Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives) - Hardcover

Morris, Edmund

4.02

1,827 ratings by Goodreads

9780007213702: Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007213700 ISBN 13: 9780007213702

Publisher: HarperPress, 2007

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HardCover. Pub Date :2007-03-05 Pages: 256 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Edmund Morris interweaves the personal history of the worlds most famous composer with an insightful exploration of the way Beethovens life was reflected and embodied in his genius and his music.Eminent Lives is an exciting and groundbreaking series that pairs great biographers. historians and novelists with iconic subjects. building on a biographical tradition that can be traced back to Aubreys Brief Lives. Dr Johnsons Lives of the Poets and Lytton Stracheys Eminent Victorians. To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant. wrote Strachey. That. surely. is the first duty of the biographer.Edmund Morris. the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethove...

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'In Edmund Morris, a great president has found a great biographer...Every bit as much a masterpiece of biographical writing as “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt”, which won the Pulitzer Prize.' The Washington Post

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'Take a deep breath and dive into “Theodore Rex”, Edmund Morris's sequel to his 1979 masterpiece, “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt”...He writes with a breezy verve that makes the pages fly.' New York Times Book Review

Synopsis:

Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Edmund Morris interweaves the personal history of the world's most famous composer with an insightful exploration of the way Beethoven's life was reflected and embodied in his genius and his music. "Eminent Lives" is an exciting and groundbreaking series that pairs great biographers, historians and novelists with iconic subjects, building on a biographical tradition that can be traced back to Aubrey's "Brief Lives", Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" and Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians". 'To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,' wrote Strachey. 'That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.' Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence.

A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived 'on the other side of silence.'

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