IN THIS CHAPTER I want to look again, now more narrowly, at the relationship of Beethoven's life and his work; how best to comprehend these two dimensions, which in some way we know must be two aspects of one. The focus here will be on three widely separated segments of his life: the years 1787, 1809, and 1826. Of course this problem in biography looks quite different in each of these periods, by virtue of Beethoven's age, his stage of development as man and musician, and all other relevant conditions.

A year in the life of a great artist can be a long time. This is especially true for one like Beethoven whose compositional styles changed so drastically across nearly five decades, from the earliest piano sonatas, written in his childhood, all the way to the late quartets. My hope is that narrowing the focus to three separate years may furnish insights that can be applied to his longer artistic career and its context. Comparable studies in literary biography are found in two books by the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro – one on 1599 and its importance for Shakespeare's work, the other on 1606, the year of King Lear. In Beethoven scholarship I pointed out earlier the value of studies that dig deep into shorter periods, in particular Martin Cooper's book on the last ten years and Mark Ferraguto on Beethoven in 1806. Studies like these can be of value in something like the sense that analyses of individual works can shed light on ways of thought that have wider implications. They can bring us down to ground level as we try to see how Beethoven's situation in a particular year may have influenced the works he was producing at the time. Further, research on what Beethoven did and wrote in a single year may broaden modern understanding of the factual landscape by bringing attention to details.

How outer and inner aspects of an artistic life relate to one another is the underlying question of artistic biography. We might see them as frameworks superimposed on one another, or as modes of experience that we feel must be perpetually connected but are sometimes apart, sometimes intertwined, like strands of a cable.