Volume 25, Number 5 · April 6, 1978
Beethoven at Home
By Frank Kermode
Beethoven
by Maynard Solomon
Schirmer Books, 400 pp., $15.00
W.H. Auden once reviewed, in these pages, Otto Deutsch's large Documentary Biography of Mozart.[1] Without research I can't be positive that it was the shortest review ever published here, but I'd bet on it. Auden found the whole enterprise redundant, even indecent. Mozart's life was none of our business; and he would have said the same of Beethoven's. One admires the purity of this attitude, but Auden himself was not always capable of holding it, for he was interested in great men and liked to pay them homage. And it is easier to do that to a person than to a shelf of books or scores. In celebrating Freud he spoke of a loved master, even of 'an important Jew who died in exile'; he mourned a man. And the wonderful epiphonema of his poem might be applied with almost equal justice to Beethoven:
Review, 3028 words
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