I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book as I am currently studying music and I am in the middle of learning the appassionata. It contains so much useful information with very interesting revelations. The author has obviously done great research for this book and it is evident from page 1.
Information:
This book contains lots of very interesting information which any non-music lover can appreciate. He writes the book in a way that anyone can understand. I found it to be more like a great fiction novel which is good! There were many interesting facts I learned from this book that were explained in detail. You can see that the author has read many other Beethoven biographies and just taken all of the important facts and recollected them in this book. I find this brilliant as he gives facts but also tells when the information is not 100% accurate. He gives his own in-depth opinions on any speculation he places before us which I found to be very well thought out.
Price:
Compared to other Beethoven biographies which I speculated purchasing, this seemed to be detailed and at a reasonable price. I personally purchased this for just under 5£ which I considered cheap. Many of the other biographies cost more than 15£ which I found to be quite expensive. For the amount of information and detail that went into this book, it is very well priced.
Length:
The book is 300 pages long so it takes quite a while to get through. It took me a couple of weeks to get through it with just reading a little bit every day. By the time I was 50% finished the book, the author was already onto close to the end of Beethoven’s life. It just shows how productive Beethoven’s creativity for music was even when he was nearly deaf.
Enjoyment:
The author did not use very complicated language or anything that would make the book difficult to read. He placed the information very clearly on the pages which anyone could appreciate. I thoroughly enjoyed this book as the author did not bore us with extreme details of Beethoven’s pieces. For me, I would have enjoyed more detail but for most, I can imagine that they want easy-to digest information.
Ratings...
Information: 8/10
Price: 10/10
Length: 9/10
Enjoyment: 9/10
OVERALL: 9/10
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I found it to be very insightful into the life of Beethoven. While it is evident that there are very limited sources of information from Beethoven’s time, the author does a brilliant job of filling you in to the best of his ability. At the very least, you will learn something!
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