Beethoven

An exemplary "entry-level" introduction to Beethoven's life and music, this little book is still in print* almost a century after its first publication. Sullivan rarely assumes musical knowledge or expertise on the part of the reader but discusses Beethoven's major works in terms of what they mean to us and how they reflect the composer's deepening understanding of existence in response to the crises in his life.

Inevitably the book shows its age here and there: Sullivan tends to see humanity as evolving towards some higher ideal; and there's a Victorian whiff to his chiding Wagner for depicting eroticism. Some readers will question his evaluations of J. S. Bach, Mozart and Shakespeare vis-a-vis Beethoven. Others may find outmoded his division of Beethoven's career into three main periods. Some of the biographical details can now be called into question. But these are minor quibbles. His discussions of the works themselves are simple, eloquent and illuminating ("a fierce joyousness" in the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony, "sorrow without hope, sorrow for what is irrevocable, and a longing for what has not been and never can be" in the Cavatina of the B-flat quartet, Op 130; Sullivan does find more in the slow movement of the third Rasoumovsky quartet than I've usually heard in performance).

Juxtaposing his interpretations of the music with accounts of the main events in Beethoven's life, Sullivan convincingly argues the case for a composer of intense tragic power, "more than Bacchic" joy, and intense and elusive spirituality. (John Park)

About the author:

John William Navin Sullivan (1886-1937) was a popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven. He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot. (wikipedia.org)