I have long argued that you have to separate artists from their art. I can admire the Eric Gill frieze above the entrance to Broadcasting House without for a second condoning the sexual abuse that appalling man subjected his daughters to. Gesualdo murdered his wife but that doesn’t stop me liking his madrigals. Henry Williamson was a member of the British Union of Fascists but Tarka the Otter is still a good book. The Siegfried Idyll is a charmingly beautiful piece but its composer, Wagner, was so virulently antisemitic that the Nazis saw him, and his music, as their inspiration. I could go on.

Beethoven was a difficult, troubled, misguided unlikeable man but almost every note of his music is sublime. Think of the finale of the fifth symphony (with the piccolo!) or the opening of the Pathetique piano sonata or any bar of the violin concerto. And the odd thing as, John Suchet finds, is that the more appalling the composer’s behaviour got the more celestial Beethoven’s music became.

Suchet, who has written extensively about Beethoven in the past, and delivered hundreds of talks on the subject, calls this eminently readable 2024 book a “personal journey”. Although it is, in part, a biography of the composer it also discusses Suchet’s own discoveries about, and relationships with, Beethoven from his childhood to the present day. The Eroica symphony, in particular,  provided inspiration, solace and courage on more than one dangerous, war zone mission in his ITN reporting days.

He travels to many places  associated with Beethoven in Germany and Austria and, by sheer serendipity, manages to hook up with several descendants of Beethoven’s sponsors and supporters. Any Beethoven lover, for instance, knows the Waldstein piano sonata (and Suchet explains how it got its name). Then 200 years later we are almost as moved, as he clearly is, when he catches up with Countess Waldstein in 2024 along with several others from families who had links with the composer.

Beethoven was a sick man for most of his life. His hearing, as everyone knows, went in his twenties although no one knows why. He also suffered all his life from debilitating gastric problems. Recent DNA analysis from hair samples suggest that he had cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure resulting from mercury poisoning. Almost unbelievably to us in the 21^st century, the wine was routinely sweetened with mercury which would also have been all around him in eating utensils, paint and so on.

Feeling permanently unwell does not, however, excuse his behaviour and Suchet eventually admits that while he adores the music in which he is steeped, he finds Beethoven the man hard to understand or like. The composer cared for nothing but music and had no empathy. Repeatedly he took money and other help from influential people and then lost his temper with them and walked away. He had a massive sense of entitlement and no concept of gratitude. Performers were treated with disdain when they tried to negotiate about “unplayable” or “unsingable” passages. Parts were often delivered only at the very last minute so there was no time to rehearse properly, if at all. Working with Beethoven was like teetering on the rim of a volcano.

Worse, however, is the very well documented treatment of his widowed sister-in-law, Johanna, whom he relentlessly sought to separate from her son Karl. She may (or was it exaggerated?) have been a bit free with her favours but, as Suchet observes, she was also a mother who naturally wanted to be with her son. Beethoven disapproved of her with venomous passion and fought for years through the courts to prevent Johanna and Karl from meeting, while, astonishingly, also composing some of his best work. It resulted in turning Karl into a very screwed up teenager. Eventually the young man tried to take his own life and, really, Beethoven was to blame.

Suchet has a pleasantly chatty style which includes conversations with his wife Nula and his late wife Bonnie, both fellow enthusiasts and active supporters as he goes about his research. As you read you can hear the music that sustains him (as it does me although I’ve never had to report from a war zone). And it’s like a mysterious alchemical process. How one earth did this irascible, awkward, misguided, ruthless genius produce this exquisite stuff? It feels like a massive contradiction but it proves my point: appreciate the art irrespective of what the artist was or did.

I’d now rather like to hear one of Suchet’s talks which he says have changed over the years because Beethoven research never stands still.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Tricked by the Kippers’ Knickers by Dick Dixon and Reine Mazoyer

This book, first published in 2014, has been grinning beckoningly at me from my digital TBR pile for several months. I simply cannot remember who recommended it but someone must have done or I wouldn’t have bought it. Anyway, whoever you are, if you’re reading this, thank you very much. I loved it.

It’s the most bookish book I’ve read in a while but that doesn’t mean it’s remotely abstruse. Rather, it’s a sparky work of fiction that celebrates the power, importance and joy of books and reading – with much warmth, affection. wit and, sometimes poignancy.

