Beethoven Variations

Poems on a Life

By: Ruth Padel

Narrated by: Ruth Padel

A fascinating poetic journey into the mind and heart of a musical genius, from the author of the celebrated Darwin: A Life in Poems

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover; the clumsy eccentric making coffee with exactly 60 beans. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood: Her great-grandfather, who studied in Leipzig with a pupil of Beethoven's, became a concert pianist before migrating to Britain; her parents met making music; and Padel grew up playing the viola, Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her book is a poet and string player's intimate connection across the centuries with an artist who, though increasingly isolated, ended even his most harrowing works on a note of hope.

* This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF that contains a selection of Beethoven’s works and recommendations for further reading.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Ruth Padel (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.... [The] poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble.... Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly.” (Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times)

“With a conversational intimacy, much like the composer’s chamber works, it is the orchestration of one life through the prism of another, structured around Padel’s expansive empathy. Padel’s light touch recharges the reader’s perception of the unfolding drama of the composer’s life.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“As fine a distillation of Beethoven’s biography as can be imagined: beautifully written, factual but elegant, touching, and funny too.... Padel also includes a list of selected musical works, and it could serve perfectly for anyone wanting to listen to Beethoven’s most enduring pieces and to encounter, as she puts it in a poem, ‘the unquenchable spirit / that powers every note he [wrote].’” (Bruce Whiteman, The Hudson Review)