Over the years, various attempts (on page and screen) to create a picture of the life of the greatest of all composers, Beethoven, have been fitfully successful, with sentiment or an unnuanced picture of psychological torment awkwardly freighted into the narratives. No such problems with Jessica Duchen’s remarkable Immortal, in which one of the most astute commentators on classical music in the UK today weaves an utterly convincing narrative from the discovery — after the composer’s death — of a love letter in his handwriting addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Years after this discovery, the Countess Therese Brunswick laid claim to being the now mythical inamorata of Beethoven, as she and her sister Josephine were his pupils in 1799. The narrative that Duchen forges here is utterly persuasive, but doesn’t read like a standard biography – rather as a synthesis of the novel of character (with, perhaps, Thomas Mann in the DNA) and a poetically rendered love story, although never moving into areas of sentimentality. Duchen’s achievement is consumate here, her most signal achievement being a rounded and utterly persuasive picture of Beethoven, along with the requisite historical detail. The book was the perfectly timed for the composer’s anniversary year, but has a timeless appeal.

Barry Forshaw

Immortal by Jessica Duchen is published by Unbound.