The Ninth by Harvey Sachs

From The Week of June 20, 2010

I am far from a music aficionado, classical or otherwise -- it was for its historical value that I settled on this biography of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the times in which it was written -- and so it is a credit to Mr. Sachs' learnedness and passion that I come away from the effort in awe of both Beethoven and his music.

Beethoven is clearly a once-in-a-century talent. Mr. Sachs, a biographer of music and its great figures, claims, here, that the legendary, German composer could have settled for producing just a third of his eventual, musical output without jeopardizing his legacy as a demigod of human music. And is that not, in the end, the definition of greatness, the capacity to produce more brilliance than anyone else? And to have lapped the field on his competition, to have his music treasured 200 years after it was composed... But while The Ninth principally concerns Beethoven's latter life, his frustrations, his struggles, his distemper, and his genius, it is equally a book about the 9th Symphony itself, its structure, its themes, and, far as anyone can reconstruct it, its message. Written in the shadows of a Europe convulsed by revolution and war, hostilities that stole the lives of millions without hardly advancing the cause of human liberty, the 9th is an appeal to brotherhood, to a human community strong enough to resist the eviscerations of continental conflict.

Mr. Sachs executes both parts of his novel equally well, trading in the literary exactitude with which he chronicles Beethoven the man for the awe and passion with which he explicates Beethoven's symphony. I've never heard music detailed like this before, tasted, admired, analyzed and ultimately eulogized. It's wonderful and moving work which acknowledges its love without drifting into obsequiousness. A must read for lovers of history, music, or even the story of a man and that moment in time when everything seemed to be slipping away, unfinished, incomplete.

I'd kick myself if I was remiss in pointing out two amazing informational nuggets in Mr. Sachs' book. The first, and most shocking, to me, was the revelation that, in Beethoven's era, there was no such thing as a professional orchestra. The performers of Beethoven's music surely admired the work, but Mr. Sachs argues that Beethoven would have never heard his music performed with the skill and preciseness with which it is regularly performed today. Imagine being a genius fully aware that your work would never be appreciated in your time, that its greatness was being muted by the inadequacy of people you could not control. Astonishing... And secondly, thinking about the giants of history like Napoleon, men who were contemporaries of Beethoven, it is a rich irony that the names of kings and queens, men and women who burned so bright in that time, have come and gone and the German composer lingers on most potently in our cultural memory. In his time, he was just a musician, a nobody next to Czar Alexander, or the Duke of Wellington. But now? They are forgotten and the musician is a god. Such are the vicissitudes of history... (5/5 Stars)