Beethoven is one of those historical figures so famous that everything worth knowing about him has been known for a long time. I am tempted to say that little of much value has been added to his biographical record since 1879, when Alexander Wheelock Thayer published the last of three magnificent volumes titled "Ludwig van Beethovens Leben" (the German version of a work only later recast in English). That remains largely true in narrative terms, but modern, more musicologically trained scholars have made their own essential contributions, none more so than Maynard Solomon, whose "Beethoven" (second revised edition, 1998) and numerous other books and essays on the deaf genius merit the highest praise.

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

By Jan Swafford
Houghton Mifflin, 1,077 pages, $40
A 1804-5 portrait of Beethoven by Willibrord Joseph Mähler. Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
The trouble such writers have to face, though, is that the more technical their work, the fewer people will read it—even though Beethoven is, with the possible exception of Franz Liszt, the most biographically interesting of all great composers. You cannot do him justice unless you talk about his enharmonic modulations and syncopated sforzandi, but as soon as you do so, persons lacking the rudiments of music theory will protest much as Bertie Wooster did to his girlfriend's readings in applied ethics—"not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head."
Most musical biographers, moreover, are musicians themselves, and that makes them, paradoxically, at once the best and the least qualified people to write about their art. Music is, as Felix Mendelssohn remarked, a superior language, incommunicable in any other medium than its own. Words cannot hope to convey more than a faint essence of its power. An expert may accurately observe that the heart-stopping effect of the orchestra's response to the soloist's opening statement in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto is a matter of B major following G major. But no matter how many adjectives are added in further description, they will not raise the hairs on any reader's neck—as the music itself does every time this exquisite change of harmony steals upon the ear.
That strain again! It had a dying fall. Alas, Shakespeare's plaint is true of the herculean attempt of Jan Swafford to articulate, over the course of nearly 1,000 pages of a new biography, what it is about Beethoven's life and work that continues to hold us in thrall nearly two centuries after his death. Maynard Solomon and that other fine contemporary biographer, Lewis Lockwood, tell the same story at 425 and 489 pages respectively—while not condescending to the reader as much as Mr. Swafford, who possibly thinks that their academic style is not "popular" enough. In an age where music is no longer taught in schools, he may be right. But what about his style?
Before discussing that, I should emphasize that Mr. Swafford is himself an excellent scholar. The author of biographies of Brahms and Charles Ives, he is a composer by trade, and this shows when he writes about questions of instrumentation. His auditory sensitivity is acute and his vocabulary equal to the task—as when he explains just why the string textures of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op. 70, No. 2 are so "oddly subdued."
Unfortunately, however, his ear turns to tin when he writes narrative prose. The style of this massive book is so relentlessly conversational, at times downright chatty, that, unless you enjoy a biographer who insists on wrapping a friendly arm over your shoulder and saying things like, "Well, after all . . . a storm happens," you might prefer the more formal company of Thayer—whose Beethoven biography is available in an authoritative modern version edited by Elliot Forbes.
Mr. Swafford begins with a long, self-referential introduction ("I am neither conservative nor liberal") that makes it difficult for him to sound like an objective chronicler once he gets around to telling Beethoven's story. The early paragraphs of his first chapter are overimagined: "In the freezing entrance of St. Remigius, the family watches as the priest makes the sign of the cross on the baby's head and his breast as he mewls in his grandfather's arms. . . . To complete the third exorcism he moistens his thumb with spittle and, in the form of the cross, touches the left and right ear of the child, proclaiming 'Adaperire.' "
By page two, Maria and Johann van Beethoven have begun to "shift on their feet in the cold." Informed readers may do the same in their seats, suspecting that about the only words in this account that can be documented are "St. Remigius"—that being the Catholic church in Bonn where young Ludwig was baptized on Dec. 17, 1770. We have to take the mewling, and the spittle, on trust.
As Mr. Swafford proceeds to cover the narrative distance between this northern Catholic rite and the scene 56 years later in Vienna, when more than 10,000 mourners followed Beethoven's body to the grave, he never again writes quite so fictitiously. On occasion, he is capable of simple eloquence, such as his rationale for the similarities among themes in the piano sonata Op. 10, No. 3: "What the D major Sonata suggests, in terms philosophical and psychological, is that the material of comedy and tragedy is the same, that joy and suffering are made of the same things."
If only he had elsewhere confined himself, like Messrs. Solomon and Lockwood, to the recorded facts of his subject's life—which are abundant, because Beethoven was the first composer to be publicly recognized as a history-making celebrity. (What we know about Mozart is mostly private information gleaned from posthumous study of his letters.) Mr. Swafford is so determined to make the most of every datum, and fill in every lacuna, that the dread phrases must have . . . would have . . . perhaps it seemed numbingly recur. A sentence such as "Beethoven may have been in love with Lorchen at this or some point, but probably not helplessly so" tells us nothing, speculates everything.
When attempting the almost impossible task of trying to describe musical form in colloquial terms, the author often sounds like one of those annoyingly jovial mikesters who present "Live at Lincoln Center" on PBS: "The finale [of the Second Symphony] begins with an absurd giant hiccup that dissolves into skittering comedy. . . . Believe it or not, this is actually the rondo theme; the hiccup is developed diligently. The second part of the opening section is flowing, more of an A theme proper, but the hiccup cannot be forsworn. . . . The spirit of fun wins the day, and the curtain comes down on a scene of laughter with troubles resolved and glasses raised."
