In Search of Beethoven with John Suchet 

Round & About

John Suchet chats to Liz Nicholls about Beethoven, and his deeply personal journey in the footsteps of his problematic hero, in his absorbing new book, ahead of Marlborough Lit Fest 

Life is full of cruel ironies. And one of the cruellest ironies in history remains: Ludvig van Beethoven, whose epic genius conjured worlds from silence, carved beauty into sound, lost his hearing. 

“So cruel, isn’t it?” says broadcaster and author John Suchet, whose latest book, In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey, explores the composer’s life and legacy. “There are many uncomfortable truths about Beethoven, and this is my hero I’m talking about. But he was a difficult man. He upset his friends, his patrons, his family. He dragged his nephew into a five-year custody battle. He made life hard for everyone around him. But he was also going deaf. Imagine being the greatest living composer and never hearing your own 9th Symphony.”  

In his intimate and absorbing new volume – his ninth on the composer – John traces both Beethoven’s footsteps, and his own. Part biography, part memoir, part travelogue, the book follows John from Bonn to Vienna to Beirut, and back to the very first Beethoven notes he heard as a teenager. It’s a journey of discovery, of affection, and, inevitably, of grief. 

Because, as John gently reminds us, hearing loss is coming for us all, if we’re lucky enough to get old. “Deafness is the one disability every person will experience,” he says. “And the heartbreaking thing is hearing loss is invisible, so people tend to be impatient, even patronising.” 

John, who is now in his 80s, speaks candidly about his own emerging hearing difficulties: trouble following conversations in crowded restaurants, struggling to catch softer voices… “My wife keeps telling me to get a hearing aid,” he says. “But it’s more than that. I’ve learned from Beethoven that hearing loss isolates you in a unique way. It puts up a wall between you and the world that no one else can see.” 

This book is dedicated to John’s wife Nula who encouraged him to write it after they visited Heiligenstadt, the village outside Vienna where Beethoven, aged 31, wrote a desperate letter contemplating suicide. “I get to the music through the man, not the other way round,” says John.
“Most writers on him – and there have been very many – want to know why the Eroica is in E flat. I’m more interested in what he was going through when he wrote it. Why did he scratch Napoleon’s name off the title page? Who had he just fallen in love with?”  

As John writes, learning about Beethoven is a joyful journey without end. So much mystery surrounds the composer to this day, including debate over his heritage, his possible autism. In his own endless journey, in every book John has mentioned the phone call he received 20 years ago from a woman in London with a shoebox containing letters from Ludvig to his famous Immortal Beloved…  “Who was she? We’ll probably never know. Or somebody out there might find something in their attic and then maybe we could unravel the mystery.” 

It’s something John would ask Beethoven if he could. Others earning a place on his dream dinner party guest list would be Napoleon and Picasso. “He is the Beethoven of art,” says John, “in that he was not a nice man, he treated his women appallingly. As did Charles Dickens! And Beethoven treated everyone around him appallingly. What is it about these great artists? And on that subject, a composer whose work I absolutely adore, Richard Wagner, was indefensibly vile… but he did things in music, no one had done before, and he admired Beethoven above all others.” 

Beethoven’s genius continues to shape our understanding of emotion, power, and beauty. But perhaps even more than that, it’s about how music can carry us through our lives. “Beethoven has been with me everywhere,” says John. “Through joy, through trauma, through love. He was with me when I was reporting from war zones, and he’s with me now, in this gentler chapter of life. Beethoven didn’t write to impress the elite. He wrote to speak to the soul. And I truly believe that if you sit with his music – even for just a few minutes a day – it will change you.”