Edition: U.S. / Global

The First Modern

By Michael Kimmelman
Published: January 19, 2003


The Music and the Life.

By Lewis Lockwood.

Illustrated. 604 pp. New York:

W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

He was short, thickset, pockmarked, maybe from smallpox, with a dark complexion. As a boy, he was called ''der Spagnol.'' His hearing, which worsened as he reached his 30's, never entirely disappeared, but he was forced to use an ear trumpet, then a conversation book, and he suffered from terrible earaches and ringing ears. He also complained of abdominal distress, chronic bronchitis and colitis, never mind his hypochondria and erratic, sometimes extreme temper.

As a domineering uncle, tending his dead brother's son and battling the boy's mother for control, he seems to have driven his nephew to attempt suicide. He never married. He pursued women who rejected him -- women of higher social standing, women who wouldn't ever have had him -- maybe because he knew he couldn't be a good husband and accomplish what he wanted at the same time. The only opera he composed, ''Fidelio,'' has as its subject the unwavering devotion of a good woman who risks her life to save the hero. Its subtitle was ''Conjugal Love.''

At his funeral, Ludwig van Beethoven was remembered by the dramatist Franz Grillparzer as a paradox, in his personal life discontented and alienated from much of society but full of love for humanity in his music. Baron de Trémont, who visited his apartment in Vienna in 1809, reported seeing ''the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable,'' the piano buried under dust and papers, an unemptied chamber pot under the piano. This was the same year Beethoven wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto, the noble ''Emperor,'' and ''Das Lebewohl,'' one of his most elegant piano sonatas.

What is the relationship between life and art? How can we ever be sure? Lewis Lockwood is circumspect about this question in his new biography. He reminds us that Beethoven's difficulties, his anger, his impatience had partly to do with the physical ailments that plagued him long before deafness set in. Man was fragile, Beethoven said, while, as he told a friend, art was without limits.

But his genius depended on an ability to thrust aside his own physical limitations, to make them irrelevant to his art. The critic Donald Francis Tovey once wrote that ''to study the lives of great artists is often a positive hindrance to the understanding of their works, for it is usually the study of what they have not mastered, and thus it undermines their authority in the things which they have mastered.'' Lockwood takes the view that Beethoven's ''inner character always underlies the artistic enterprise'' in that ''we feel a granitic inner strength'' in the work, a resistance to adversity. Between 1797 and 1802, when he knew his hearing was going, and must have been despondent, Beethoven was more productive than ever. Overcoming adversity became the motif of music like the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and ''Fidelio,'' whose drama moves from struggle and turmoil to triumph.

Lockwood, an eminent Beethoven scholar and Harvard professor, has put a lifetime of study and wisdom into this far-ranging, temperate biography, which, while summarizing all sorts of specialized and academically fashionable works about Beethoven, speaks in a clear and prudent, if a little stodgy, voice. The book switches between the story of the composer's life and his milieu and analysis of his music, with the emphasis toward the latter. Being able to read music is a help, but there is no better survey of Beethoven's compositions for a wide audience.

Lockwood explains how a work like the Third Symphony, the ''Eroica,'' exemplifies a new heroic style by showing, first in musical terms, where passages of sustained dissonance create moments of tension and resolution, which amplify a feeling of conflict essential to the heroic motif. Then he relates the music to Napoleon; to the work of Neo-Classical artists like David and Canova; to classical literature (Beethoven compared Napoleon ''to the greatest Roman consuls,'' Lockwood reminds us); and finally to Beethoven's struggle to overcome his deafness and various ailments. By the end, we see the music as part of a larger world that situates but can never explain its particular distinction: to Lockwood, rightly, the music ultimately speaks for itself.

The ''Eroica'' was bigger and longer than any symphony composed before it. Beethoven's music placed unheard-of demands on performers. His symphonies began conservatively, unspectacularly. About the first, Berlioz said, ''in a word, Beethoven is not here'' -- but by the third not only was the scale enormous but the ambition was wholly new. The music he composed in his head was what mattered to him, regardless of whether anyone could play what he wrote. Musicians would have to adapt.

He was himself a gifted pianist. Carl Czerny, his pupil and Liszt's teacher, recalled, ''No one equaled him in the rapidity of his scales, double trills, skips, etc.'' Pianists during Beethoven's day had to demonstrate their skills at improvisation, among other tasks. Music like the slow movement of the piano sonata Opus 10, No. 3, or the opening of the ''Moonlight,'' ruminative and searching, reminds us of what was said about Beethoven's moving people to tears when he improvised. ''The piano sonata remained the genre most closely tied to improvisation,'' Lockwood says, ''a laboratory for innovations.'' By the last sonatas, Beethoven was writing music so free and unconventional that it almost gives the impression of being made up on the spot.