PASSION AND PAIN, the second volume of John Suchet's compelling trilogy about the life of Ludwig van Beethoven, depicts the composer at the height of his powers, famous throughout Europe, championed by wealthy patrons, sought out by other musicians, yet all the time beset by the great tragedy of his life - his deafness - and struggling to come to terms with it. The reader is there as Beethoven compares the towering works of the so-called 'heroic period',...