Edmund Morris is the author of two award-winning biographies of Theodore Roosevelt – and, of course, the much-derided official biography of Ronald Reagan, “Dutch.” So, what is he doing writing a biography of Beethoven?

Well, Mr. Morris is also a classically trained musician, one with a lifelong devotion to Beethoven; he writes about his “immortal beloved” with brio and wit. This book amply fulfills the promise of the “Eminent Lives” series of short biographies to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar: “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant.”

Mr. Morris’s subtitle – “The Universal Composer” – says it all: Beethoven is the Shakespeare of music. The composer appeals to listeners on all levels, and Mr. Morris aims to do the same, which is difficult when confronting the technical aspects of music. “The greatness of Beethoven’s music cannot be fully expressed without some analysis and some reference to technical matters. Wherever possible, this has been done in plain language.”

In the main, Mr. Morris succeeds in the tricky balancing act of engaging the full range of musical readers:

The huge sonorities of the organ, particularly in the pedal register, and its capacity to prolong tones ad infinitum, combined with yet more lessons in viola and horn to produce the characteristic “sound” of Beethoven the composer: spacious, projective, multilayered, muscular.

Packing this much into a paragraph is a good way to evoke Beethoven’s resonance.

There are moments in human experience, Mr. Morris suggests, when only Beethoven will do. The biographer describes how, for example, in the aftermath of a tremendous storm that brought 6 feet of snow to New England in February 1978, some invisible person in Harvard Yard “threw open a second-floor window, mounted a pair of speakers on the sill, and blasted the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into the crisp air.”

But there are moments, I confess, when Mr. Morris – never Beethoven – is boring, when the music lover/biographer is both too technical and too impressionistic at the same time: “The soft A-major haze introducing the second sonata turned out to be a mirage that burned off a hard landscape in D minor.” A “Glossary of Musical Terms” helps but cannot really diminish the dullness of such sentences.

And then there is the overreaching music critic, attempting to find in language the equivalent of what is ineffable in music. Describing a six minute section of the Second Symphony as a “hypnotic balance of action and inaction … centering on the paradox of a climax with no increase in volume,” Mr. Morris concludes: “The music simply evaporated into a sort of spiraling mist that fell without condensing.” At such moments it is the author himself who is all wet.

What interests me as a biographer is how Mr. Morris handles speculation: “In court, he performed piano pieces and acted as repetiteur for the elector’s opera singers. (Those stage folk, we may presume, taught him a thing or two about sex.)” Boswell called biography a “presumptuous task” and then, like Mr. Morris, went on to presume. Beethoven, Mr. Morris assures us, has to fit in with adolescence as we know it: “He would have been a rare teenager if he did not delight in mounting the palace organ loft in all his finery, and letting go with the loudest possible blast from the big pipes.”

How to police presumption? Describing how Beethoven wrote on the outside of an envelope that he intended to leave Vienna for Westphalia and the patronage of Jerome Bonaparte (a ploy, actually, to get the Viennese to cough up more dough), Mr. Morris adds: “A biographer should resist the speculation that his envelope was allowed to lie upside down on a silver tray in the hall, preparatory to being posted, but the fact is Countess Erdody at once embarked on a frantic campaign to keep Beethoven in Vienna.” There should be a literary term for this, for invention followed by fact.

Lured into the precincts of psychobiography, Mr. Morris finds the work of Editha and Richard Sterba, two Viennese psychoanalysts, helpful in describing Beethoven’s fixation on his nephew. The composer treated him as a son, wresting custody of the boy from his mother, whom he attacked in court as an unfit parent during a seven-year legal assault. Mr. Morris agrees that while Beethoven “redeemed himself with perfect works of art,” he was “deeply disturbed, even psychotic.” Then the biographer comments on the Sterbas: “Their arguments are persuasive, although it is in the nature of psychobiography to infer what cannot be proved.”

This kind of biographer’s slither is rare in Mr. Morris’s straightforward narrative. He is quite aware of the perils of presumption: “When disease, and money maneuvers, and family politics, and eccentricity mix as much as they do in Beethoven’s personal dealings from 1813 through 1820, speculation as to what was going on in his mind is even more risky than it normally is in biography.”

What is apparent is that Beethoven had an “overengined mind and body” – he could not have produced such great art without it. But Mr. Morris’s book is no throwback to biographies of earlier days that linked genius and madness. The creative mind remains undaunted no matter what the emotional upset. As Mr. Morris observes:

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven’s remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify.

This is the courage of creativity. Such passages go a long way toward describing how a man who was often so wretched and overwrought could produce such sublime art. What more can one ask of biography?

crollyson@nysun.com