Product Description

The connections between a great artist's life and work are subtle, complex, and often highly revealing. In the case of Beethoven, however, the standard approach has been to treat his life and his art separately. Now, Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative.
Cooper employs a strictly chronological approach that enables each work to be seen against the musical and biographical background from which it emerged. The result is a much closer confluence of life and work than is usually achieved, for two reasons. First, composition was Beethoven's central preoccupation for most of his life: "I live entirely in my music," he once wrote. Second, recent study of his many musical sketches has enabled a much clearer picture of his everyday compositional activity than was previously possible, leading to rich new insights into the interaction between his life and music. This volume concentrates on Beethoven's artistic achievements both by examining the origins of his works and by expert commentary on some of their most striking and original features. It also reexamines virtually all the evidence--from fictitious anecdotes right down to the translations of individual German words--to avoid recycling old errors. And it offers numerous new details derived from sketch studies and a new edition of Beethoven's correspondence.
Offering a wealth of fresh conclusions and intertwining life and work in illuminating ways, Beethoven will establish itself as the reference on one of the world's greatest composers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #906363 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 440 pages

From Booklist
His music was a period unto itself, for Beethoven built on the music of preceding eras and created his own styles. New tonal relationships between sections of a piece, formal innovations, rhythmic exploration, and challenging complexities are the hallmarks that set him apart from his contemporaries (Haydn, Rossini, and Salieri) and far beyond his predecessors (Bach, Handel, and Mozart). He placed his divine art above all else, but he was practical, composing on commissions and for publication to support himself and, after his brother Carl's death, his nephew Karl. His humanism and the need for interaction with his peers always successfully countered his occasional coarseness and irascibility. Through extensive analysis of Beethoven's most significant works, Cooper shows how his creativity developed and how events in his life influenced his compositions. This balanced biography that integrates Beethoven's feelings and motivations with his music belongs wherever there are those who enjoy the great melodies, structures, and harmonic complexities of this unique figure in the world of classical music. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Cooper has produced a comprehensive and valuable reference source.... In addition to the sizeable bibliography, a detailed list of Beethoven's compositions, a few illustrations and numerous musical examples, there is a 'calendar'...giving a year-by-year summary of Beethoven's activity against a backdrop of other events in the world of music, and there is also a very useful 'personalia' listing more than a hundred individuals of significance in Beethoven's life, with concise but pertinent background."--Richard Freed, The Washington Post
"Barry Cooper has crafted a thoroughly refreshing and reliable new biography for the 21st century. He seamlessly recounts the story of Beethoven's life and music with clarity and vigour, avoiding both hero worship and hostile attempts to tumble the composer from some imaginary throne. Cautious where caution is warranted yet perfectly willing to hypothesize, Cooper sets just the right tone in reporting and reflecting on modern Beethoven scholarship." --William R. Meredith, Director, The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies (www.sjsu.edu/depts/Beethoven)

About the Author

Barry Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester and author of Beethoven and the Creative Process and Beethoven's Folksong Settings.

Customer Reviews

A New Study of Beethoven
The work of great artists is inexhaustible. In Beethoven's case, his music remains a stunning achievement. His achievement as a composer, together with the nature of his character, his deafness, his thwarted love affairs, and his relationships to his musical predecessors and successors, has led to a fascination with him and to a literature that is likely to be written and rewritten as long as people listen to his music. As is Beethoven's music, and is is history, Beethoven's life and character, and the means by which one is to understand them, are open to a multitude of approaches.

In his Preface, Cooper writes (at x) that "surprisingly little is known for certain about Beethoven." He points out that some studies, such as Maynard Solomon's fine biography that appeared shortly before Cooper's own, featured a psychoanalytical approach to Beethoven that attempted a fuller explanation of Beethoven's character than those that had been attempted by other writers at the cost of questionable psychological theory and speculation in the face of a scarcity of evidence. Cooper endeavors to write a biography that holds closer to the known facts about Beethoven's life and to emphasize those facts that may shed life on his activities as a composer.

