Beethoven Variations
Poems on a Life
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
From the author of the bestselling Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel’s new collection follows in the footsteps of one of the world’s greatest composers, Beethoven, and investigates what his life and music might mean to us today
Two hundred and fifty years since Beethoven was born, Ruth Padel goes on a personal search for him, retracing his steps through war-torn Europe of the early nineteenth century, delving into his music, letters, diaries and the conversation books he used when deaf, to uncover the man behind the legend. Her quest, exploring the life of one of the most creative artists who ever lived, turns more personal than she expects, taking her into the sources of her own creativity and musicality. From a deeply musical family herself, Padel’s parents met through music, and she grew up playing chamber music on viola – Beethoven’s instrument as a child. Her father’s grandfather, a concert pianist born on the German–Danish border, studied in Leipzig with a friend of Beethoven before immigrating to the UK. The poems in this illuminating biography in verse conjure not only Beethoven’s life and personality, but her own music-making and love both of the European music-making tradition to which her father’s family belongs, and to the continent itself Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Balancing a historian's fidelity to archives and a musician's passion for composition, Padel (Alibi) offers a lavish poetic biography of Beethoven from his birth in 1770 to his death in 1827. The psychological and musical effects of the composer's deafness are sensitively rendered: "The almost-nothing bone,/ that little house of hearing... the new/ shocked calm of Is it true. Is this/ what it sounds like, going deaf?" Drawing on letters, diaries, and the handmade "Conversation Books" (in which those Beethoven encountered wrote notes to him once he lost his hearing), Padel tracks "the domestic minutiae against which his late style—introspective, cosmic, radical—evolved." The tumultuous inventiveness of his late style ("havoc on the brink, a jackhammer shattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow") emerges in the contexts of Napoleon's violent rise to power and Beethoven's own illnesses, lost loves, and legal battle with his sister-in-law (whom he called the Queen of the Night) over custody of his late brother's son, Karl. Padel grows increasingly intimate with her subject, often addressing him directly, and even attempting to intervene in his self-destructive spiral, "trying to cancel/ the mathematics of strain." Aficionados of classical music may draw inspiration from this ambitiously conceived and realized reconsideration of Beethoven's genius.
