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Beethoven: The Universal Composer
Edmund Morris
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770?1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston.
Eminent Lives
Eminent Lives
October 2005
Featuring: Beethoven
256 pages ISBN: 0060759747 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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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