Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph - Couverture souple

Swafford, Jan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 057131256X ISBN 13 : 9780571312566

Editeur : Faber & Faber, 2015

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

"Swafford’s craftsmanship shines...The book is two books: a biography and a series of journeys through the music, a travelogue with an excitable professor. Readers will want to have a recording playing so they can match metaphors to sounds. I found myself engaged by his imagery, sometimes delighted and surprised." –Jeremy Denk, New York Times Book Review 
"Compelling...Despite the wealth of historical detail, this is no dry academic tome, but a biography full of colorful descriptions of the composer and his milieu...Comprehensive, detailed, and highly readable, this is an entertaining biography that should find favor with music lovers and history buffs." –Seattle Times
"Monumental...Engaging and entertaining...Beethoven aficionados and lovers of classical music will want this book, as will readers interested in biography and the artistic milieu of late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe."–Library Journal, starred review
"A thorough, affectionate, and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)...Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic."–Kirkus, starred review

 "In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven."–Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Swafford’s craftsmanship shines...The book is two books: a biography and a series of journeys through the music, a travelogue with an excitable professor. Readers will want to have a recording playing so they can match metaphors to sounds. I found myself engaged by his imagery, sometimes delighted and surprised." –Jeremy Denk, New York Times Book Review 

"A thorough, affectionate and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)..Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic." --Kirkus, starred review "In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

"A thorough, affectionate and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)..Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic." --Kirkus, starred review

Praise for Johannes Brahms  A New York Times Notable Book  "It is a measure of the accomplishment of Jan Swafford's biography that Brahms's sadness becomes palpable . . . [Brahms] manages, like Swafford's previous study of Charles Ives, to construct a full-bodied human being." — Edward Rothstein, New York Times Book Review  "The definitive work on Brahms, one of the monumental biographies in the entire musical library." — Weekly Standard (London)  "This brilliant and magisterial book is a very good bet to . . . become the definitive study of Johannes Brahms." — Cleveland Plain Dealer  "Swafford comes to the task armed simply with a determination to understand a personality which, in the private life and the music, has so often proved hard to grasp. And it must be said that he has succeeded magnificently." — The Independent (London)  "[Clara Schumann] confessed that the great composer always seemed a 'stranger' to her. Swafford's [Brahms] is an earnest attempt to discover that stranger, who concealed his fragile identity behind a mask of roguish humor and a big, famous beard." — The New Yorker  "A splendid critical biography." — San Francisco Chronicle  "Truly revelatory . . . Swafford's study, clearly a labor of profound affection, is a model biography: eloquent, clear-sighted, and often moving." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)  "A definitive work about one of the 19th century's most influential classical music composers . . . This is an exceptionally well written chronicle of this musical master, an extraordinary work, guaranteed to inform and entertain classical music aficionados and tyros alike." — Kirkus  Praise for Charles Ives  Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography  "First rate . . . Thoughtful, witty, instructive . . . One of the best biographies in recent memory." — Newsweek  "A sensitive, specific, gracefully worded and remarkably clearheaded book that is both an engrossing biography of a craggy idiosyncratic New England 'character' and a detailed examination of the work he left behind." — Washington Post Book World  "Scrupulously detailed and unfailingly enthusiastic." — The New Yorker  "A superb writer . . . [Swafford has] brought the old curmudgeon . . . to vivid life, at once a comic and a tragic figure and in terms of his significance in American artistic life, on the level of Twain or Whitman." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

"A thorough, affectionate and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)..Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic." --Kirkus, starred review  "In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
A Christian Science Monitor Top 10 Book of the Month
"Swafford’s craftsmanship shines...The book is two books: a biography and a series of journeys through the music, a travelogue with an excitable professor. Readers will want to have a recording playing so they can match metaphors to sounds. I found myself engaged by his imagery, sometimes delighted and surprised." –Jeremy Denk, New York Times Book Review
"Compelling...Despite the wealth of historical detail, this is no dry academic tome, but a biography full of colorful descriptions of the composer and his milieu...Comprehensive, detailed, and highly readable, this is an entertaining biography that should find favor with music lovers and history buffs." –Seattle Times
"Swafford creates the perfect blend of a historical person and musical genius...Monumental...A truly remarkable biography."–Christian Science Monitor
"Swafford’s writing on Beethoven’s music is perceptive and illuminating. But just as impressive is his sympathetic portrait of Beethoven the man. Swafford’s book, which should be placed alongside the excellent biographies by Lewis Lockwood and Maynard Solomon, does not diminish any of the composer’s flaws. Instead, it suggests that these flaws were inconsequential compared with the severity of the composer’s anguish and the achievement of his music." –Washington Post 
"Swafford has a knack for bringing in the reader wholly unschooled in the technical vernacular of classical music. That skill is in evidence in this blend of biography and musical assessment. Even if you don't know the difference between a leitmotif and a lighthouse, don't sweat it, for this is, more than anything, a saga of a man at odds with so many things: convention, social mores, himself, women, his family ... If this isn't exactly the Beethoven that Schroeder of 'Peanuts' fame worshiped, it's a more believable characterization, and, more than that, one gets a better sense of how this roiling personality produced works to roil the human soul."–Boston Globe
"Magnificent...Some of the most enjoyable segments of his book are the spirited and knowledgeable readings of Beethoven’s various compositions. These passages are so passionate that they virtually propel the reader across the room to the CD collection, to play the pieces being so smartly described...A stunning tour de force, a Beethoven biography to shine for a lifetime." –Open Letters Monthly
"Monumental...Engaging and entertaining...Beethoven aficionados and lovers of classical music will want this book, as will readers interested in biography and the artistic milieu of late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe."–Library Journal, starred review
"A thorough, affectionate, and unblinking account of the life of the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)...Due to the author’s unsurpassed research and comprehension, we stand in the presence of a genius and see all his flawed magic."–Kirkus, starred review
"In this brilliant, exhaustive story, biographer and music historian Swafford (Johannes Brahms) brings new life to Beethoven."–Publishers Weekly, starred review

Présentation de l'éditeur

Jan Swafford’s biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world’s most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and “fate’s hammer,” his ever-encroaching deafness. Throughout, Swafford offers insightful readings of Beethoven’s key works.

More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come. 

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Faber & Faber
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 057131256X
• ISBN 13: 9780571312566
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 1104