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by Edmund Morris

ISBN: 0007213700
Author: Edmund Morris
Publisher: HarperPress (2007)
Language: English
Pages: 256
ePub: 1305 kb
Fb2: 1584 kb
Rating: 4.3
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Category: Art and Photo
Subcategory: Music

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even . His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. A lifelong devotee, Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence-a gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints

Beethoven: The Universal Composer. Beethoven is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins’ Eminent Lives series of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer.

Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of. .Beethoven: The Universal Composer Atlas books Eminent lives.

Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Издание: иллюстрированное, перепечатанное.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity .

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. A lifelong devotee, Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligenceâ?a gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music, whose grandeur.

Edmund Morris' biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, part of the "Eminent Lives" series, is delightful. Edmund Morris has written biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He also plays piano, studies music, and has been examining Beethoven for decades and decades. The combination works very well here. Edmund Morris's highly readable brief biography, "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" tries, in a straighforward way, to explain the sources of the inspiration that listeners have found and continue to find in Beethoven's music. Morris's book is part of a series. This is the third biography of Beethoven I’ve read and each of the three books might as well have been about a completely different person. Harper Collins Publishers, New York. Perhaps the reason for this is that there is so much material that any biographer picks and chooses what he wants and can pretty well end up wherever he wants to go.

Title: Beethoven Author: Morris, Edmund Publisher: Harpercollins Publication Date: 2010/02/09 Number of Pages: 243 Binding Type: PAPERBACK Library of Congress: oc2010045750 Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives). Get specific details about this product from customers who own it. Back.

Beethoven : The Universal Composer . Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Dutch) is one of America's most distinguished biographers, known for his rich, compulsively readable prose style. His biography of Beethoven, one of the most admired composers in the history of music, is above all a study of genius in action, of one of the few giants of Western culture. Beethoven is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins' "Eminent Lives" series of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.

HardCover. Pub Date :2007-03-05 Pages: 256 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Edmund Morris interweaves the personal history of the worlds most famous composer with an insightful exploration of the way Beethovens life was reflected and embodied in his genius and his music.Eminent Lives is an exciting and groundbreaking series that pairs great biographers. historians and novelists with iconic subjects. building on a biographical tradition that can be traced back to Aubreys Brief Lives. Dr Johnsons Lives of the Poets and Lytton Stracheys Eminent Victorians. To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant. wrote Strachey. That. surely. is the first duty of the biographer.Edmund Morris. the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethove...

Comments: (7)

Ungall

I am a huge fan of Morris's Teddy Roosevelt books. He's a throwback to old-line Romantic historians with substantive research, a grand way with storytelling, and a grand, musical prose. Apparently, he's also a music scholar who has dived deep into Beethoven for decades. So why my disappointment?

As his introduction makes clear, he intends his book for the general reader rather than for the specialist. Unfortunately, this isn't a book for beginners or for those who know only the nicknamed symphonies and sonatas. He assumes at least a familiarity with the scores of the pieces he talks about. For example, the first work he deals with is the early Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II, which I argue most general readers don't know at all. Indeed, there aren't many recordings of it, at least on the US market. His comments may be apt, but he hasn't established sufficient foundation for them. This damages much of the book, since he finds vestiges of the cantata in later works, thus giving the argument all the substance of cotton candy. There's also a good deal of jumping around chronologically. If you don't know general European history or have no clue about Beethoven's life (other than he became deaf), then you may have to solve a jigsaw puzzle of a time line.

However, the book's opening is wonderful -- Morris at his best -- about the aftermath of a Boston storm. We get to spend company with a capacious mind and a prose master. If only ... At other times, Morris counts on his eloquence too much to make his point and produces purple gush. I don't doubt the depth of his feeling, but (to paraphrase Morris himself) feeling without an artist's disciplined craft means very little and can even work to the work's detriment. Otherwise, La Dame aux camélias would be as great a novel as Anna Karenina.

Finally, Morris has this annoying habit of delivering bulls from the pulpit. His bit on the relative importance of melody vs. harmony reflects the current habit of woefully undervaluing the power of melody. If a great melody were so easy to write, composers would write more of them. He deems Beethoven and Bach great composers, but not because they wrote great melodies. Actually, I'm not even sure what Morris means by a great melody, since I find many such in both Bach and Beethoven, and I'm sure he knows them. What's wrong with the opening tune of the Sixth Symphony or, for that matter, the first movement of Bach's Concerto for 2 Violins, Beethoven's Elegiac Song and Adagio from the Pathétique, or Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, second movement?

Many of the book's lapses I believe stem from Morris's striving to write something concise about a subject too big for the pages. I sense that he has tried to take shortcuts, many of which lead to ha-has.

I would love to see Morris tackle Beethoven again in a format that gives him the proper space.

OCARO

This brief but excellent biography of Beethoven has an important shortcoming: it lacks an index of the compositions that Edmund Morris discusses as he leads his readers through Beethoven's life and huge accomplishment. This is a shortcoming because Morris is able to convey tremendous excitement about the many Beethoven masterpieces he reviews and to develop, at least in this reader, a determination to become more familiar with The Master's oeuvre.

Not to worry, though; this resourceful reader began to keep his own list of masterpieces that Morris discusses, that are largely unknown to him, and that he is now determined to hear and enjoy. Thanks to Morris, the list reaches 24 and includes the Cello Sonata, Op. 69; the violin sonata in G major, Op. 96; the Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120; and the single movement trio in B-flat (WoO 39), which Beethoven accommodated to the technique of a little girl (the daughter of a friend) "without condescension to parlor sentimentality." And as I write, Op. 131, the string quartet in C-sharp minor, plays in the background. According to Morris, Beethoven rated this as his most perfect single work.

Certainly, Morris, an award winning biographer, does not neglect the basics of his discipline in BEETHOVEN: THE UNIVERSAL COMPOSER. From this book, a reader will learn about the wealthy and aristocratic connoisseur society in Vienna, which recognized and sustained Beethoven from the start of his career. A reader will also learn about Beethoven's work habits, frustrated romantic life, and questionable business practices. And, a reader will learn about his erratic and obsessive obstreperousness. Late in his life, this dominated in the world, while The Master amazingly produced from his head such great works as the Leonore Overture, the Grosse Fugue for Piano Four Hands, the Missa Solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony.

This enjoyable biography provides ample information about Beethoven's life but never loses sight of his many great works. Recommended.

Yllk

Mr. Morris provides an excellent and surprisingly complete (in less than 250 small format pages) overview of Beethoven's life. Short biographies tend to be chatty and gossipy rather than informative - not this one. I'm sure that "scholars" will pick at some of the conclusions Morris draws from conflicting evidence but he does not purport to be providing the definitive work on Beethoven. Of course if you want more detail and a through discourse on the intricacies of these events, Thayer (Forbes update), Solomon or any one of several other biographies, some approaching 1000 pages, should be your choice. But if you are looking for a very readable insight into Beethoven and his music, and how the many travails in his personal life, including deafness midway through his productive years, may have impacted his music, this is a great place to begin. The Morris writing style is wonderfully alive and fills the pages with flowing accounts of the significant events in Beethoven's life.

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