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Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Beethoven: The Music and the Life

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Author: Lewis Lockwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book

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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars 11 reviews
Sales Rank: 60359

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 604
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2

ISBN: 0393326381
Dewey Decimal Number: 921
EAN: 9780393326383
ASIN: 0393326381

Publication Date: January 30, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: N20090105043406T

Also Available In:

  • Hardcover - Beethoven: The Music and the Life

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
A "magisterial" (New York Review of Books) work offering a fresh look at Beethoven's life, career, and milieu.

This brilliant portrayal weaves Beethoven's musical and biographical stories into their historical and artistic contexts. Lewis Lockwood sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and examines their effects on his music. "The result is that rarest of achievements, a profoundly humane work of scholarship that will—or at least should—appeal to specialists and generalists in equal measure" (Terry Teachout, Commentary). Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 50 illustrations.


Customer Reviews:   Read 6 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars 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.


2 out of 5 stars 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.



5 out of 5 stars 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.



5 out of 5 stars 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.


4 out of 5 stars 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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