Without understanding alcoholism, one cannot understand Beethoven. This includes nearly all of his biographers.
“Beethoven is one of those historical figures so famous that everything worth knowing about him has been known for a long time.”
So writes Edmund Morris in a review of Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in The Wall Street Journal (“The Mystery of Creativity: The madder Beethoven got, the more lucid his musical intelligence became,” August 2-3, 2014).The trouble with Morris’s observation is, knowing is not understanding.
He says Beethoven was “so unable to relate to other people’s feelings as to suggest a modern-day diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.” (For Myers-Briggs enthusiasts, this suggests he was either INFP or INTP.) “Nor did he ever really understand love….Hence the long list of occasions when Beethoven unfeelingly hurt those who loved him and whom ...