EROICA by Carl Pidoll

Beethoven has inspired biographies of many kinds and in many languages - this is a biography with a difference. It's written in the form of imaginary memoirs by Herr von Zmeskall, a Viennese civil servant who is known to have been the composer's close friend for many years, and who must therefore have been one of the few people who could presume to understand Beethoven's secretive and tempestuous genius. Everyone knows the tragic and heroic story - brilliant early success, deafness and despair producing alternate periods of amazing productivity and barren hackwork, and then the triumph of the Ninth Symphony and the last quartets. The author, via the charming personality of this elderly count, rightly gives first place to the musician rather than the man, but his penetrating analysis of Beethoven's character makes this by no means a book confined to musical specialists. His two unhappy love affairs, his notorious rudeness and refusal to flatter, his agonies of loneliness and disappointment over his nephew, are all dealt with seriously, tastefully and with wise understanding.

Hard cover, with dust jacket, both in very good condition.