The real key to this distinctive book lies in its subtitle. The book's core is an astonishingly detailed medical history of Mozart, spanning his entire life, compiled with great ingenuity and skill from varied and sometimes surprising sources. Davies, a British physician specializing in internal medicine, has already established his credentials with a series of substantial journal articles concerning Mozart's final illness and death. Here he expands and consolidates his research, offering a presumably definitive account of the intricate cluster of ailments and disabilities, some stretching...

This critical reevaluation of the causes of many of Beethoven's illnesses offers detailed accounts of the treatments applied by his physicians and a comprehensive rendering of the composer's final illness, death, and burial. Separate chapters discuss the causes of many of Beethoven's illnesses, his autopsy and the exhumations. Following the rediscovery of the original Latin autopsy report in 1970, the author has discovered two faulty translations, which he argues contributed to errors in earlier medical assumptions. New evidence disputes earlier assertions that Beethoven's deafness...

Beethoven's often-discussed dark side--marked by paranoia, narcissism, and obsession--is brought into focus by Peter J. Davies, who examines both the composer's genetic roots and the familial cruelty and neglect that defined his childhood. But this book is more than a biography, eschewing facile psychoanalysis in favor of a real exploration of how Beethoven's character shaped the work now universally regarded as among the best music ever written. Davies acutely observes the ways in which suffering can bring, at the same time, both madness and genius.

The author begins by tracing the...