Beethoven
Story Stream
The Quest for the Catholic Beethoven March 31, 2025
Historians love influence, yet genius eschews it. The whole point of genius is its singularity. Or as Beethoven once put it to his patron: “What you are, you are by circumstance and birth. What I am, I am through myself. Of princes there have been an...
Bastardizing Beethoven May 19, 2023
For decades now, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas. These directors did so through wildly incongruous stagings that updated an opera’s plot to modern times and in...
What Made Beethoven Sick? March 27, 2023
Nearly 200 years after Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, researchers pulled DNA from strands of his hair, searching for clues about the health problems and hearing loss that plagued him....
Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Family Secrets March 23, 2023
It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance?...
A Catastrophic Purity April 25, 2022
WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I wrote my autobiography. Short, laudatory, and in the third person, it told the story of my birth as a composer. I let my audience (who I hadn’t found yet) know what to listen for in my music (which I hadn’t written yet) so they c...
Making Beethoven Woke April 06, 2022
Revisionist performances of classic works deconstruct our precious links to the past....
A Great Deaf Bear: Beethoven Gets Going December 28, 2020
Sunday afternoon was Beethoven time – torpor, majesty. Tired after cooking the lunch, but sweetly imploring, my father relished his captive audience. Mother and older brother had somehow slipped out of the sitting room, which left me and my sister, ...
Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary August 12, 2019
There have been many books written about classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven’s life and musical career. My own collection includes volumes by A.W. Thayer and Maynard Solomon, Harold C. Schonberg’s analysis in “The Lives of the Great Composers,” a...
