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TITLE: Beethoven: The Universal Composer
SPEAKER: Edmund Morris
EVENT DATE: 10/25/2005
RUNNING TIME: 45 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris discussed his new book, "Beethoven: The Universal Composer." The Library's Music Division cosponsored the event with the Center for the Book. Morris, a classically trained pianist, has studied Beethoven and his music for 40 years. "Of all the great composers, Beethoven is the most enduring in his appeal to dilettantes and intellectuals alike," Morris writes. "What draws them is Beethoven's universality, his ability to embrace the whole range of human emotion, from dread of death to love of life--and the metaphysics beyond--reconciling all doubts and conflicts in a catharsis of sound."
Speaker Biography: Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His biography "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award in 1980. After spending several years as President Reagan's authorized biographer, he published the national bestseller "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" in 1999. He has written extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times and Harper's Magazine. Morris lives in New York and Washington with his wife and fellow biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris.
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SERIES: Books & Beyond