Swafford’s book is intended not as a specialist study but as a comprehensive introduction to Beethoven’s life and music. It is the heftiest English-language Beethoven biography since the multivolume work undertaken in the nineteenth century by the American librarian Alexander Wheelock Thayer—a project completed and revised by others. Swafford, in his introduction, declares his fondness for Thayer’s Victorian storytelling and belittles modern musicological revisionism. He writes, “Now and then in the course of an artist’s biographical history, it comes time to strip away the decades of accumulated theories and postures and look at the subject as clearly and plainly as possible.” He also distances himself from the psychological approach of Maynard Solomon, who, in his 1977 biography, attempted to place Beethoven on a Freudian couch. Though Swafford does not look away from the composer’s less attractive traits—his brusqueness, his crudeness, his alcoholism, his paranoia—the portrait is ultimately admiring.

Hoffmann, in his 1810 essay, appropriated Beethoven for the Romantic movement. Swafford concurs with the more recent tendency—adopted by, among others, Solomon and the pianist-author Charles Rosen—to see the composer as a late manifestation of the Enlightenment spirit, an artist who prized free thought within rational limits. He “never really absorbed the Romantic age,” Swafford writes. In this view, Beethoven instead stayed true to the ideals that prevailed in his native city of Bonn, where Maximilian Franz, the Elector of Cologne and the brother of the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, presided over a short-lived intellectual flowering. Swafford is hardly the first author to observe how fortunate Beethoven was to come of age in such an environment: his grandfather, the Flemish-born musician Ludwig van Beethoven, had served as Kapellmeister in Bonn, and Christian Gottlob Neefe, his principal teacher, instilled in him progressive literary influences. When Beethoven was in his early twenties, he was already thinking of setting to music Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” with its call for universal brotherhood. More mundanely, Bonn’s connections to Vienna helped to establish Beethoven in the imperial city, to which he moved in 1792.

Swafford colorfully evokes Beethoven’s first years in Vienna: his initial triumphs as a composer and a pianist, his canny manipulations of patrons and critics, the terrifying discovery of early signs of deafness, his apparent thoughts of suicide, and his defiant emergence, in the first years of the nineteenth century, as the creator of the “Eroica” and the Fifth, the “Appassionata” and Waldstein Sonatas, and the Razumovsky Quartets. At a time when Napoleon was overturning the old order, Beethoven seemed to launch a comparable coup, and he nurtured an ambivalent fascination for the French Revolutionary milieu, to the point of contemplating a move to Paris. Swafford plausibly suggests that the “Eroica” is a tribute to the “power of the heroic leader, the benevolent despot, to change himself and the world”—an Enlightenment document with revolutionary trappings. As Swafford recognizes, too much is made of the hoary anecdote of Beethoven striking Napoleon’s name from the manuscript after hearing that the leader had crowned himself emperor. He did indeed erase the phrase “titled Bonaparte,” but kept the words “written on Bonaparte,” and referred to the symphony as his “Bonaparte” even after Napoleon had taken an imperial title. The subsequent decision, in 1806, to publish the work as a “Sinfonia Eroica” may have had a pragmatic basis: at that time, Austria was at war with France, and a Napoleon Symphony would have been ill-advised.

Swafford has a marvellous chapter on the music of the “Eroica,” restoring freshness to a very familiar score. He shows how Beethoven composed not episode by episode but toward a predetermined climax—a dizzying, collagelike sequence of variations on an impish theme previously associated with Beethoven’s ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus.” The striding E-flat-major theme of the opening movement is related to the variation theme (both are defined by B-flats above and below), and its swift descent to a discordant C-sharp—an inversion of a more innocent-seeming chromatic slide in the “Prometheus” theme—creates an instability that leads to shocking orchestral violence and finds resolution only at the very end. Furthermore, the usual image of Beethoven the furious smith, binding all notes to a fundamental idea, gives way to a welcome emphasis on the composer’s wit and his love of dancing rhythm. Swafford ingeniously connects the “Eroica” finale—whose theme is based on the popular dance known as the Englische—with a passage in Schiller’s correspondence that sees the Englische as a symbol of an ideal society in which “each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else . . . the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.”

Impassioned and informed, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” stands far above the chatty biography by Suchet, a British television anchor and radio host, who, when the documentary record thins out, supplies fan-fiction scenarios of, say, Beethoven’s conversations with Haydn. Yet Swafford lacks the elegant discipline of Solomon, who traverses Beethoven’s life in four hundred-odd pages, or the analytical precision of William Kinderman and Lewis Lockwood, whose book-length treatments of Beethoven, published in 1995 and 2003, respectively, are rich in insight. A ruthless editor might have saved Swafford from frequent repetition and occasional rhetorical excess (“Surely in music there had never been a more beautiful, a more profound evocation of tranquility and Arcadian peace”).

Still, Swafford’s exuberance is infectious, prompting the reader to revisit works both famous and obscure. I found myself dwelling on the “Harp” Quartet, a transitional piece from 1809 that often receives little more than a glance in the Beethoven literature. (There is, however, a monograph devoted to it: Markand Thakar’s “Looking for the ‘Harp’ Quartet.”) Swafford spends a couple of pages on the “Harp,” noting how a catchy little pattern in the first movement—rising pizzicato figures traded between instruments at the end of the first-theme statement—becomes increasingly significant. Indeed, the pizzicatos seem to overrun the score in an almost anarchic manner, destabilizing its form and releasing rowdy energies. You get the feeling that Beethoven initially believed he was writing a market-pleasing throwaway and then found the project growing steadily more tangled and complex. Or perhaps he meant all along to veer off course. The joy of listening to Beethoven is comparable to the pleasure of reading Joyce: the most paranoid, overdetermined interpretation is probably the correct one.

How did Beethoven become “beethoven”? What prompted the “great transformation of musical taste,” to take a phrase from William Weber—the shift on the concert stage from a living culture to a necrophiliac one? The simplest answer might be that Beethoven was so crushingly sublime that posterity capitulated. But no one is well served by history in the style of superhero comics. This composer, too, was shaped by circumstances, and he happened to reach his maturity just as listeners of an intellectual bent, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, were primed for an oversized figure, an emperor of an expanding musical realm. The scholar Mark Evan Bonds, in his new book “Absolute Music,” describes the “growing conviction at the turn of the nineteenth century that music had the capacity to disclose the ‘wonders’ of the universe in ways that words could not, and that the greatest composers were in effect oracles, intermediaries between the divine and the human.” As Bonds observes, people had spoken of Mozart’s genius but had not referred to him “as a genius.” With Beethoven, genius became a distinct identity, fashioned by the self rather than furnished by God.

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Politics also assisted in Beethoven’s elevation. The disorder of the Napoleonic Wars, which redrew the map of Europe and ended the Holy Roman Empire, caused many to look toward music as a refuge. Amid universal chaos, Beethoven exuded supreme authority. Moreover, the burgeoning of his reputation, notably in Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, coincided with a movement that the early-twentieth-century theorist Carl Schmitt identified as “political Romanticism”—a pan-German nostalgia for vanished medieval Christendom and mythic national roots. Beethoven, despite his cosmopolitan Enlightenment background, was not immune to such sentiments. Several recent scholarly studies, notably Mathew’s “Political Beethoven” and Stephen Rumph’s 2004 book, “Beethoven After Napoleon,” have scrutinized Beethoven’s shifting alliances in his final years, detecting political implications even in the otherworldly realm of the last string quartets. This would seem to be the kind of work that Swafford dismisses as so much posturing, but it sheds new light on the origins of the Beethoven phenomenon.