Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph; A Biography by Jan Swafford (review)

Beethoven was a man of contradictions. Generous to a fault, he was often petty and could be duplicitous in his business affairs. He cared deeply for his nephew Karl but often treated him miserably. He made supreme declarations of faith in his music but disdained church dogma. He devoted himself to women he could not attain and, most heartrendingly of all, to an art that for much of his adulthood, he was unable to experience.

These contradictions come to the fore in Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, a vivid and sympathetic portrayal of Beethoven’s life and music. His biography joins an impressive corpus of English-language biographies that includes those by Maynard Solomon (1977 Maynard Solomon (1998), William Kinderman (1995 William Kinderman (2009), David Wyn Jones (1998), Lewis Lockwood (2003), and Barry Cooper (2008), among others. It draws on several of these, but distinguishes itself in its more comprehensive scope and overall tone, geared more for music lovers than for scholars or performers. This is not to say that the book lacks scholarly rigor, only that much of the nitty-gritty—both biographical and musical—is relegated to the copious endnotes section, and that the ebb and flow of the text is considerably more narrative compared to these earlier biographies.

Written, according to the author, in the spirit of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s magisterial Life of Ludwig van Beethoven (the Victorian-era biography that, in its most recent edition by Elliot Forbes, remains unsurpassed for richness of detail and documentary rigor), Swafford’s book aims to present an unbiased view of its subject that prefers “objective fact” to “interpretation” (p. xv). Elusive though this goal may be, the book deftly navigates Beethoven’s family history, political environment, and professional life to create a rich portrait of an individual whose reality has often been obscured by his legacy. Swafford’s handling of Beethoven’s Bonn years is especially effective and sets the tone for the biography. Rather than a mere prelude to the more musically interesting Vienna years, the Bonn chapters serve to establish Beethoven’s lifelong investment in the ideals of the German Aufklärung, ideals that—as Swafford details—stayed with Beethoven throughout his career and marked him as an Enlightenment thinker in an increasingly romantic and politically repressive world.

The importance of Beethoven’s Bildung is echoed in Swafford’s conception of his music. Beethoven was not so much a revolutionary as a “radical evolutionary” who “based much of what he did on tradition, models, and authorities” without ever intending “to overthrow the past” (p. 365). Swafford supports this notion through clear and at times extensive analyses of individual works that occasionally make reference to Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and others (although, as he admits in the introduction, he does not “play the influences game as much as many writers do” [p. xvii]). A noted composer in his own right, Swafford brings his professional expertise to bear on his analyses, several of which proceed from a composer’s-eye perspective. The lengthy analysis of the “Eroica” (chapter 17), for instance, shifts into present tense, makes frequent reference to the sketches, and involves a bit of creative speculation about Beethoven’s compositional process. Purists may balk at the somewhat florid literary style of these passages, but they are arguably effective in simulating the creative moment for the reader.

Swafford treats the complexities of Beethoven’s life with the sure hand of an experienced biographer (his previous writings include biographies of Ives and Brahms). To give just one example, in light of the seemingly endless debates about the identity of the Immortal Beloved, it is refreshing to read his nonpartisan take on the matter: “My treatment of the Immortal Beloved mystery in this chapter gives an overview of the various theories [mainly those concerning Josephine Deym, Antonie Brentano, and Bettina Brentano], all of which amount to many pages of reasoning and speculation teetering on a handful...