Beethoven bulletins

What newsreader John Suchet doesn’t know about Beethoven probably isn’t worth knowing, and his secret passion has turned into a parallel career away from the newsroom. Andrew Stewart reports.

Most music-lovers know little of Beethoven sketch studies, the composer’s medical history or analytical approaches to his output. And yet everyone holds an image of the tormented, profoundly deaf musician, unlucky in love, who defied the odds to produce a succession of impassioned masterpieces.

The gist of the composer’s alleged outbursts against Napoleon or the legal battle for the custody of his nephew, told in headline terms, would make ideal material for a news bulletin.

Cue John Suchet to read the piece, add vox pop interviews with Beethoven’s long-suffering friends and footage of Napoleon’s troops storming the suburbs of Vienna.

Serious students of Beethoven will immediately connect the names of Thayer, Tyson, Kerman, Cooper and Solomon to the scholarly business of charting, analysing and interpreting the composer’s life and works, a business that began not long after Beethoven’s death and has survived eccentric political spinning, lofty myth-making and wild speculation. Suchet the Beethovenian may not so readily spring to mind, although the man from ITN has a depth of knowledge about the composer that extends far below the surface patina of popular history and an ability to express it in compelling language.

His three-volume ‘biographical novel’, Beethoven – The Last Master, is set for re-issue later this year in a boxed paperback edition. Meanwhile, Suchet will be on the road with his Beethoven show, also titled The Last Master, appearing this summer at the Perth, King’s Lynn, Exeter, Chester and Lichfield festivals, and entertaining audiences in venues from Mold’s Anthony Hopkins Theatre to the Palace Theatre in Westcliff-on-Sea.

Although the public has responded positively to Suchet’s Beethoven books and talks, what have guardians of the god-like musician’s memory and other fervent Beethovenites made of his work?

‘I’ve found that musicians, who I expected to be against what I do, have really taken to it. They enjoy hearing someone talking about and explaining the music they play. They also respond to details of how Beethoven lived.’

The Suchet approach is less concerned with the key structure of a particular work, or its formal outline, than with whether Beethoven was in love or drunk at the time of its composition, where he was living, his financial situation or how he might have been affected by the Austro-Hungarian empire’s war with Napoleon. His instant recall of dates and events is certainly impressive; likewise, the research underpinning The Last Master has been judged as sound by respected authorities.

‘Even Professor Barry Cooper, one of the the world’s leading Beethovenians, sent me a really nice letter about my books. Sir Colin Davis, whose daughter now plays cello for me when I do my talks, wrote to me pointing out three or four very small musical errors. I was absolutely mortified, but he ended the letter by saying he offered those corrections out of humility. That was lovely.’

Suchet is sure that knowledge of the context of Beethoven’s work can throw light on individual pieces that evade detailed musical analysis, a view reflected in recent scholarly interest in placing the composer within Viennese society and re-assessing the business of his survival in a competitive musical environment.

‘People think of Beethoven as a god, but he was a man. He had to live in a city that was at war for most of his adult life: where did he eat and drink, how did he pay his rent? Those are the type of questions that fascinate me.’

He adds that initial results from a DNA test on a strand of Beethoven’s hair suggest that poisoning from fish caught in the polluted Danube may have caused the composer’s painful death. ‘For me, such details add another level of interest to the man.’

How and when did Suchet’s love for Beethoven take root? ‘It began with the music a long time ago,’ he explains. ‘At school I was a Tchaikovsky freak, although my piano teacher told me I would grow of out that. I was sure I wouldn’t, but I’m afraid I did; increasingly I turned to Beethoven’s music and began listening to everything I could.

‘At first, I explored the "angry" stuff that everybody knows, such as the opening movement of the fifth symphony, and accepted the image of this permanently scowling figure with hair flying everywhere. Then I discovered a whole body of lyrical, beautiful and gentle music, and began to question the received image.

‘As his deafness increased, he was supposed to have become angrier and angrier. So how come he produced so much that is sublimely beautiful? And how does a deaf composer produce masterpieces of that quality? I began reading about his life and my journalistic antennae were drawn out by this incredibly strong story.’

The Beethoven bug multiplied and took hold when Suchet read Thayer’s monumental Life of Beethoven, a dry yet detailed account that offered up what he describes as the ‘kernel of a really good story’.

Maynard Solomon’s single-volume biography, complete with psycho-analytical conclusions on the composer’s character and the childhood trauma of living with an alcoholic father, was next on Suchet’s reading list.

