Beethoven: variations on a life - Mark Evan Bonds

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• Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career-even in the face of deafness-Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art.
• This inner consistency, the music historian Mark Evan Bonds argues, provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works.
• Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing whatever occupied him from a variety of perspectives: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion.
• His ability to unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory.
• Beethoven's works, Bonds argues, are a series of variations on his life.
• The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he could assume and project through his music.
• The supposedly characteristic furrowed brow and frown, moreover, came only after his time.
• Discarding tired myths about the composer, Bonds proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self.