Beethoven was born 250 years ago this month. Paul Griffiths surveys his oeuvre and the best recent books on the composer in the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1970, at the time of the last Beethoven jubilee, one of the leaders of the musical avant garde, Mauricio Kagel, suggested that the great composer could best be honoured by a year-long moratorium on performances of his works. Although intriguing, perhaps even enticing, Kagel’s proposal was never going to be considered, let alone adopted. Yet now, fifty years later, it has happened. Tens of thousands of concerts, worldwide, planned for the run-up to the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth (celebrated on December 16, though the exact date is uncertain), have been cancelled – not, of course, at the behest of a master musical ironist, but for a reason we all know.

While the same circumstance has had its effect on book production, most of the planned celebratory volumes have arrived in due time, to enter a world where performances of the music have been muted. The title of Jeremy Yudkin’s study of Beethoven’s manifold ways of opening a composition, From Silence to Sound (Boydell and Brewer. £65), thus plumbs a contemporary resonance the author cannot have anticipated. We stand in the silence and are waiting for the sound.

Kagel might have been hoping that, following a Beethoven fast, our ears would emerge refreshed, ready to meet the music in all immediacy, preconceptions forgotten. So, perhaps, it will be. The books, however, tell a different story, of an urge not to wipe clean the memory but rather to record and recall and reconsider ever more about the figure whose primary place in western classical music is hard to contest. Ask almost anyone to name a great composer and the response will be the same. Possibly Mozart will squeak in ahead now and then. Possibly Bach. But much more often Beethoven, Beethoven, Beethoven.

Closest to the source is a volume in the complete edition in English of Beethoven’s Conversation Books (Boydell and Brewer. £45), the third of a projected twelve. Unprecedented, and surely not soon to be repeated, this immense enterprise is in the sure hands of Theodore Albrecht, who not only translates the text but also scrupulously annotates it to create what is as near as possible a diary of the composer’s encounters during, in this case, large parts of the year from May 1822 to May 1823.

In other news: A world-renowned organist has bought a church in Nova Scotia so he can play Bach whenever he wants, even in his pajamas: “For Varnus, the organ is more than just a church instrument. He has aspired to learn and share the enchantment of classical music for almost his entire life. And his fellow Brooklynites want to hear him play, he said. ‘It’s very beautiful that almost every day, five, six, sometimes 10 people are knocking on the door,’ he said. ‘Everyone was so excited when the organ came here, you know, it was almost like some huge accident because a great crowd came around the church when the organ arrived. Even the people who were more interested in rock ’n’ roll or pop music before, they were here almost day by day and they are asking different pieces to play.’” (HT: Ted Gioia)

Scott Beauchamp reviews a “fascinating” history of magic: “Near the beginning of Magic, Gosden explains, ‘For tens of thousands of years, and in all parts of the inhabited world, people have practised magic.’ And this fascinating book mirrors that vast scope, spanning chronologically from the very beginnings of our species to modern neopagans attempting to respond to climate change. Magic shows us polar shamans and African cults, Native American sweat lodges and European witches. Covering such a broad swath of human experience makes the book more entertaining, but it also drives home Gosden’s point that magic is universal.”

Andrew Roberts on writing history: “Narrative is the friend of the historian; chronology, his greatest ally. It is innate to the human condition to want to know the outcome. It is what impels the reader to turn the page. It is the reason that historians don’t get writer’s block; we know what happened next.” But: “To try to immerse oneself in the mindset of the long-dead is easily the hardest part of the historian’s craft, and the most treacherous.”

Bob Dylan sells his entire music catalog to Universal Music: “The price was not disclosed, but industry experts have suggested the sale is in the range of $300 million to a half-billion dollars.”

An archaeologist believes he may have discovered Jesus’s boyhood home in Nazareth, but also admits that it is “by no means a conclusive case. On the one hand, we can put forward a totally plausible case that this was Jesus’s childhood home. But on the other hand, actually proving that is beyond the scope of the evidence. It’s debatable whether it would ever be possible to prove that.”

Photo: Neuschwanstein