The last master - John Suchet

In the concluding volume of John Suchet's fascinating fictional biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, the reader witnesses the great dramas of the composer's final years, as his growing deafness becomes the source for unrelenting misery - and ever more sublime music.

This is the era of the 'Battle' Symphony, the Seventh, the Diabelli Variations, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth and the 'Ode To Joy', of monumental pieces composed in solitude and performed with ferocious energy to rapturous audiences in Austria and Germany. After his love for his 'Eternally Beloved' is finally consigned to the past, Beethoven's return to Vienna in 1813 marks the advent of a gloriously creative period, and we see him discover renewed artistic purpose amid a city celebrating the defeat of Napoleon. Meticulously researched yet told in a vividly readable style, everything in the novel is true: there is nothing that could not have happened. It is a story as immortal as the music itself.