BEETHOVEN: ANGUISH AND TRIUMPH by Jane Swafford (Faber & Faber £30) Not many great men have been arrested as a tramp. But it happened more than once to Beethoven, because of his slovenly appearance. He would shout down the police cells with rage, ‘I am Beethoven’, until he was identified and released. Such stories encapsulate the problem of understanding him; so great a composer, so impossible and so unhappy a man. Beethoven seems to have lived his whole life over the top. In his frequent rages, as in his loves and his music, he was volcanic. Genius cannot be comfortable to live with. As this massive, but fascinating, biography shows, Beethoven quarrelled even with his best friends, invariably chose unattainable women to love and drove his ‘son’ — his nephew, Karl, to whom he was guardian — to attempt suicide.
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Beethoven was arrested more than once because he looked like a tramp
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The great composer was lonely, but his loneliness was self-inflicted
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His pupil, Ferdinand Ries, once found Beethoven on a sofa with a woman
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Without fail he fell for much younger girls of aristocratic birth
He and a couple of other princes clubbed together to provide @placeholder with a steady income — which was sometimes late in being paid, to Beethoven’s loud complaint.