Customer Reviews

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development

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This is not going to get many postive feedbacks.. HOWEVER.. this is just a note to say THIS REALLY and truly is a BRILLIANT BOOK.... and for anyone wanting to dive straight into the deep end as to what Beethoven and ART and Classical Music par se is and the mind of a composer and the struggle of a life between Art, creativity, God and love and genius is all about this is the one book to get. Yet, surprisingly not only all made very understandable but then clarity and inspiration and feel good factor was never made so good in a book on a composer, also made so enjoyable. A true and real learning journey in this book.Priceless. I felt myself on tour with the writer and the works and mind of life of Beethoven as though the man was his art and his work. Out of MUCH self taught reading on classical music. This book truly remains my ALL TIME FAVOURITE book about any single composer. Supremely well written and written with clarity and passages I underlined endlessly. It is one of those books. Just well researched, well written and written about from angles and insights that you really DID want to know and not written anywhere else and never realised you did want to know and it is a real journey. If you feel a journey with Beethoven`s music this is the best book ever written to get into his mind , and his art and the music and his life as one.... A real cherished classic. I hate the phrase. This book is one of 20-30 that I look back really does come under the heading "life changer" and can give a truer real insight into the mind of genius and ART in capital letters and an artist`s intention and the working of a mind and spirit..and it explains the music so well in relation to his life and genius. A seriously great gem , where every page is a page turning inspiration and delight. Seriously 5+ Not a normal book. Exceedingly well done... This book is special. Class of it`s own and essential reading on Beethoven. Trust me. And write your own review. I challenge anyone not to adore this book and give it a 5 having read it. I`m serious. Think about it compared to all the others on Beethoven and dull ill written biographies and over detailed stuff. This book really hits the spot and is very very well writen in style and content and theme and insight....and is concise. : ) I.e not only readable but also exciting and a a book to learn from not just factually but with real thinking and a journey and highly enjoyable read. The world it takes one too to the mind of the composer and the music and the journey it takes one too is first class. A really enjoyable mind expanding insight. Seriously good. i.e Great.

Sullivan's book has remained in print for over 70 years, despite not being a definitive source book for facts about Beethoven's life and work. Sullivan's achievement is different. Sullivan wrote one of the very few biographies, about Beethoven or anybody else, that captures and understands the level of "depth of life" that results from identifying one's life with the search for the meaning of life and of the universe, if there is any such meaning. Beethoven lived on this level and the particular path Beethoveen pursued and expressed in his music is uniquely understood by Sullivan. This biography is a masterpiece in its own right.

Sullivan was a mathematician, scientist and philosopher, but music had a high priority in his life. And Beethoven was at the top of his list of greats. He says: "Perhaps even Shakespeare never reached that final stage of illumination that is expressed in some of Beethoven's late music."

As the title says, this is not a biography so much as a description of Beethoven's "spiritual development. If you love Beethoven. You must read this book.

And you might ask yourself the question: Why has this book remained in print for 73 years?

This book profoundly deepened my experience of music. It opened doors of appreciation for both listening to music and expressing myself musically. It inspires one to put the whole of themselves with ever increasing passion into their creative endeavors and by extension their lives. As Beethoven said, "There is no loftier mission than to approach the Godhead nearer than other people, and to disseminate the divine rays among humanity." Read this book. You will not regret it.

I recommend the book not only for its intertwined information about the composer's life and works, but for its demonstration of Beethoven's inward evolution. My one criticism is that the author tends to see in some of Beethoven's clearly neurotic behavior (e.g., his obsession with his nephew; his incredible personal messiness; his narcissistic rages at certain colleagues) an overabundance of some sort of energy--which may indeed be the case at a very deep level, but hey, misbehavior is misbehavior. Nevertheless, an excellent Beethoven resource.

