“Beethoven: The Universal Composer”, by Edmund Morris

256 pages, Eminent Lives, ISBN-13: 978-0060759742

Edmund Morris’ Beethoven: The Universal Composer is part of the “Eminent Lives” series of books which seeks to enlighten the masses as to the lives of eminent folk (that was rather circular, wasn’t it?). I picked this thing off of Barnes & Noble’s overstock shelf and, thus, didn’t pay a lot for it, for which I am glad, for it didn’t take me long to realized that Morris relied too much on the psychobabble pushed by Editha and Richard Sterba in their Beethoven and his Nephew: A Psychoanalytic Study of Their Relationship, and accepted without questioning some of the more controversial aspects in the writings of Maynard Solomon, many of which were addressed in Barry Cooper’s (far superior) biography, in which he investigated and put into proper perspective everything his predecessors did not. For a book that was written with the idea of for introducing Beethoven to the general public, this one falls far short of its mark. Beethoven is, of course, the Greatest Ever Composer (yeah, I said it) about whom many excellent books have been written – but THIS book is not one of them. I’m sure Morris thinks he writes beautifully, but I find it often pompous and extremely inelegant. Some examples:

“The paradox of Beethoven’s ‘bigness’ is that it is not always measurable in time or decibels”.

“So a brilliant green butterfly metamorphosed from the shabby cocoon of Ludwig’s schooldays”.

“His preferred data bank was to remain the twelve tones of the scale – so much closer, in their logical order, to the ten digits of mathematics than to the twenty-six mutable ciphers of the alphabet”.

“The fugue that ends the Hammerklavier sonata takes…sometimes all three processes going at once: the musical equivalent of trigonometry”.

“If he had to choose between the charm of a seductive tune and a figuration built out of integral coefficients, mathematical beauty won out every time”.

And so on and so forth. How can a biography of Beethoven practically ignore not only the Missa solemnis but his Ninth Symphony? While there are some interesting business and social stories here, there is actually very little in this book about, well…BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC! (I betcha Morris mentioned Beethoven’s diarrhea more times than the Ninth Symphony; he shoulda called his book “Beethoven: Chronic Bowel Irritation”). For a more accurate, better-written biography of Beethoven that incorporates his life and works (one without the other is meaningless), I would suggest the Biography by Barry Cooper (which I should probably review soon).