Omar’s Reviews > Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph > Status Update

“He met extraordinary suffering with extraordinary endurance and courage. He needed that strength. Other than death itself, going deaf is the worst thing that can happen to a musician. That is easy to understand, terrible to bear.”

(226)

By 1798, the first parts of a great puzzle were falling into place for him….The enlightened and revolutionary ideals of his childhood in Bonn, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, Haydn's masses [….] How could he lift his art to a new level, to the territory of scope and ambition where he had always expected it to live? How could he step out of the role of entertainer and into the stream of history?

“Now Mozart was dead. In part, Beethoven’s coming career as a composer would be predicated on having no real rival in his own generation.” (126)