Kavi Reads

Feels good to be back at this after the almost-two-month hiatus. I think I still remember how to do this. Part of the reason for the break was simply because I was not feeling the right amount of enthusiasm to blog for a bit, and the books I read did not seem to match up with the kinds I like to blog about. But a big reason was also this book. I have had this book on my want-to-read list for the longest time, but its thousand-page length always made me push it off as a future read. And when I finally decided to pick it up as a challenge for November 2019, it took pretty much the entirety of November and December to finish it. It was huge, so it was hard to carry around and read on the go. It was not always the most accessible read because of the music theory and analysis sprinkled in it, that I preferred to spend time on instead of skim through. And I wasn’t able to read, and therefore blog about, much else until I finished this (I can’t really do multiple books at once). In the end, it was all worth it.

As Beethoven himself once said, “What is difficult is beautiful and good”, the same can be said for Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. I can’t really say that reading it came with much anguish as, all in all, it was quite a fantastic story, but I certainly did feel triumphant once I was done with it.

As the title suggests, the book is a complete biography of, in my opinion, the greatest musical artist to ever have lived: Ludvig van Beethoven. Piece after piece, Beethoven truly transformed the idea of what classical music meant in his time and was a key player in the advent of the Romantic era of music. Artists can receive various kinds of receptions. We can admire da Vinci and his quirks, respect Shakespeare and his works, relax and enjoy Mozart’s symphonies and concertos. But Beethoven universally and instantly summons a powerful image of a tough, ugly, angry, deaf genius staring down at adversity and delivering one powerful masterpiece after another. Just mentioning his name can be accompanied by the intense opening of his fifth symphony in the background. This perception of Beethoven is not something new; it was equally true during his time. His pieces changed what it meant to make music changing it from a product or commodity made by a craftsman to art that comes from the artist’s deepest spirits and sufferings.

All of this was perfectly captured in Jan Swafford’s biography. It was always a pleasure to read his warm and engaging writings on the individual pieces. Beethoven’s Third Eroica Symphony (originally called Bonaparte, named after Napolean, another symbol of revolution later renamed when Napolean declared himself emperor and “betrayed” Beethoven) was his first breakthrough and introduced the world to the revolution that his music was to be. His piano sonatas like the forty-minute Hammerklavier pushed the boundaries of what a pianist is capable of and, according to him, should endure some suffering to produce something so beautiful. His massively popular Ninth Symphony cemented his place amongst the Gods of music and never fails to make me emotional while listening to it. In each case and in others, Swafford’s descriptions were a delight to read and always did true justice to the compositions themselves. They are more than enough to satisfy music experts and more importantly, perfect to help a nonmusical reader to appreciate the art and the story behind their composition.

However successful and famous Beethoven’s music was and remains today, his personal life was full of tragedy. He began losing his hearing quite early in his career and was almost completely deaf for most of its peak. While he kept looking for it, he never truly found love and remained unmarried until his death. He was never really well off and almost always lived with ill health. In his famous Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter written to his brothers, he described his struggles with depression and contemplated suicide, only deciding to not end his life because he felt a responsibility to humanity to continue producing his art (this was right before he composed his defining Third Symphony). Once again, Swafford manages to effectively capture Beethoven and his life in his words. While his music is divine and treated so, as a person, he remains a man and not a very pleasant one to be around. He had a complicated personality with random bouts of anger and generosity. I think Swafford did well to express that in a conversational manner. He does go overboard sometimes, with the book getting a bit too chatty and had sections I tended to skim over quickly to get to more interesting bits. This was not limited to stories about Beethoven’s personal life. There were times where Swafford, a musical scholar himself, goes a little too deep into an analysis of the keys and notes of various pieces.

Overall, the book was very enjoyable. Part of it might have been because I have always idolised Beethoven and was very excited to actually learn more about him, but a good part of it because Swafford wrote a revelatory and moving book. There are times when the book is not so easy to read, but to be fair, neither was Beethoven. I would recommend you have Spotify or YouTube open on the side when reading this, as the book is best appreciated when you can listen to the pieces and notice the features being described yourself as you read them.