Among Beethoven's many surviving sketchbooks, one of the most famous is the "Eroica" Sketchbook, containing all the known sketches for the "Eroica" Symphony, the "Waldstein" Sonata, and other works of 1803 04. These include his first sketches for the opera Leonore (later entitled Fidelio), as well as the unfinished opera Vestas Feuer, the oratorio Christus am Oelberge, the Triple Concerto, songs, keyboard compositions, and early sketches that later bore fruit in the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. It also contains ideas for works that were never completed. This...

This brilliant portrayal weaves Beethoven's musical and biographical stories into their historical and artistic contexts. Lewis Lockwood sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and examines their effects on his music. "The result is that rarest of achievements, a profoundly humane work of scholarship that will or at least should appeal to specialists and generalists in equal measure" (Terry Teachout, Commentary). Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "Lewis Lockwood has written a biography of Beethoven in which the hours that...