Product Description

A reference book containing information about Beethoven's life and times. Features include a chronology of Beethoven's life and works, a list of works with commentaries, a who's who of contemporaries, historical and musical background and accounts of daily life from diaries and documents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #276990 in Books
• Published on: 1996-03-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 351 pages

Customer Reviews

A first-rate, readable reference to Beethoven's life/work
Every library should have one. This is undoubtedly the best reference book about Beethoven to come out in years, pulling together and ordering both facts and opinions, and drawing upon modern research as well as the time-honoured for its substance.

The co-authors are the British Drs. Anne-Louise Caldicott, Nicholas Marston and the American William Drabkin (based in England), whose various contributions are brought together under the reliable baton of Dr Barry Cooper, himself one of the foremost Beethoven scholars of recent times.

The content of the book itself is well laid out and logical: it is in sections, starting with biographical details and followed by invaluable material on the political, social, philosophical and musical environment of Beethoven's time (in many biogrpahies this is often hazy at best and assumed at worse, so its inclusion here is welcome). It then progresses through sections on source materials to a hefty section on the music itself. This consists of a full list of all published, unpublished and incomplete works - more often absent from otherwise useful books, followed by a classification of the music into types, with commentary. There is also a good critical review of biographers and researchers, and, in light of modern reconstruction of 'period' music, one of especial interest which deals with performance styles.

The authors write with genuine feeling and enthusiasm for their subject, but the style is blessedly unemotional, and the book no less fascinating as a result. The articles are readable and substantial without being weighty or turgid, and in a style accessible to non-scholars and those general readers with an interest in the man and his music but not necessarily in the minutiae of dates and events, etc. It is, however, primarily a book for the student or the serious enthusiast; despite its readability it has been designed as a work of reference and as such is not meant to be read from start to finish. It is a credit to the co-authors that they have managed to distil such a neat, clear end-product from the unimaginable mountains of material that exist on the subject of Beethoven.

How Beethoven is seen and appreciated by succeeding generations is almost a subject for dissertation in its own right. This book is a view of Beethoven at the end of the 20th century, and is in marked contrast to those of thirty or forty years ago. In the sixties, Beehoven the revolutionary, the iconoclast, the musical zeitgeist of liberty, equality and fraternity, was embraced as a man of the times, an honorary child of the sixties who would undoubtedly have supported the message of flower power had he been around; the view of him was up-beat; reverential, certainly, but on the whole joyous. The message of the Heiligenstadt Testament was played down, and more than enough ideas as to the identity of the Immortal Beloved (many of them absurd) were batted around. The climate has changed. In these cynical times, the embrace is considered, as is the reverence. Research and scholarship have advanced, new generations approach from different directions. The Ode to Joy is a surprising rather than an inevitable culmination of the man's life and work and the editor thoughtfully presents the latest thinking on the Immortal Beloved, but witholds his own opinion. The only thing that is no in doubt and has not been turned on its head is Beethoven's unassailable position as one of the greatest musicians (the greatest, in some views) the world has ever known.