When the twin Voyager probes were launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, they each carried with them a Golden Record. Containing audio recordings of natural sounds, spoken greetings in a host of languages, and musical works from around the world, the record was a time capsule of life on earth. It was intended, as Edward Dusinberre writes, “to convey a snapshot of humanity to any space traveller who might find it in the future.” The last musical selection on the record, performed by the Budapest Quartet, was the fifth movement of Beethoven’s Op. 130 string quartet, a work deemed by the panel of experts selecting the music as one of humankind’s most sublime achievements.

Beethoven’s quartets are the main theme of Dusinberre’s book, and they afford him a way of making sense of the composer’s immensely complicated life. So it is that we meet first the youngish man whose Op. 18 quartets, six all told, were published in 1801. Later we find the older man who, with his Op. 95 “Serioso,” seemed to bid farewell to quartet writing; fourteen years passed before he wrote another. Finally, we behold the invalid, near death in late 1826, composing an alternative ending to Op. 130, which originally concluded with the “incomprehensible” Grosse Fuge. Powerful patrons are depicted, such as Count Andrei Kirillovich Razumovsky (the dedicatee of the three Op. 59 quartets)