Beethoven The Music and the Life
by Lewis Lockwood
W.W. Norton & Co.
Stg£28
When a biography has a title such as “Beethoven, The Music and the Life” perhaps one would expect the emphasis to be on the music, with smaller details of the life thrown in for illustrative purposes. Lewis Lockwood though has attempted to write a book which is aimed at the general reader. Separate chapters are devoted to biography and to “critical discussion of the music”, and in the preface the author states his hope “that readers who care more about Beethoven’s life will also read those [chapters] that deal with works and genres; and that readers interested mainly in the music will cross the bridge to the biography”.
Alas, trying to be all things to all people is where this book falls down, because while there are indeed entire chapters which focus on particular areas of Beethoven’s actual musical output, these are the weakest part of the book and readers interested in a critical discussion of the music will be disappointed, while those readers interested in the biography without a basic classical music vocabulary may be lost.
Lewis Lockwood is the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University and along with the music of the Italian Renaissance, Beethoven is his area of expertise. A previous title of his, “Beethoven:Studies in the Creative Process” (Cambridge, 1992), won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. It is all the more surprising then that there are questions raised by many of the points he makes when discussing the music because there are inaccuracies. For instance, writing of the Piano sonatas of Opus 27 No 1in Eb and No 2 in c sharp minor (the famous “Moonlight”), the author mentions the cyclic return of material which occurs in No 1 in Eb, and then goes on to assert that “there is no return of thematic material in the ‘Moonlight’ ”. Here the author is mistaken, as the third movement of the “Moonlight” is made up of the very figurations which are used to such great effect in the first movement, and the cumulative top register notes which cross the span of the opening sentence of the third movement actually spell out the same motif (g sharp, c sharp, e), an effect which is used structurally to create the raison d’etre of the coda.
There are many moments of interest, though. I found it particularly intriguing that, writing of the 5th and 6th symphonies, Lockwood says “these two worlds...belong to systems that move at different speeds. Their relationships to musical time are entirely different” (p218). This is a tantalising thought, but one which the author leaves totally undeveloped.
Another interesting possibility was raised by the publisher’s use of a website on which to store musical examples in order not to clutter up the book with musical illustrations which might put off the general reader (www.wwnorton.com/trade//lockwood). Expecting some wonderfully arcane analyses (why else hide them from the general reader?) which would satisfy my thirst for detail, I visited the site to find 69 extracts from scores pertinent to the text as indicated, but no secrets reserved for analytical initiates (which, depending on your viewpoint, could be a good thing!). Neither are the extracts in a playable format.
In stylistic terms this book often becomes a little cloying. Consider the following written about the Symphony No. 3, the famous “Eroica” Symphony: “ The disintegration of the theme at the end [of the slow movement] signifies not the literal death of the hero, as it does a few years later at the end of Coriolanus , but that mourning and grief have reached a stage at which the theme itself can no longer be uttered in full but is reduced to broken whispers” (p 209). Ah! Me!
However the chapters which deal with the composer’s life are very stimulating, and the tightrope Beethoven often walked when trying to balance his abstract musical thought with the programmatic elements which often inspired them is discussed sympathetically and in detail. “As a tone poet he accepted and exploited music’s power to evoke nameable, identifiable externalities; as a pure musician, he rejoiced in composing music whose structural and expressive power reinforced its claim to autonomy” (p 268)
Some of the contemporary historical detail is fascinating, and particularly interesting was the description of music publishing technology at the time (p 92), and the ease with which pirate editions were made available once the composer became a hot commodity. The issue of the cause of his frequent illnesses is briefly alluded to in the wealth of references provided by the notes at the back (lead-poisoning is the leading candidate, apparently). The composer’s command of counterpoint is legendary and the book also relates how the elderly Haydn didn’t have the time (nor perhaps the inclination) to correct the young Beethoven’s counterpoint exercises, and how in consequence young Ludwig took lessons secretly from Schenk, and later (and less secretly) during Haydn’s absence in London in 1794, from Albrechtsberger.
Overall, this is a very readable book when it deals with historical aspects of the composer’s life, but in its devotion to the general reader, its attempt to balance critical discussion of the music with the needs of the layman’s vernacular means that if one does want to examine the composer’s music in any depth this book will, I suspect, fall short.