This short masterpiece was written in 1927, probably to mark the centennial of Beethoven's death. It's an extraordinary book that gets inside the mind of Beethoven and requires no technical knowledge of music or anything else for one to profit from its insights. In fact it was the first book I ever read on the composer, back when I was a classical music neophyte, and it really helped me appreciate the music I subsequently heard. Saying you're dealing with a book that "gets into the mind" of the subject is hardly unusual...after all, Maynard Solomon is always professing to do this. But this book *does.* The author says nothing radical about the personality of his subject, but he does a thorough job of exploring Beethoven's mind and explaining why his greatest masterpieces are just that. Written at a time when Beethoven was widely considered THE greatest composer (a view I hold as well), the book has no problems with absolute statements about the relative values of different elements and aspects of music, and what Sullivan (and many others of the time) valued about Beethoven was his constant growth, growth to higher and more refined realms of consciousness. We are not so comfortable with pronouncements like this today in this more relativistic age. And Mozart is today considered at least Beethoven's equal and more often his superior, often by people unfamiliar with both composers beyond a superficial take or else publishers/performers all to eager to jump on the public's "Moe-zart is divine" bandwagon for reasons having more to do with box office than any true conviction. Here Sullivan, who is a truly gifted writer when it comes to music, demonstrates the inexorable artistic growth of his subject and how that growth changed all Western music forever, causing us to really understand and value the content of the middle and late string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, the Hammerklavier, and Op. 111. We live in an era where we've, for sociological reasons, shied away from extra-musical meaning in music. Fortunately, Sullivan was born long before such concerns came to be, and so he isn't afraid to tell us the Op. 131 string quartet contains a more refined level of music thought--in the way Beethoven *organically* organizes his material, chooses harmonic presentation over the stormy conflict of his second period works (5th symphony, 3rd piano concerto, etc.), and breaks the expected bounds of four movements and certain key structures. Beethoven's earlier music has roots in Haydn, Mozart and just the general Viennese music of its day, but as Sullivan points out, his late period is sui generis. It has no precedent, although arguably with it he gave birth to the avant-garde, for better or worse. Really, is there another composer who journeyed so far and changed his musical approach, his way of solving musical problems so much, who never stopped developing (many say in his very last works they hear the buddings of a "fourth period" that was cut short by illness) as Beethoven?

Sullivan makes us aware--it seems obvious but it is often overlooked in books about the composer today--how Beethoven was the first to envision the whole work as an organic organism. While Mozart may have given us a Jupiter Symphony, for example, and as magnificent as it is, only the last movement is truly "Jupiter," the other movements *could* be excised and attached to other works with the same key flow without harm. Even early Beethoven functions this way. By Beethoven's second period, organic elements begin to dictate form and content--starting essentially with the Eroica symphony and continuing with the 5th, where the real interest is not with the famous da-da-da-duum first movement but rather the scherzo-finale transition. This type of organic logic was a precursor, Sullivan shows, to the unity of the three Galitzin quartets of the late period, which he rightly considers three of the greatest if not *the* greatest creations in Western music.

To be sure the book isn't without flaws. His suggestion that Beethoven was perhaps unique among artists (not just composers, but artists) for his continuous and organic spiritual growth till his death, and that he channeled this growth into his work, had me wondering if he'd perhaps like to also consider Rembrandt. The author glosses over Beethoven's personality shortcomings in an effort to show the artist is as sublime as the art (widely believed in those days...but this was before we saw newsreels of Hitler and Goebbels listening to the Ode to Joy). His circular reasoning (on p. 128) involving Beethoven's dealings with his publishers regarding the Missa Solemnis would be hilarious if Sullivan weren't completely sincere. And he gave me a chuckle when the commented early on that advances in modern (1927) society will likely soon mean that people know little of personal suffering that afflicted the artists of Beethoven's time, or words to that effect. But overall this is a superb study of why Beethoven *matters,* why his sacrifice, life and illnesses contributed to the advance of the art of composing, and why it was very conscientious on the composer's part. Rereading this work (I originally bought this book on impulse when I was in 9th grade and hadn't read it since), I gained an even deeper insight into works I thought I knew well. He shows how the light-to-darkness transition that marks the 5th symphony is superseded by a much more mature understanding of suffering and the outcome of that suffering in later works such as (the first three movements of) the 9th symphony and the B-flat Major late quartet (with the Grosse Fugue included). He gives a convincing argument that despite the 6th being Beethoven's "Pastorale" symphony, it's the 7th that's really his hymn to nature. And his interpretation of the events that transpire in the 4th symphony are very eye-opening and interesting, even if you think you know that work by heart. Considering he was writing in an era before recordings of these works (Schnabel and Weingartner had not even made their earliest Beethoven discs) and that he had to become familiar with all these pieces--and the late ones were not so often played at the time, a mass public not yet being ready for them--either by concert performance or by score, assuming he could read scores. The fact that this music was far less available in his day makes me think that more of those who were lucky enough to hear it listened actively, and thought more about what they heard.

