Ludwig van Beethoven

Date

1770–1827

Description

City of birth: Bonn
Country of birth: Germany
Field of activity: Culture — music

More detail coming ...

Quotes

‘What is beautiful in science is the same thing that is beautiful in Beethoven. There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.’

Author

Victor Frederick Weisskeopf

Title of the publication

Sympathetic Vibrations

Other contributors

K.C. Cole, author

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

W. Morrow

City of publication

New York

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United States of America

Publication date

1985

Location [pp. or web]

p. 78

Original language

Enlgish

Genre

Book

Context

Victor Frederick Weisskeopf (1908–2002) was an Austrian born American based theoretical physicist. His Doctoral advisor was Max Born and he went on to work extensively with Neils Bohr exploring the atom. During World War II, after moving to America, he was appointed Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In 1981 he led a team of four scientists sent by Pope John Paul II to talk to President Ronald Reagan about the need to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons. K.C. Cole is an American science-writer, author, radio commentator, and professor emerita at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her book Sympathetic Vibrations we re-released in 1999 with the title, First You Build a Cloud, and Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life.

‘We will see that Beethoven was in some ways a hard man. The troubling parts of his personality, the squalor he lived in, his growing paranoia and delusions of persecution, his misanthropy and later his double-dealings in business will be on display here roughly in the proportion that they we on display in his life. Likewise the plaintive history of his deafness and illness and his failed love affairs. Still, I believe that in the end there was no real meanness in Beethoven. He aspired to be a good noble, honourable person who served humanity. At times he could be entirely loveable and delightfully in his quirks and puns and metaphors and notions, even in his lusty sociopolitical rants. There was something exalted about him that was noted first in his teens and often thereafter. He was utterly sure of himself and his gift, but no less self-critical and without sentimentality concerning his work.’

Author

Jan Swafford

Title of the publication

Beethoven, Anguish and Triumph: A Biography

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

City of publication

Boston

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United States of America

Publication date

2014

Location [pp. or web]

Introduction, p. xiii

Other location

https://bit.ly/2zEwtaV

Original language

English

Genre

Book

Context

Jan Swafford has written biographies on Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms.