Beethoven, Ludwig van Books

Beethoven

Maynard Solomon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not Really 2 out of 5 stars.
10 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Not really a biography, more a lengthy attempt to psychoanalyze the composer. Surprisingly little about his actual life. BUT such things as a whole chapter about Solomon's guess (all "Beethoven Scholars" have one) as to the identity of the Immortal Beloved, to whom Beethoven wrote (but may not have mailed) an ardent love letter -- then no real attempt to make this supposed relationship relevant to the man's life and work. More fuzzy stuff about Beethoven's attempt to become guardian of his nephew. Spare me.

If this is the "definative biography of Beethoven," lord help us.

The definitive biography. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Thousands of books have been written about Beethoven, but this is the DEFINITIVE biography. Readers interested in the man behind the music will find a wealth of information and those with a deep understanding of his music will appreciate the chapters devoted to works composed during each phase of Beethoven's life. Finally, if you have ever heard of the Heiligenstadt Testament or the Immortal Beloved and would like to learn more, the chapters devoted to these subjects are the best. And no, the Immortal Beloved was NOT who the movie with Gary Oldman would have us believe.

Editorial Review:

Softcover edition of this national bestseller! Hailed as a masterpiece for its original interpretations of Beethoven's life and music. This edition takes into account the latest information and literature. Includes a 30-page bibliographical essay, numerous illustrations and a full-color pictorial biography of the composer.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)

Edmund Morris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston.

Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

Classical Style

Charles Rosen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Classic writing about Classical music 5 out of 5 stars.
23 of 25 people found this review helpful.

Charles Rosen by now has attained a place among musical analysts on a par with the likes of Tovey and Grout, though his style is very different from either of these luminaries. Taking the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as the pinnacle of the musical style that developed in the late eighteenth-century, Rosen explains how around 1775 there was a decisive shift away from the High Baroque style of Bach and Handel, and why this new music was different. After his general introduction to the style most of the book explores different genres, symphony, opera, concerto and string quartet among them, to create a lucid and multi-faceted picture of how these three great composers approached and solved common musical and formal problems. The new edition adds a preface that addresses criticisms of the original book and an additional late chapter on Beethoven.

Rosen's writing, though it can be dense and repetitive, at its best is unmatched in its ability to relate analysis to what actually is heard by a listener. To this end, an ability to read and understand the copious and detailed musical examples is essential to fully grasping his points--this book is not for the casual amateur. But to those willing to do the work, The Classical Style remains as richly rewarding after three-plus decades as when it first appeared. As another reviewer has mentioned, it is a book one returns to again and again simply for the sheer pleasure of reading it.

Editorial Review:

A greatly expanded edition of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece by a world-class pianist and writer on music. This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is basic to any study of Classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language. For this expanded edition, now available in paperback for the first time, Rosen has provided a new, 64-page chapter on the later years of Beethoven and the musical conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The author has also written an extensive new preface in which he responds to other writers who have commented on his ideas.

Beethoven's Letters

Ludwig van Beethoven

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

BEETHOVEN "A Look Behind The Notes" 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Beethoven's Letters
As a pianist, teacher, adjudicator, examiner, critic and author, I am often presented with performances of Beethoven's works that offer no insight or understanding of Beethoven the man or his music! When giving master classes, I encourage students to read his letters and analyze his music before attempting to perform it. Most consider Beethoven an unpleasant, angry, reclusive human being! Beethoven's letters prove these thoughts to be totally invalid! When writing to his brothers (Heiligenstadt Testament),Beethoven shows an essence of lament because he is so distraught about the false opinions of others toward him. In his letter's we find the true essence of this great man.
Beethoven was a man of morality, truth, and beauty very much like Schubert. Beethoven's deep love of nature is well-known and well documented in his letters and shows in his music too! He was a deeply religious man. Beethoven's attitude may have been more of conventional Catholic ecclesiastical views, but as his letters show, there are countless evidences of his spirituality.
In Beethoven's letter's the fundamental differences are clear. I feel the most important ones are these:
Purity. There is never one single moment of something demonic or unhealthy in his music.
Dignity. He is always completely honest in his music. And there is never a trace of something that might be interpreted as self pity. Pain and sorrow, yes, but nothing to suggest that he ever felt sorry for himself.
His letter's convey a very good guess that Beethoven's deafness may have been a result of his attempts to press his excellent hearing sense to the extreme in order to gain the ultimate understanding of music! The reading of Beethoven's letters is paramount for those who truly want to know the essence of the man and how to approach performing his music!

Author: Raymond Vacchino M.Mus.(MT) A.Mus. L.R.S.M. Licentiate (hon.)