‘It’s a great book. After that I read anything I could get my hands on, and have since built up a library of over 100 books on Beethoven. I wanted to know if he knew Mozart, for instance, and discovered that they had met just once. That was the sort of thing that made me want to write the man’s story. I told my wife about it, and she said do it.’

He began his labours in 1983, expecting to complete a short semi-fictional account of Beethoven in good time. The project grew into a three-volume deal that occupied its author until the late 1990s, supplemented since with work on The Last Master talks and Suchet’s Beethoven website – www.madaboutbeethoven.com.

‘I thought I would never finish. It was meant to be one book, which became two and then became three. My publisher, bless him, stayed with it. I was under serious pressure to produce them at yearly intervals and it just about did me in. Someone said to me that I would feel bereft when I had completed the books, and another said that I would never want to hear another note of Beethoven’s music for as long as I lived. They were both wrong! I can’t get enough of the music; I can’t listen to it too often.

‘After the books, I thought that my involvement with Beethoven would only be as a listener. But suddenly I was asked to do a talk about the composer, and found that the audience loved it.’

Beethoven has inspired Suchet to develop a cottage industry devoted to the composer. All-Electric Theatre Productions has confirmed bookings for The Last Master show stretching into the middle of next year, with up to seven talks a month in the diary for this summer. Pianist Bernard Lanskey, assistant director of music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, supplies musical illustrations for the talks, often partnered by a violinist and cellist.

'The real shock to me is that people are interested in the show and that I can do it,’ Suchet observes. He recalls a recent visit to New York to see his brother David, of television’s Poirot fame, as Salieri in Shaffer’s Amadeus on Broadway. ‘We found a moment to talk about performing. I told him, "I’m not a performer – I’m a journalist!" What I do is a performance, but I’m not a performer. "Oh yes you are, brother," he said'.

The success of Suchet’s Beethoven talks supports a reasonable theory that audiences are eager to learn more about classical music, especially if their guide happens to be a friendly face and voice from the small screen. A man trusted to deliver news on events that may have a direct impact on the lives of viewers, so it appears, can also be trusted to penetrate the mystique of a great composer.

‘I genuinely like to break down that mystique,’ he explains. ‘I’m not stupid, since I know there’s an element of people wanting to see "that bloke on the telly". But from what audiences say to me afterwards, people who come to hear the show are true Beethoven fans who happen to be daunted by the idea of going to the Wigmore Hall.

‘Classical music is there to be listened to by as many people as possible. I have to say that Classic FM, say what you like about it, and boy has it got its faults, has brought a huge number of people to classical music. To put it another way, a lot of people who loved classical music clearly felt they had nowhere to turn to before Classic FM came along. They were frightened off by Radio 3.’

Accessibility is a recurring theme in many of the thousand-or-so letters Suchet has received from those who have read his books or heard him talk about Beethoven. ‘So many people thank me for bringing him to life and for bringing him down to earth.’ He adds that correspondents have written movingly of the life-changing experience of Beethoven’s music and how the composer offered comfort in times of extreme pain and sorrow.’

‘After one talk, a man came and said he wanted me to know that Beethoven had saved his life – twice. I can’t think of another composer who could do that for someone. The word passion returns over and over again when people talk to me about the show. I just love doing it, I love telling these stories about this man.’

How did his television colleagues respond to his spare-time work? ‘For much of the eight years or so I was writing the books, I kept quiet about it. Scratch every journalist and they say that they’re really writers waiting for the right day to create their great novel. I gave very little away until I had finished, but I had to tell the editor of my programme.’

He recalls the days when he presented ITN’s early evening news, which began at 4.30am with a four-hour Beethoven stint before setting off for work. ‘It reached the stage where, without fail, my head would drop at 4pm and I’d fall asleep. In a busy newsroom, you get noticed if you fall asleep! I thought I’d better out myself, so I told a few key people. They were very supportive.’

The 56-year-old newsreader says that talking about Beethoven should keep him busy for several years to come. Beyond that he is looking forward to retirement in 2004 and the chance to make progress with his next book, a biographical novel devoted to another passion, the life and times of Verdi.

‘I’d love to do a television programme that visits the Beethoven sites, which would make a great show. I’ve already been asked to lead a conducted tour of the Beethoven sites in Vienna, and that’s another retirement project. And finally, there’s a television series to be made about the whole life of Beethoven, and I know just the actor – my brother!’

Details of The Last Master tour from David Foster at All Electric Theatre Productions, tel 01264 361924, or e-mail all.electric@cwcom.net

This article appeared in the May 6 edition of Classical Music magazine. For more information about the magazine e-mail classical.music@rhinegold.co.uk or visit the publisher’s Web site at www.rhinegold.co.uk

© John Suchet