probably correct) notion sometimes leads him to over-interpret pieces. Even so, Swafford — an American composer himself — rarely errs significantly, and some observations (how, for instance, Beethoven’s hack-work arranging hundreds of Scottish and Irish folk songs for a British publisher fed directly into the Seventh Symphony) bring genuinely fresh insight. It’s a book that sends you scurrying back to the music — and that must be the best accolade any composer biography can have.
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Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford, Faber & Faber, 1,104pp, £30. To buy this book for £24, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134