https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/beethoven-a-life-in-nine-pieces-by-laura-tunbridge-review

The author lets the music do the talking in this pithy new biography, which uses the composer’s works to shed new light on his life

A book about the most famous composer in the western canon, a “dead white male” at that, isn’t an obvious place to look for insights into our current plight. Yet from the opening paragraph, Laura Tunbridge’s short, illuminating study of Beethoven (1770-1827), published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of his birth, casts a loose net across the centuries and deftly gathers in the connections. Not that she could have known quite how pertinent her starting point would be. Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces opens with a prolonged campaign, begun soon after his death and lasting nearly two decades, for a monument to the composer to be built in his birth city, Bonn. If our current preoccupation is more about knocking down than erecting, this statuary episode reminds us of our compulsion to honour, in lifelike replica or exhaustive biography, those we celebrate.

How can anyone say anything new about a composer who ranks alongside Shakespeare and Dante? Beethoven biographies have poured forth steadily since his death: from Johann Aloys Schlosser’s in 1827, to key works by Alexander Wheelock Thayer (three volumes, published 1866-79), Maynard Solomon and, most recently, and massively, Jan Swafford. If you can’t add musicological novelty, fiction could be the answer. Paul Griffiths (former music critic of the New Yorker) and Jessica Duchen (the Independent critic, and a blogger) have produced novels to coincide with the inevitably thwarted anniversary: Griffiths’s Mr Beethoven (Unbound), with a formidable display of fantasy scholarship, depicts him living in and travelling to America. Duchen’s Immortal (Unbound) explores the enduring mystery of Beethoven’s unidentified “immortal beloved”, if she existed at all.