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"Maynard Solomon has given us a modern discussion of Beethoven's music, and the complete story of his life—as it has never before been told." This quotation from the book's jacket is, I believe, essentially accurate, and for that reason Solomon's biography can be unreservedly recommended to anyone who wishes to read a well-documented account of Beethoven's productions and the events of his life. Solomon, however, aims to accomplish more than this traditional biographic task. In the preface he states, "My book is an essay in interpretation and meaning: I will try to discover the meaning of several of the ambiguities and delusions in Beethoven's life and to offer some indications of their possible significance for his creative quest" (p. xiii). He promises the reader to utilize "aesthetic, historical, psychoanalytic, sociological" (p. xiii) categories of analysis. Throughout the book he makes references to specific psychoanalytic formulations by Freud, A. Freud, Abraham, Fenichel, Glover, Greenacre, Rank, Sachs, E. and R. Sterba and utilizes the oedipus complex, internal conflict, splitting, ambivalence, idealization, denial, unconscious fantasy, identification, homoerotism, castration fears, etc., to explain