Cooper also spends a great deal of his book analysing the music itself. There are lengthy accounts of the origins of the symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas,songs, masses, of Fidelio, of the folksongs and other parts of Beethoven's output. There are generous musical analyses and quotations. I was particularly impressed with Cooper's attention to some of Beethoven's work that is not as well known as it deserves to be, such as the Opus 7 piano sonata, the Creatures of Prometheus Ballet, and the oratorio, Christ on the Mount of Olives. These works are analyzed insightfully and lovingly.

As Cooper acknowledges, his study is perhaps less detailed than is Solomon's on Beethoven's life. His book does, however, offer its own perspective on Beethoven. Broadly speaking, Cooper is more sympathetic to certain aspects of Beethoven's actions than has been the case with many other writers. Unlike Solomon, Cooper takes Beethoven's side, for the most, part, in his dispute with his sister-in-law over the custody of Karl, Beethoven's nephew. Also, he disputes Solomon's account that Beethoven frequented prostitutes. In both these matters, I am not sure that Cooper has the better of the evidence. The portrayal endeavors to see Beethoven favorably without making him something different than a human being with fallibilities.

I also found interesting Cooper's discussion of Beethoven's religious views. Beethoven's views on such matters, as is the case with the views of any thinking person on these matters, were highly personal and difficult for a third party, such as a biographer writing 250 years after the fact, to ascertain and expound. Cooper acknowledges that Beethoven was not for most of his life a practicing Christian but finds him a devout believer in God as the source of human morality. Solomon's account emphasizes more Beethoven's predilection towards the Enlightenment. A difficult question, and I suspect that Beethoven had components of both views in him.

Too many recent biographers feel a need to deprecate their subjects. This is definitely not Cooper's approach to Beethoven. (For that matter, it was not Solomon's approach either.) Cooper writes of Beethoven that "despite much sniping from twentieth-century critics, his reputation as a giant among composers remains intact as we enter the twenty-first century." (Preface x)

This book is not hero-worship but it presents an inspiring and historically plausible account of a composer and a man who is worthy to be revered for his vision, attainments and character. This book will be treasured by those who love Beethoven's music. May it encourage the reader to become acquainted or reaquainted with these works of the human spirit.

Beethoven Scholarship at It's Best
This surprisingly engaging and informative biography of Beethoven is written as a continuous narrative history, and is certainly a work that any Beethoven enthusiast would wish to have in the library. At some 400 pages of small text, the work is a carefully researched and highly detailed piece which presents a comprehensive portrait of this musical genius. Beethoven "comes alive" in the work, and one forgets that the work is describing a person who passed away some two centuries ago.

The work integrates Beethoven's personal life with a critical look at his musical work. This approach allows us to not only understand the entire opus of collected works, but to place individual pieces into the unfolding context of Beethoven's life. There is no sparing of details, but the book is nevertheless able to convey these details in a manner that doesn't require us to be musical experts to understand the descriptions. We also find in the text some eminently interesting details, such Beethoven's estimation of George Frederic Handel as the greatest of composers, a preference for Streicher pianos, and Beethoven's wrestling with the "finale problem" that kept his "Symphony in C," now sometimes nicknamed "Symphony 0," permanently unfinished. But these are just interesting notes in a symphony of words which Cooper has put together for us: the entire work is an immense musical play which we observe with great interest and pleasure.

The book also provides some very helpful informational addenda which serve as continuing reference for our Beethoven studies. These include a comprehensive "calendar" of Beethoven's life from 1770 to 1827 (including for each entry the year, Beethoven's current age, the event, and contemporary musicians and musical events), a comprehensive listing of Beethoven's works (including WoO, Hess, and opus numbers as appropriate), and a small personality glossary describing key people in Beethoven's life.

The book is an easy recommend to the Beethoven enthusiast, the music student, or the Beethoven scholar. The work easily stands on its own as a solid piece of historical scholarship, but when coupled with a good collection of Beethoven recordings (say, the Deutsche Grammophon "Complete Beethoven Edition" CD-ROM series), the work serves as a continuing reference for anyone wishing to know more about Beethoven's music.

Filling a gap
As a Beethoven fan I was initially attracted to the cover of this book, until I discovered its contents. The amount and quality of information is outstanding and Barry Cooper doesn't spare any words to guide us through the life, creative process and personality of this incredible composer. In a nutshell, a book not to be missed by any classical music enthusiast.