After reading about the above hiccup, I have to say that I was nervous about what word Mr. Swafford would choose to describe the deep, vibrant bassoon notes in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. As it happens, he discreetly calls them grunts.
The question arises, however, as to whether Beethoven wasn't being deliberately vulgar by scoring so grotesque a B-flat after the chorus has maintained a long, high, seraphic concord in F. If so, he merely went to a further extreme than Bach, who in the last of the "Goldberg Variations" inserted the tune of a folksong lamenting the effects of eating too much cabbage.
There are plenty of other such juxtapositions of the sublime and the earthy in Beethoven's works, some of them perverse, if not pathological. Mr. Swafford is persuasive in arguing that the composer who added the words " O Freunde, nicht diese Töne" ("Oh friends, not these sounds") to Schiller's so-called Ode to Joy was, for all his affected humanism, a lifelong loner, so unable to relate to other people's feelings as to suggest a modern-day diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome: "[Beethoven] never truly learned to understand the world outside music. . . . Nor did he ever really understand love."
This was evident early on, long before the shroud of deafness further isolated him. Helene von Breuning, the wealthy Bonn widow who gave young Ludwig his first introduction to high society, used to tease him about his tendency to fall into a dreamy "raptus" whenever music filled his head. Hence the long list of occasions when Beethoven unfeelingly hurt those who loved him and whom he loved (or imagined he loved). Hence the stupid puns and incomprehensible jokes—not to mention the fits of paranoia—that make his letters read, on occasion, like the maunderings of a madman.
Yet such is the mystery of creativity that the madder he got, the more lucid his musical intelligence became. Already at age 19 he was capable of writing a cantata in memory of Emperor Joseph II so masterly that Johannes Brahms, discovering the manuscript almost a century later, was awed. "It is Beethoven through and through! The beautiful and noble pathos, sublime in its feeling and imagination, the intensity, perhaps violent in its expression." Mr. Swafford surprisingly calls this work (which also impressed Joseph Haydn) "overscored." On the contrary, its central Humanitatsmelodie is a miracle of subtle sonics—too subtle, in fact, for any recording yet made. A gorgeous solo soprano aria extolling the Enlightenment is gradually enhanced, strand by aural strand, by other voices and instruments blending in at unobtrusive moments, so that, listening, we never know quite when the singular becomes the universal.
Beethoven on this evidence was already a mature composer when he arrived in Vienna in December 1790, purportedly for a temporary spell of study with Haydn. Mr. Swafford makes clear that the young man's fierce desire for independence, as well as the political and military expansionism of Revolutionary France, precluded any chance that he would ever return to court life as a powdered and liveried musicus in the employ of the Elector of Cologne. For the rest of his life Beethoven lived in and around Vienna, a short, swarthy, frenetically energetic bundle of eccentricities, marrying no one, slowly going stone deaf (the first tinnitic symptoms afflicted him at age 28), drinking too much, often ailing with agonizing abdominal disease, alternately craving intimacy and rejecting it, terrified that it might crowd the freedom he needed to compose. Apart from his mysterious affair with an "Immortal Beloved" (Mr. Swafford is inclined to think that she was sexy Bettina Brentano, whose breasts Goethe once fondled and kissed) and a futile attempt to adopt his own nephew as a substitute "son," Beethoven's only real passions were for music and nature—as can be heard in every chord of the Pastoral Symphony. His deafness is conventionally described as a tragedy. One might argue that he made the most of it, retreating into the silent chamber of his cerebellum to devise some of the most uniquely beautiful sounds in the repertory.
Mr. Swafford has spent 10 years writing "Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph" and is honest about his debt to the studies of such specialists as Theodore Albrecht, Barry Cooper, Tia DeNora, Joseph Kerman and Warren Kirkendale—not to mention old Thayer. (Time and again, when you check the endnotes after a particularly good anecdote, you'll find it ascribed to Thayer/Forbes.) Yet there is none of the primary research one might expect in a book this size. Quotations from Beethoven's letters derive from the familiar 1961 translation by Emily Anderson, with only a glancing reference to the definitive seven-volume German edition, numbering some 1,770 holographs, completed 16 years ago. The absence of a separate index of Beethoven's works is another defect. They do not even appear under his name in the general index. Where to find a pointer to his arguable masterpiece, the C-sharp minor quartet, Op. 131? As it happens, under "String," where several quartets are listed but not, for example, the one in B-flat, Op. 130. You have to search for that, bizarrely, under "Galitzin," that being the name of the Russian aristocrat who commissioned it.
These are minor faults, unlikely to bother the average reader. We can thank Mr. Swafford for apparently consulting every Beethoven-related book, monograph and article ever published in English, right down to an 1848 translation of Christoph Christian Sturm's "Betrachtungen über die Werkes Gottes in der Natur" ("Reflections on the Works of God in Nature"). Beethoven's pantheistic philosophy was greatly influenced by Sturm, and Mr. Swafford's pages of exegesis from this book are revelatory and moving. Quoting Sturm's observation that "every thing in the universe is connected together and concurs to the preservation and perfection of the whole," he adds: "The microcosm of a musical form, Beethoven would surely have agreed, aspires to the divine unity of the macrocosm." Here, for once, his speculative adverb is unchallengeable.
—Mr. Morris is the author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Beethoven. His writings on music and literature are collected in "This Living Hand and Other Essays."