Improvisation was his main creative engine. When Beethoven could no longer hear conversations, he carried notebooks in which people would write down their side of the conversation.
He never threw anything away, so most of the notebooks survive. Swafford read many of them, along with numerous other articles and books.
He realized that it would be impossible to read everything by and about Beethoven. With Beethoven, I had to make decisions about what to read. Take the Appassionata Sonata, one of his most famous pieces: there are articles about just that piece alone.
Though the Beethoven is a print and Kindle publication, he has thought of producing an online book with links to music.
Swafford has written numerous articles for the online magazine Slate , which does just that. He will begin the way he starts each book: He will wipe the slate clean, create a simple chronology, then type up hundreds of pages of Mozart's letters.
For now, Beethoven, with his difficult life and magnificent music, still occupies Swafford. A man who was unable to relate to other people and was sick and deaf for much of his life, Beethoven managed to surmount his difficulties and write some of the greatest music ever written. Marjorie Howard can be reached at marjorie. Skip to main content. Photo: Alonso Nichols. By Marjorie Howard. January 14, Music in His Mind By his mids, Beethoven had started to lose his hearing.
May 14, February 5, The Sonic Storyteller. June 28, Worse was to come. In April, Beethoven developed a serious intestinal illness. His doctor ordered him away from Vienna for rest at the nearby spa of Baden , and banned him from drinking wine or eating his favourite liver dumplings. As Robert Kapilow, a composer and musical commentator explains, Beethoven adored the countryside, but this trip away would be far less enjoyable. His exact condition is unclear, but from his letters he clearly feared for his life — especially when combined with his fragile mental state.
Think of me when writing your poems. In the end, Beethoven did get somewhat better — and it was while recovering at Baden that he wrote the Heiliger Dankgesang.
Even if a dumpling-free diet really did help his recovery, the composer himself looked to a higher power. Start listening to the Heiliger Dankgesang and reality seems to hold its breath and wait.
For about three heartrending minutes, the notes come glacially — so glacially, says Michiko Theurer, a violinist who has played and studied the piece, that it almost feels like a meditation exercise. This is exactly the point. Combined with the molto adagio pacing, the music feels stuck in an unending desert or an infinite sea — similar, Kapilow has described , to the feeling you get trapped in hospital for days without end.
This reverential atmosphere is heightened by the tune itself. The quartet pairs five short preludes with an eight-note chorale , the sort popularised by earlier religious composers like JS Bach — even if the Beethoven version is too slow to really hear.
But wait for long enough, and everything shifts. The austere music of the first few minutes suddenly collapses into an optimistic universe of harmonies and trills. If the movement ended there, with the triumph of health over sickness, it would be easy to understand what Beethoven was trying to convey. Having successfully beaten his illness, he was simply thanking the Almighty for his good fortune. But this music is about far more than just watching Beethoven emerge from his sickbed and trot back to Vienna.
Listen for a few more minutes, and you get another round of Feeling New Strength. How, then, to explain the Heiliger Dankgesang? Perhaps the fifth and final part of the movement can help. At the end of the second New Strength section, the slow pace returns again — but only for a moment. From there the original eight-note chorale is reduced to five notes, then three, then two, then one. The composer himself appears to agree.
In the middle of his illness, Beethoven sent a short piece of music to his doctor. The accompanying lyrics proclaim: Doctor, close the door against death, Notes will help him who is in need. To put it another way, if the Heiliger Dankgesang is partly an uncomplicated prayer of thanks to the Almighty, and partly a meditation on sickness and health, it may also symbolise the immense power of music — notes — to keep people going in times of strife.
Nor is Beethoven alone in using his music this way.
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