Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

MOST OF THE time the extraordinary begins in the ordinary.

Only once in his life was one of his piano sonatas played in a public concert.

Music was the one extraordinary thing in a sea of the disappointing and ordinary. Reared as he was in a relentless discipline, instinctively responsive to music as he was, the boy never truly learned to understand the world outside music. Nobody ever really demanded that of him until, disastrously, near the end of his life. Nor did he ever really understand love. He could perceive the world and other people only through the prism of his own consciousness, judging them

in the unforgiving terms he judged himself.

Otherwise Beethoven had little grasp of the world at all. In childhood he did not truly comprehend the indepe...