Beethoven Variations
Poems on a Life
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
A fascinating poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, from the author of the celebrated Darwin: A Life in Poems
Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly sixty beans. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood: Her great-grandfather, who studied in Leipzig with a pupil of Beethoven's, became a concert pianist before migrating to Britain; her parents met making music; and Padel grew up playing the viola, Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.
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.
