"In the course of elucidating Beethoven and his music in this volume, Wilson questions the traditional practice of dividing Beethoven's life into three periods, discerns his true attitude toward Napoleon, and probes the "heroic" side of Beethoven's music and its bearing on his work as a whole."--BOOK JACKET.

"Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston." "Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte." "But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence.""--BOOK JACKET.

Lockwood (music, Harvard U.) is a world-renowned Beethoven scholar who has written extensively on the composer. Written for the general reader, his text portrays Beethoven as man and artist, focusing mainly on his music, but also exploring his life, career, and the age in which he lived. While the text presents his life mainly through his development as a composer, it also places him within the historical, political, and cultural setting in which he lived, and shows Beethoven's works as both reflections of outer influences and as imaginative products of an exceptional musical mind. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Buch (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris) has written a fascinating account of the political origins, impact, and later uses of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, particularly its familiar Ode to Joy. Initial chapters delve into the political and musical context of the work, with treatment of the genesis of political hymns, especially Handel's God Save the King. The rest of the book is devoted to the reception and uses made of the Ode to Joy in contexts that include the 1845 ceremony commemorating a monument to Beethoven in Bonn, the 1927 centenary of the composer's death, Nazi Germany, and as the European Anthem. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beethoven's death. By the time he was buried, Beethoven's head had been nearly shorn by the many people who similarly had wanted a lasting memento of the great man. Such was his powerful effect on all those who had heard his music. For a century, the lock of hair was a treasured Hiller family relic, and perhaps was destined to end up sequestered in a bank vault, until it somehow found its way to the town of Gilleleje, in Nazi-occupied Denmark, during the darkest days of the Second World War. There, it was given to a local doctor, Kay Fremming, who was deeply involved in the effort to help save hundreds of hunted and frightened Jews. Who gave him the hair, and why? And what was the fate of those refugees, holed up in the attic of Gilleleje's church? After Fremming's death, his daughter assumed ownership of the lock, and eventually consigned it for sale at Sotheby's, where two American Beethoven enthusiasts, Ira Brilliant and Che Guevara, purchased it in 1994. Subsequently, they and others instituted a series of complex forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer's chronically bad health, his deafness, and the final demise that Ferdinand Hiller had witnessed all those years ago. The results, revealed for the first time here, are startling, and are the most compelling explanation yet offered for why one of the foremost musicians the world has ever known was forced to spend much of his life in silence. In Beethoven's Hair, Russell Martin has created a rich historical treasure hunt, an Indiana Jones-like tale of false leads, amazing breakthroughs, and incredible revelations. This unique and fascinating book is a moving testament to the power of music, the lure of relics, the heroism of the Resistance movement, and the brilliance of molecular science. An astonishing tale of one lock of hair and its amazing travels--from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America.