Beethoven Literature

The Music Division's collections include a great deal of scholarship and literature on Beethoven and related subjects. The sections on this page highlight the materials available for use both on-site in the Performing Arts Reading Room and elsewhere.

Books about Beethoven are usually classified under ML, Music Literature, in the Library of Congress Classification Schedule. Find them by searching the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Print Scholarship Sponsored by the Music Division

The Music Division has supported scholarship on Beethoven. Much of this research has been shared and made available on the Library's website. These materials include short articles in the Digital Collection of the Moldenhauer Archives, focused on manuscripts held by the Music Division:

See the "Lectures, Interviews, & Concerts" page of this research guide for recordings of additional scholarship on Beethoven presented by the Music Division.

19th-Century Books on Beethoven

Biographical interest in Beethoven and his music sparked soon after his death in 1827. These books are usually classified under ML, Music Literature, in the Library of Congress Classification Schedule. The following titles are some of the earliest biographies of his life and link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Several of these titles have also been scanned and are available online through HathiTrust. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven by Schindler, Anton
Call Number: ML410.B4 S3
Published/Created: 1840
Early biography of Beethoven published just 13 years after his death. Written by Anton Schindler, a close friend and later secretary for Beethoven, the biography includes many inaccuracies and exaggerations about Beethoven, his life, and his works. Yet although Schindler forged documents and offers an unreliable biographical text, his accounts of Beethoven's style of performing his own piano works are indispensable.
Ludwig van Beethoven : Leben und Schaffen by Adolph Bernhard Marx
Call Number: ML410.B4 M3
Published/Created: 1859
Available online from HathiTrust External
An early biography of Beethoven by Adolph Bernhard Marx, a musicologist whose intellectual and musical critiques Beethoven appreciated in his lifetime.
Thematisches Verzeichniss der im Druck erschienenen Werke von Ludwig van Beethoven
Call Number: ML134.B4 B83 1868
Published/Created: 1868
Available online from HathiTrust External
Early thematic catalog of Beethoven's works, documenting the provenance and locations of sketches and manuscripts.
Beethoven, sa vie et son oeuvre, d'après les documents authentiques et les travaux le plus récents by Wilder, Victor, 1835-1892
Call Number: ML410.B4 W56
Published/Created: 1883
Early biography of Beethoven in French from the late nineteenth century.
Ludwig van Beethoven : mit einem Porträt in Stahlstich by Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von, 1822-1896
Call Number: ML410.B4 W25 1888
Published/Created: 1888
Available online from HathiTrust External
A later nineteenth-century biography of Beethoven by Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, a German violinist, music historian, and conductor.

Bibliographic Sources for Beethoven

Bibliographic interest in documenting primary resources in Beethoven research has continued to garner new insights, even in the twenty-first century. The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Ludwig van Beethoven : thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis by Dorfmüller, Kurt, 1922- compiler.
Call Number: ML134.B4 A16 2014
ISBN: 9783873281530
Published/Created: 2014
Published catalog of Beethoven's musical works, compiled between 1999-2014. Documents provenance and locations of Beethoven sketches and manuscripts. Also documents compositional history of works, as well as provides bibliographical information on first and early editions of works, including alternate arrangements.
The Beethoven Sketchbooks by Douglas Johnson; Alan Tyson; Robert Winter
Call Number: ML410.B4 J58 1985
ISBN: 0520048350
Published/Created: 1985-11-22
A comprehensive description of Beethoven's sketchbooks - bound books of music paper in which Beethoven made sketches for his compositions dating back to 1798. This book summarizes the ways in which past scholars have treated the sketches, explains their nomenclature, and proceeds to more detailed discussions of the principal collections through which they passed. There is a central portion consisting of detailed accounts of individual desk and pocket sketchbooks. Each account follows the same basic plan: provenance of the manuscript, problems of reconstruction, chronology, contents, and structural chart. The text also includes documentation of watermarks in each sketchbook.
Beethoven-Jahrbuch
Call Number: ML410.B4 B2817
Published/Created: 1954-1981
Ten-volume publication that documents the provenance and locations of Beethoven sketches and manuscripts.

21st-Century Beethoven Scholarship

Beethoven scholarship continues to offer new insights into the composer and his works. The following titles offer a representative sample and link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Beethoven by Jan Swafford
Call Number: ML410.B4 S94 2014
ISBN: 9780618054749
Published/Created: 2014-08-05
Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, and romantic rejection. Throughout, Swafford offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works.
Beethoven by Lewis Lockwood
Call Number: ML410.B4 L597 2003
ISBN: 0393050815
Published/Created: 2002-12-17
Lewis Lockwood interweaves his subject's musical and biographical dimensions and places them in their historical and artistic contexts. By providing glimpses into the composer's sketchbooks and autograph manuscripts, Lockwood allows us to gain substantial insights into Beethoven's compositional methods.
Beethoven and His World by Peter Clive
Call Number: ML410.B4 C62 2001
ISBN: 0198166729
Published/Created: 2001-11-08
Following the author's acclaimed biographical dictionaries on Schubert and Mozart, 'Beethoven and His World' offers an extremely comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the composer's relations with a multitude of persons with whom he associated on a personal or professional basis: relatives,friends, acquaintances, librettists, poets, publishers, artists, patrons, and musicians. With more than 450 entries, the dictionary is the result of a wide-ranging examination of primary and secondary sources, and critically assesses the use which scholars have made of the considerabledocumentation now available. In particular, there are numerous references to Beethoven's correspondence and conversation books.
Late Beethoven by Maynard Solomon
Call Number: ML410.B4 S655 2003
ISBN: 0520237463
Published/Created: 2003-05-14
Using the composer's letters, diaries, and conversation books, Solomon traces Beethoven's attraction to a constellation of heterogeneous ideas, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative religion, Eastern initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and contemporary thought.
Beethoven by Barry Cooper
Call Number: ML410.B4 C738 2008
ISBN: 9780195313314
Published/Created: 2008-10-08
Barry Cooper's new volume incorporates the latest international research on many aspects of the composer's life and work and presents these in a truly integrated narrative. Cooper employs a strictly chronological approach that enables each work to be seen against the musical and biographical background from which it emerged.
Beethoven in America by Michael Broyles
Call Number: ML410.B4 B869 2011
ISBN: 9780253357045
Published/Created: 2011-10-27
Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop songs; he is Schroeder's god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry's freaked-out parent in "Roll over Beethoven." In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural icon. Broyles examines Beethoven's appearance in a variety of contexts: American commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist critique of Romanticism.

Beethoven: A Guide to Primary and Secondary Resources at the Library of Congress

Performing Arts: Ask a Librarian

Beethoven Literature

Print Scholarship Sponsored by the Music Division

19th-Century Books on Beethoven

Bibliographic Sources for Beethoven

21st-Century Beethoven Scholarship