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Beethoven: The Music and the Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Lewis Lockwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy Used: $11.98
You Save: $27.97 (70%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 731565
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 7 x 1.8
ISBN: 0393050815
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.92
EAN: 9780393050813
ASIN: 0393050815
Publication Date: December 16, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A fresh look at Beethoven's life, career, and milieu highlighting his development as a composer. In this brilliant portrayal of the world's most famous composer, eminent Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood interweaves his subject's musical and biographical dimensions and places them in their historical and artistic contexts. Written for the lay reader, the book describes the special problems Beethoven faced as a highly gifted artist who fulfilled his destiny as Mozart's main successor while remaining a true, rebellious original. It sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and demonstrates their effects on his music. Finally, it turns to the composer in his last years, with great achievements behind him, surmounting the crisis of finding still further artistic paths by which to continue. Also, by providing glimpses into the composer's sketchbooks and autograph manuscripts, Lockwood allows us to gain substantial insights into Beethoven's compositional methods. In a publishing first, musically literate readers will find some one hundred notated music examples on a special Web site. 50 illustrations, 8 music examples.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
Solid Beethoven Biography November 13, 2008
Lockwood's Beethoven gives an excellent overview of the great composer's art, life and times. If one wants a bit more of a psychological profile, Maynard Solomon's biography is my favorite. Thayer's Life of Beethoven is a more stolid volume, but it also has much more detail about smaller events in the composer's life.
 Not an adequate biography, nor an adequate critique December 20, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
As a college undergrad I took a music course taught by Lockwood many years ago. He was good as a teacher, and I knew he was a LvB scholar, so I always hoped to see a book about LvB's music. After I left college he published not one but at least two such books.
This one was written for the general audience, someone who wants to learn about LvB's life as well as his music. Unfortunately, the interweaving leaves the book in the awkward position of fulfilling neither purpose. As a biography it's too brief, and if you were looking for in-depth analysis of LvB's great music you'd be disappointed like myself. I guess one purpose it can serve is as a casual introduction to the background of LvB as a person and as a musician, against the cultural-political backdrop of his times. However, I myself find the coverage too shallow, way too shallow.
 A Musically Conceived Biography July 9, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Lockwood's Beethoven:...is not only one of the best organized (as in excellently researched and uniquely ordered),but is also smartly presented from a sensitive muscial point of view. This point would seem to be obvious in biographies of composers, but is not always the case. From the standpoint
of a present day composer, this is fine new portal into the mind and music
of this giant of giants.
UNQUESTIONABLY, ONE OF THE FINEST RECENT BOOKS ON THE MASTER... November 18, 2006
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
Can't go wrong with this finely researched and well written tome on the Master.
Masterful command of the artist's life and work July 9, 2006
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Ludwig Van Beethoven is no easy man to write about, and his music at times defies description and shrugs off analysis. However, Lockwood has risen to the occasion. With painstaking thoroughness and an eye and ear for detail, he serves as our guide through a life that was filled with obstacles at every turn, and yet out of that, Beethoven was able to create works of enduring genius. Here was a man who shook his fist at the heavens and defied convention. He scorned the ordinary and had no time or patience for niceties. Lockwood misses nothing in this probing, sensitive and very honest account of a difficult man who wrote extraordinary music. At times, we learn more than we might need to, but for the serious reader, this book is both a challenge and a joy. I commend it highly!
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