Editorial Review:

of Beethoven’s most candid letters dealing with such topics as his deafness, his declining health, other composers and their influence, his own work. 15 illustrations.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers)

Mike Venezia

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An entertaining juvenile biography of the great Ludwig Van 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Mike Venezia's Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series tends to focus on biographies rather than music appreciation because unlike his companion series on the World's Greatest Artists you cannot include a sonata the way you can a reproduction of a painting. However, for Ludwig Van Beethoven the author/illustrator makes an exception. This volume begins with an appreciation for how Beethoven changed the sound of music (no more party music). Within that context Venezia provides the expected biography, complete with historic ethics and paintings as well as those funny cartoons; just think Beethoven as the Liberace (if you are over 50) or Elton John (if you are under 50) of his day. There is also a photograph of his eyeglasses and metal ear trumpets. However, Venezia only mentions a handful of specific works by Beethoven, touching on how the 3rd symphony represented Napoleon, the four-note theme of the 5th Symphony, and going into some depth on the 6th Pastoral Symphony (but no mention of the glorious 9th Symphony or his other masterworks). Still, I appreciate the attempt to get more into Beethoven's music than he has done in other volumes of this series, which covers not only the great classic composers like Handel and Mozart, but also contemporary composers from Aaron Copland and George Gerswhin to Duke Ellington and the Beatles. As always, the recommendation is for young readers to have listened to some of Beethoven's masterpieces before, during and after reading this engaging juvenile biography and mini-music appreciation lesson.

Editorial Review:

The author/illustrator of the highly successful Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series lends his creative talents to another fun, informative series, this one featuring world-famous composers.

Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Lewis Lockwood

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A fresh look at Beethoven's life, career, and milieu highlighting his development as a composer.

In this brilliant portrayal of the world's most famous composer, eminent Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood interweaves his subject's musical and biographical dimensions and places them in their historical and artistic contexts. Written for the lay reader, the book describes the special problems Beethoven faced as a highly gifted artist who fulfilled his destiny as Mozart's main successor while remaining a true, rebellious original. It sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and demonstrates their effects on his music. Finally, it turns to the composer in his last years, with great achievements behind him, surmounting the crisis of finding still further artistic paths by which to continue. Also, by providing glimpses into the composer's sketchbooks and autograph manuscripts, Lockwood allows us to gain substantial insights into Beethoven's compositional methods.

In a publishing first, musically literate readers will find some one hundred notated music examples on a special Web site. 50 illustrations, 8 music examples.

Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

Russell Martin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beethoven's death. By the time he was buried, Beethoven's head had been nearly shorn by the many people who similarly had wanted a lasting memento of the great man. Such was his powerful effect on all those who had heard his music.

For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, and perhaps was destined to end up sequestered in a bank vault, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, during the darkest days of the Second World War. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. Who gave him the hair, and why? And what was the fate of those refugees, holed up in the attic of Gilleleje's church?

After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are startling, and are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence.

In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, an Indiana Jones-like tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science.

An astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.

Beethoven (Master Musicians Series)

Barry Cooper

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The connections between a great artist's life and work are subtle, complex, and often highly revealing. In the case of Beethoven, however, the standard approach has been to treat his life and his art separately. Now, Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative.
Cooper employs a strictly chronological approach that enables each work to be seen against the musical and biographical background from which it emerged. The result is a much closer confluence of life and work than is usually achieved, for two reasons. First, composition was Beethoven's central preoccupation for most of his life: "I live entirely in my music," he once wrote. Second, recent study of his many musical sketches has enabled a much clearer picture of his everyday compositional activity than was previously possible, leading to rich new insights into the interaction between his life and music. This volume concentrates on Beethoven's artistic achievements both by examining the origins of his works and by expert commentary on some of their most striking and original features. It also reexamines virtually all the evidence--from fictitious anecdotes right down to the translations of individual German words--to avoid recycling old errors. And it offers numerous new details derived from sketch studies and a new edition of Beethoven's correspondence.
Offering a wealth of fresh conclusions and intertwining life and work in illuminating ways, Beethoven will establish itself as the reference on one of the world's greatest composers.

Beethoven`s Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion

Charles Rosen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Beethoven's piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people. In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven's youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812–1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s. Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven's sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today's audience, Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humor of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians, or professional pianists.

Inside Beethoven's Quartets: History, Performance, Interpretation

Lewis Lockwood, Joel Smirnoff, Ronald Copes, Samuel Rhodes, Joel Krosnick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, the signal achievement of “that noble genre,” have rewarded the engagement of scholars, performers, and audiences for almost two hundred years. This book and its accompanying recording invite you to experience three of these profound and beautiful works of music from the inside, with a leading Beethoven scholar and a premier performing ensemble as your guides. Lewis Lockwood provides historical and biographical background along with musical analysis, drawing on the most important insights of recent scholarship on Beethoven’s life and works. The members of the Juilliard Quartet share the fruits of decades of performing and teaching these compositions through annotated scores and recordings of the first movements of three representative quartets, including the rarely heard original version of opus 18 no. 1. And all parties join in lively and illuminating conversations that range from details of bowing and articulation to Beethoven’s development as a composer to the social history of the nineteenth century. Inside Beethoven’s Quartets illustrates how scholarly knowledge can inform a performance, as well as how performers’ interpretive choices can illuminate this sublime music.

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