The titular AJ Fikry owns and runs a bookshop on fictional Alice Island which is off Cape Cod. We first meet him at the point when he has turned to hard drinking in a search for oblivion to blot out the agony of his wife’s recent death. He can’t run the shop without her so he’ll probably retire on the proceeds of his most valuable possession – a rare, early copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane. One night, while he’s blotto, the book is mysteriously stolen. Once you remember Silas Marner’s golden guineas there are no surprises at what comes next. Yes, that’s right:  A toddler is abandoned in his shop.

What follows is a joyful story about AJ’s rehabilitation,  born of the need to look after Maya. You have to suspend disbelief a bit and accept that the authorities permit him first to foster, and then to adopt her. She is bright and engaging and AJ talks to her as if she were at the very least a post-doc intern so she becomes highly articulate. Each chapter is headed with an introduction to another (real) book addressed to Maya. Eventually he finds a love interest too with books and the book trade always underpinning everything he does and lives for. I chuckled at AJ’s fury when his mother turns up with e-readers for Christmas. Of course I understand his position but there’s room for both. I read The Collected Works of AJ Fikry on Kindle after all.

It’s a gloriously positive book. I relished, for instance the character of Lambiase,  local Police Chief who becomes a friend to AJ and godfather to Maya. He doesn’t read much but starts a crime fiction book club for his colleagues. Ever more hooked, he has evolved into an irrepressible bibliophile by the end of the novel which spans a couple of decades.

An affectionately affirming novel, it never stoops to banal sentimentality. We do learn, eventually, what happened to Maya’s mother and she doesn’t get a happy ending. And the end of the novel itself is bitter-sweetly rooted in realism rather than resorting to anything chocolate-boxy.

You don’t need to adore books and bookshops to enjoy this novel but if you do, it adds an extra dimension. And why “collected works”? Well, the literary reference is obvious but it’s also how AJ sums up life. Our lives, he thinks, are simply our collected works and I rather like that.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: In Search of Beethoven by John Suchet

I’m delighted to have met Mrs Laetita  “Letty” Rodd having stumbled upon her by chance. Sadly our acquaintanceship will be shortlived bacause her creator, Kate Saunders (lots of children’s and young adult titles), died in 2023 aged only 62. So there are only three titles in the series.

It’s 1850. Mrs Rodd, who narrates, is the impoverished widow of a clergyman. We feel we know her late husband, Matt, because she thinks about him a lot and theirs was a very happy marriage. Now living simply in Hampstead with her landlady and friend Mrs Mary Bentley (wonderful character) she works occasionally as a sleuth for her lawyer brother, Fred. Mrs Rodd, you see, has Marple-esque powers of perception and Mrs B, who stays at home, is a terrific contributor of sensible suggestions, good food and obliging grown up children. They make a formidable pair.

Now Fred – tiresome wife, lots of children and shared happy childhood memories with Letty – has a case involving a proposed unsuitable marriage between wealthy young Charles Calderstone and Helen Orme.  And he wants his sister to go to Wishtide, a grand house in Lincolnshire as governess to Sir James Calderstone’s daughters. This she does, travelling by smutty train, although the disguise doesn’t hold up for long. She meets Helen, and her sister Winifred, who are living nearby and eventually hears the story which renders the marriage out of the question.

What follows at this point is a homage to David Copperfield (as Saunders acknowledges at the end). I recognised it instantly because Little Emily features in a current project of my own so I’ve thought a lot about her lately.  Poor Helen, like Emily has succumbed to a glamorous but unscrupulous cad and wrecked her marriage chances for ever. But someone, apparently, needs to shut her up.

Then – no spoilers – we are suddenly in whodunnit country. There are some pretty gruesome deaths and the culprit must be found. The intrepid Mrs Rodd isn’t fazed by dead bodies because she has, in her years as a clergy wife, had to lay so many out.

Eventually, of course, she susses out the truth after a few red herrings. I like Mrs Rodd a lot. She’s feisty and often funny. And Saunders is good at period detail while also making all these people seem a lot more human than they sometimes are in mid nineteenth century novels. I look forward to the other two titles which followed The Secrets of Wishtide (2016) in 2019 and 2021.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Collected Works of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin