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An authoritative work offering a fresh look at Beethoven's life, career, and milieu. "Magisterial" -- New York Review of Books. 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 Beethoven spent writing music -- that is, his methods of working, his interest in contemporary and past composers, the development of his musical intentions and ideals, his inner musical life, in short -- have been properly integrated with the external events of his career.