The Life of Beethoven

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1. The young courtier;
2. A new career in Vienna;
3. Cursing his creator and his existence;
4. Drama and symphony;
5. Patrons and patriotism;
6. Empires of the mind;
7. Towards a public comeback;
8. Facing death.

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'My compositions bring me in a good deal … I state my price and they pay.' Beethoven was an inspired composer but he was also a working musician with sound commercial sense. David Wyn Jones's account of Beethoven the man and composer reveals the life of a creative musician in Bonn and Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While paying due regard to the image of Beethoven as one of the most single-minded composers in the history of music, this biography places his work in the context of the musical life of the period. Through an understanding of the changing nature of musical patronage, the private and public concert, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on culture and society, and the increasing ambition of musical life in the period after the end of the wars, a varied and dynamic picture of Beethoven's musical career emerges.

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Here, at last, is a Beethoven who behaves like a real composer. That he does so is thanks to the careful accumulation of circumstantial detail with which Wyn Jones, a dispassionate and even-handed historian, fleshes out his subject's life

The Life of Beethoven by David Wyn Jones in the Cambridge Musical Lives series is so clear to a non-specialist and so elegant as it weaves the public and private lives together, that I intend to get all the other books in the series

this book gives a better, more rounded picture of the Viennese environment in Beethoven's years there than any other Beethoven biography I know

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