IN CLOSING, I WILL offer some further thoughts on artistic biography and some reflections on my own contribution to it in my book Beethoven: The Music and the Life (2003). A biography in our time can't be just a new report of the known facts. To be of value it needs a premise that informs the narrative and controls the interpretation. Such a premise may be focused on different aspects of the subject. It may center mainly on the works themselves and on the subject's development as an artist; or on what can be known of the subject's personality and relationships, close and distant; or on his or her political or spiritual outlook and world-view. It may touch on all of these and other topics, with a binding focus on a few of them. But in the modern age a purely factual biography, narrowly construed as a step-by-step account of the particulars of the life, no matter how comprehensive, may not be strong enough to create the profile that the genre demands and that readers need and want. The biographer needs to have the facts securely in hand but also needs to try to unearth their meanings and suggest their implications. And he surely needs to deal with some aspects of the works themselves, which for many readers is the raison d’etre of the whole enterprise.

The abiding problem of artistic biography – how to do justice to the life and to the works and how to relate the two dimensions – was the question I felt most keenly in writing my own biography of Beethoven. I tried to deal with it first by acknowledging how hard it is to handle and by noting its pervasive presence in all artistic biography, whether or not it is explicit. To widen my view I read or re-read a number of biographies of writers, artists, and scientists. Among them are those of Abraham Pais on Einstein, of Nicholas Boyle on Goethe, and of Richard Holmes on Coleridge and Shelley.

For many musicians, when it comes to the biographies of great composers, pessimism reigns – as in the remarks I quoted earlier by Donald Francis Tovey and Carl Dahlhaus.