Briefly recounts the life of a composer who wrote beautiful sonatas and symphonies despite tragic personal problems.

“An ideal ‘first book’ on Beethoven” from one of the world’s most eminent classical music aficionados (Booklist).
 
Beethoven scholar and classical radio host John Suchet has had a lifelong, ardent interest in the man and his music. Here, in his first full-length biography, Suchet illuminates the composer’s difficult childhood, his struggle to maintain friendships and romances, his...

Just before his death, Sanford Friedman completed this, his final novel, something entirely different from anything he, or for that matter anyone, had written before - Conversations with Beethoven, a moving meditation on greatness and pettiness, vulnerability and genius, that is as elegiac as it is witty and engaging.

Introduces the early life of the Austrian composer, offers a brief guide to listening to his works in different musical forms, and suggests related activities.

Beethoven's 250th anniversary falls at the end of a long period in which he has been under constant, relentless attacks by postmodern musicology. Scholars like Editha and Richard Sterba, Maynard Solomon, Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer and others have speculated wildly along the lines of the modern "-isms," spreading falsehoods rather than pursuing new truths about Beethoven. Even his music, once hailed as a guiding light of humanity, has been under...