Volume 43, Number 15 · October 3, 1996
The Beethoven Takeover
By Joseph Kerman
Beethoven Hero
by Scott Burnham
Princeton University Press, 209 pp., $29.95
In 1969 Alan Tyson, the leading British authority on Beethoven, who is also a psychoanalyst, published a short, quiet, and (by now) rather well-known article called 'Beethoven's Heroic Phase.'[1] Its subject is the composer's psychological state (bad) in the years when he first began to experience deafness, from around 1799 to 1802. Beethoven says again and again, in letters sent and unsent, that he must accept his affliction with resignation. Yet resignation was obviously hard to attain, for he also keeps mentioning alternatives: death as a release, a woman's love that may rescue him, and especially immersion in his art. 'The goal which I feel but cannot describe' was to create a future music of transcendent greatness. Tyson observed that three compositions written or commenced in the year 1803, the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, the opera Leonore (later Fidelio), and Symphony no. 3, the pathbreaking Sinfonia Eroica, virtually act out each of these alternatives.
Review, 2995 words
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