Beethoven’s Triumphs

Jan Swafford’s biography of Beethoven, Anguish and Triumph, recounts the composer’s physical ailments in squirm-inducing detail: “deafness, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, a variety of infections, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice and at the end chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.” 

The NYTBR reviewer adds that “When Beethoven’s body wasn’t betraying him, he was destroying himself, sabotaging his most important relationships, succumbing to destructive obsessions. Between these willful and fateful destructions, he squeezed out the miracle of his music.”

Impressive, but not as impressive as the musical achievements themselves, where Beethoven seems to triumph over the limits of the material he uses. In the reviewer’s words, “Beethoven preferred musical ideas of almost unusable simplicity, things that seem pre-musical, or ur-musical, like chords, or scales — not music, but the stuff music is made of. Imagine a building constructed of blueprints, or a novel based on the word ‘the.’”

The result is a combination of freedom and control that is unprecedented in music: “By the late years, an uncanny duality develops: On the one hand, the sense that Beethoven might do anything , harmonically, that he would venture to the far ends of the musical earth; on the other, always there, rock-solid, the triads, the tonic and the dominant, the familiar landmarks of classical harmony. The sense of the world dissolving into the modern, the ground disappearing beneath your feet, and yet . . . the ground reassuringly remains. Beethoven somehow gets to have it both ways — absolute liberty and total control.”