The great composer Ludwig van Beethoven often disgraced himself in public (he threw a bowl of hot stew at a waiter), was once arrested and charged with dereliction, and was widely believed to be mad. His clothes were so rumpled and dirty that street urchins would mock him. He had trouble holding on to servants, and what few friends he had, when they came to his flat, had to put up with stench from an unemptied chamber pot that he kept beside his piano. He became deaf. Mysterious ailments further isolated him from human society. Loneliness and desperation leap from the pages of his intimate...