There are a few musical lapses. With the exception of the Hammerklavier, which gets a whole chapter, he short-changes the late sonatas somewhat. (No mention of Op. 101 or Opp. 109-110.) Another mature masterpiece, the Archduke Trio, gets only a brief nod. And the Diabellis and Bagatelles are ignored when discussing Beethoven's late period masterpieces. Still, this is an impressive book overall, giving more insight into Beethoven in 170 tight pages than many a tome five times its length. This book should be on every Beethoven-lover's bookshelf, even if you think you already have read everything you need to about the composer and his greatest masterworks. Highly highly recommended.

Amateurs tread upon the musicologist's turf always at their peril - a tendency doubled in the case of one amateur reviewing another. J.W.N. Sullivan was one of the most gifted popularizers of science (i.e., THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE) between the world wars, conveying in clear, polished prose the main lines of scientific development tailing Einstein's once-in-a-lifetime comet. When he turned his hand to music, as in this short appraisal of the inner development of Beethoven as it found expression in his work, he brought to the task his customary literary gifts, and the result is a joy to read. Sullivan spends a fair amount of throat-clearing time early in his book in discussing the capacity of music to convey deep, extralinguistic truth (a topic ground to dust by every would-be philosopher since at least as far back as the pre-Socratics). The remainder of the book highlights the unending round of struggles - physical, material, emotional - faced by the composer, and the ways in which he strove to express and overcome them in his music. Especially from the vantage of today, with the wealth of fine scholarship at their disposal, Beethoven specialists may quarrel throughout with Sullivan's pet notions. But general readers, who have claims of their own, will be hard put to find a more moving or better-written short attempt at conveying what stirs us still in the life and work of a composer who, to paraphrase the great musicologist Sir Donald Tovey, will always occupy a central place in a sound musical mind.

This book is essential reading for all who appreciate Beethoven's music. It would be futile to try and review it here; indeed, the book needs no review. It will be appreciated by all who know, after listening to Beethoven, that this is not merely music for entertainment, but music that uplifts, in the very real sense of the word.

This is the best book about music that I have read, and my recent (fourth in 35 years) reading solidified this opinion.
The reviews here offer many insights, so I just want to emphasize that this is unlike any other music biography you will read. It is not a linear life history, nor does it focus primarily on musical quotations. It digs deeply into Beethoven's spirit and tries to grasp what made him so special. That is a fundamental bias of the book, so if you find Beethoven less a genius than Bach or Mozart or Mahler or Wagner, then you probably won't agree with Sullivan's conclusions. But, as a mathematician, he approached his subject without the standard musicologist biases, and that shines through in a work that is accessible to anyone who wants to think deeply about the ultimate meaning of great music, and how one person could create what Beethoven poured forth in his life.

Sullivan examines Beethoven's spiritual development and how that development was reflected in the composer's music. After reading this book, I will listen to Beethoven's music with new insight. I found Sullivan's book to be an enjoyable read. I highly recommend it.