Mr. B

Just the other day, before taking one of his increasingly frequent turns as a guest conductor, Placido Domingo was asked by a member of his audience, “Who are the composers that most touch your heart?” He was about to conduct a symphony by Tchaikovsky, but his answer, quite simply, was “Beethoven and Verdi.” That the music of Verdi should touch the heart of the finest Verdi tenor of our times is hardly surprising. Nor is it really so surprising that Beethoven should have been the other name on his lips, for the great tenor is first and foremost a musician.

Beethoven’s powerful appeal to musicians, and to generations of music lovers, can be summed up in one word: humanity. His music is the expression not of humanity in the abstract but of a very concrete example of it--his own. For where Bach’s music looks up and Mozart’s looks outward, Beethoven’s almost always looks inward, almost always is an expression of his personality, his outlook, his aspirations. This is part of what makes Beethoven the single greatest paradigm shift in the history of music. Because it was in his music, for the first time, that subjectivity and self-expression were established at the center of the artistic enterprise.

Other things happened in Beethoven’s music as well. The notion of etiquette--the notion that art should adhere to norms of fashion and taste--was not merely challenged but openly attacked and eventually overthrown. Classical rhetoric was subverted time and again, though never completely ignored, while the confines of 18th century form were broken wide open. Most impressive of all, perhaps, especially from a composer who was deaf, the power of sound was unleashed for the first time.

Since the subject of so much of Beethoven’s music was, to a certain degree, Beethoven himself, it is important that we understand the man who speaks to us through it. And no one has contributed more to that process over the last 25 years than Maynard Solomon, author of the landmark biographical study “Beethoven,” which first appeared in 1977. At a time when most scholars were focusing on the minutiae of the historical record--on which page of what sketch-book did this phrase of that symphony first appear?--Solomon was not afraid to paint in broad strokes and use the tools of modern psychology in his attempt to gain insight into the personality and creative drive that produced music’s most extraordinary body of work. A brilliant researcher with a code breaker’s talent for reading between the lines, Solomon tackled the question “Who was the ‘Immortal Beloved?’ ” and, as far as most of us are concerned, cracked the case wide open in a chapter that still reads like an espionage thriller: It was Antonie Brentano. His analyses of Beethoven’s style periods and of the conceptual processes at work in each one were widely hailed, as was his skill at drawing plausible parallels between developments in the composer’s personal life and the directions the music took, though many scholars felt and continue to feel that there are limits to what Freud can say about Beethoven or, more precisely, Beethoven’s music.

Nonetheless, the appearance of the second, revised edition of Solomon’s “Beethoven” is happy news for the reader interested in becoming better acquainted with the composer and his music. Among the new material here is information gleaned from the latest edition of Beethoven’s correspondence as well as from the conversation books Beethoven used in his later years, when deafness prevented him from hearing even the remarks of friends and companions seated across the table. Also new to this edition is a full-color compendium of all the known portraits of the composer created during his lifetime, from the silhouette taken of him when he was 16 to the deathbed drawings of Joseph Teltscher and Joseph Danhauser. A good book has been made even better, and it remains an indispensable volume for the aficionado.

The new “Beethoven’s Concertos” by Leon Plantinga is a book for working musicians and serious students. Plantinga’s courses at Yale were, 25 years ago when I was there, and still are among the gems of the music curriculum at that university. His long-awaited book represents the substantive marrow, as Rabelais might call it, of scholarly bones patiently gathered and expertly crunched over many years by this most erudite and good-natured professor. For those with a fairly good command of music theory and terminology, it will be a delight to dig in to such nutritious, high calorie stuff. The book’s most significant finding, from the specialist’s point of view, has to do with the C minor piano concerto; Plantinga establishes conclusively that, contrary to much speculation, the score dates from 1803, not 1800. This changes our perspective on it rather dramatically. In addition to his detailed analyses of all of Beethoven’s works in concerto form--including the black sheep of the family, the Triple Concerto (which he elegantly addresses as “an interlude in the French manner”)--Plantinga provides a great deal of aesthetic, historical and, significantly, political background to the works. This is particularly important in the case of the Emperor Concerto, written against the backdrop of the Napoleonic conquest of Europe and perhaps, as Plantinga suggests, a metaphor for generalized human struggle and the “nobility of character required to prevail.”

It’s in phrases such as this that the great value of Plantinga’s book to the lay reader becomes apparent. For while he approaches the material with the careful and painstaking attitude of a true scholar, Plantinga transmits his ideas in the graceful and undaunting language of a fine writer, one who is willing and able to share his knowledge in a way that even the non-musician can enjoy.

A writer who has been doing that for a long time now, Michael Steinberg has also recently weighed in with a long-awaited volume on concertos, in this case not just Beethoven’s but the essential repertory works of every major composer from Bach to John Adams. “The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide” comes as a sequel to Steinberg’s highly successful 1996 offering “The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide,” and those who have already discovered how useful and engaging the earlier book is will be happy to know that there is more of the same here. Steinberg has served as a program annotator for several of America’s top orchestras, and for 12 years he was music critic of the Boston Globe. His style is elegant and informative; his commentaries do not shy away from a serious analysis of the music, in the manner of such distinguished forerunners as Tovey and Dent. He has a vast knowledge of European culture, yet there is an all-American directness and pace to his writing: He wears his scholarship lightly and chooses well what information to impart to the reader. His treatments are models of how program notes should be written for today’s audiences, and it is wonderful to have them collected in so easily accessible a form.

It was Aaron Copland who said that if a literary person puts together two words about music, one of them is bound to be wrong, which didn’t stop PolyGram (now Universal, a division of Seagrams) from getting together with Penguin Books to produce a series of compact disc reissues called “Penguin Music Classics,” featuring booklet essays by a variety of contemporary “literary persons.” Drawn from the back catalog of Universal’s classical labels--London (now Decca), Deutsche Grammophon and Philips--the discs share many of the design elements of the well-known Penguin Classics paperbacks, including the black background to the title information on the cover. The recordings chosen for inclusion in the series are all ones that have received upticks from the prestigious “Penguin Guide to Compact Discs.”

On musical and technical grounds, most of the performances offered here pass muster. However, I’m not that sure I like what’s implied by the marketing approach. Using respected figures from the world of letters (Arthur Miller and John Fowles on Beethoven; Ethan Canin on Holst; Paul Johnson on Wagner; Douglas Adams on Bach; Garrison Keillor on Handel; Wendy Wasserstein on Dvorak; Stephen Jay Gould on Mozart; William Boyd on Rachmaninoff; Edmund White on Tchaikovsky) to promote classical music is no worse, I suppose, than asking well-known actors and athletes to promote literacy, but is it necessary? To the extent it suggests that this music and these performances need a testimonial, it may actually be harmful. But for a reader of good books who may be drawn to these recordings because, like the one of Chopin selections performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy, they feature an original essay by Kazuo Ishiguro, this series could well open a door to new delights.