“Beethoven: The Music and the Life”, by Lewis Lockwood

624 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393326383

Lewis Lockwood is an American musicologist whose main fields are the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven and the music of the Italian Renaissance; he taught at Princeton University from 1958 to 1980 and then at Harvard University from 1980 to 2002 when, after retiring, he was given an honorary appointment at Boston University where he is presently Co-Director of the Boston University Center for Beethoven Research. So, who better to write about the music and the life of Ludwig van Beethoven than this guy, which is what he does in Beethoven: The Music and the Life which is, in fact, his third book about Ludwig van. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that this is a scholarly work, one in which Lockwood expects his reader to have a serious attitude about the subject and some knowledge of Beethoven’s musical catalogue and of music in general. It’s not a “popular”, commercial work, but I expect it will take an important place in the scholarly literature on the man who was perhaps the greatest – and certainly personally the most difficult and inscrutable – composer of importance the world has known. There, I said it.

And scholarly it is, as the word order of the subtitle suggests: it is Beethoven’s music that takes center-stage with Lockwood, while his personal life comes a distant second. Oh, there is a section entitled “Relations with Women” that runs to…five pages, while his concern over the attempted suicide of his nephew Karl earns a mention just so that we can learn that Beethoven’s dedication to one of his final quartets was unaffected. Beethoven’s debilitating deafness is, of course, discussed, but there is next to nothing about his final illness and death. We learn about the Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s only composition student and his most faithful patron; about Anton Felix Schindler, Beethoven’s associate, secretary and early biographer; about Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the violinist, friend and teacher of Beethoven and leader of Count Razumovsky’s private string quartet; and about his early years in Bonn when, by default, he became the head of his family. So there is a plethora of details about the private privations and struggles of this difficult man who was a genius composer. But not much.

And that is because it is the music that matters, and there can be no doubt that Lockwood is intimately familiar with Beethoven’s sketch books and other manuscripts and is eminently qualified to discuss this music. Lockwood emphasizes the works he considers to be the most important inherently or innovatively, and has an especially high regard for the even-numbered symphonies (especially Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36, and Symphony No. 8 in F major, Op. 93, to my delight, as these are some of my favorite Beethoven works), which are too often slighted by others. He refers often to the String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59, No. 1 (the first of the three Razumovsky string quartets) in addition to discussing it in detail, while also giving ten pages to the Missa solemnis in D major, Op. 123, twenty pages to the Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, and nearly fifty to the last string quartets: the String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op. 130; the String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp, Op. 131; the String Quartet No. 15 in A, Op. 132; and the String Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135.

Although Beethoven: The Music and the Life breaks no new ground, this book does offer a cogent account of the works as they relate to the well-known three phases of Beethoven’s too-brief life, and Lockwood just may have written the best overall book that will increase the reader’s understanding of Beethoven and his music.