Beethoven has been particularly fortunate in his recent critics and biographers. As a start, Elliot Forbes's revised edition of Alexander Thayer's standard early-twentieth-century five-volume Life appeared to great acclaim in 1964 and was further revised by Forbes in 1967. This was followed by a spate of biographical and critical studies of a very high order, including works by Joseph Kerman, Scott Burnham, Charles Rosen, William Kinderman, Martin Cooper and Lewis Lockwood, the senior figure in Beethoven studies, whose magisterial Beethoven: The Music and the Life, the culmination of years of monographic studies, has also just appeared. But for sheer interpretive genius and an uncommon gift for rendering in prose the complex, humanly compelling subtleties of Beethoven's music and life, few approach Maynard Solomon. Aside from an excellent critical biography...
Untimely Meditations
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