Description
In the concluding volume of John Suchet’s remarkable fictional biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, the reader witnesses the great dramas of the composer’s last years.
This is the era of the ‘Battle’ Symphony, the Seventh, and the ‘Ode To Joy’, of monumental pieces composed in solitude and performed with ferocious energy. After his love for his ‘Eternally Beloved’ is consigned to the past, we witness Beethoven’s return to Vienna in 1812, a period of glorious creativity amid a city celebrating the defeat of Napoleon. But we also see a genius, divinely blessed, being unjustly punished and a disease ravages Ludwig’s body and he becomes increasingly deaf, music becomes his language, his salvation, his very being.
Through a vivid narrative culminating in the remarkable moment of his death on 26 March 1827, the ‘raging at the fates’ epiphany, John Suchet invests Beethoven with a tragic grandeur missing from conventional biographies and brings to stunning life the extraordinary story of the Last Master’s personal anguish and artistic triumph.
Soft cover, 401 pages. In excellent preloved condition.