Customer Reviews

Fatal Links: the Curious Deaths of Beethoven & the Two Napoleons

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The reader of these lines already knows from Amazon's book description that the author explores the possibility that Beethoven was "helped to an early grave" by people who were his enemies or people he thought were his friends. The author looks at incidents in the composer's life during the last 17 years of his life in a completely new and fresh way. She shows us that, unbelievable as it is for us today, in much of Viennese society Beethoven was far from popular. In his times, few years after the French revolution, there were great political tensions between the "establishment" on the one side, and revolutionary and republican ideas on the other. Austria was a police state. Like other artists, the great composer was regarded as a threat to status quo, and with good reason: he often expressed ideas that could be seen as a threat to law and order. Emperor Franz I had reason to fear his influence, just as dictators have always feared popular artists. The book is very thrilling, although it is painful to imagine how the great man in long periods may have been tortured to have him silenced. Involved are many subordinate characters and two more main characters: Napoleon Bonaparte and especially his son "The King of Rome", so it must have been quite complicated to compose the structure of the book, but the author has made that very logic. Maybe this is a book for us enthusiasts who know much about Beethoven's life from before. However, the author explains his situation so well that I think any "newcomer" in the field of Beethoven's life will have full pleasure of it even without any such previous knowledge. I have only minor critical comments. In one of the chapters I did not quite follow the author's reasoning, maybe I would not have been confused if she had summed up and given her conclusion to that chapter in a more explicit way. In my opinion this is the most interesting book about the Life of Ludwig van Beethoven which has been written for many years.

I was a bit skeptical when I read Ms. Altman's hypothesis suggesting that Beethoven had been poisoned. However, the test results are in, and essentially, she was right. Beethoven's system suffered from a massive ingestion of lead. While another researcher (the one with the test results) guesses that Beethoven was poisoned by his dinnerware or (amusingly) by his "lead" pencil, Ms. Altman's premise that the poisoning was deliberate is well researched, fascinating, and quite plausible. Her book reads almost like a "who-done-it" in what she calls "the crime of the (19th) century." It was amazing to me that Ms. Altman deduced Beethoven's poisoning solely on documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts, and without being privy to the tests on his hair.