A good time was had by all at last week’s online panel discussion titled ’Meet the Author of Mr. Beethoven’, hosted by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston and featuring Manorbier’s Paul Griffiths (pictured), who wrote the book.

David Snead, President of H+H, and Teresa Neff, the Society’s historian, were joined by Boston Globe literary critic Michael Patrick Brady, who moderated the event.

It was Mike who wrote the first review of the American edition of Mr. Beethoven (NYRB Books, 2021) for the Boston Globe (October 21).

Mike started by asking Paul how he got the idea, and how he carried out his research.

Paul forgot to emphasize the importance of the 349 bus on the Manorbier to Tenby route, where he often got in two solid 20-minute work sessions on his laptop, one each way, over a period of months.

Teresa congratulated Paul on creating such believable portraits of the historical characters, and David described the shock he felt on opening his newspaper and discovering a book that made the H+H’s two-hundred-year-old fantasy of successfully commissioning a new Beethoven masterpiece come true.

All three commented on the enjoyable characters, in particular the two women who make friends with the composer.

One is Mrs. Hannah Hill, an actual person living in the Boston area at the time and who could reasonably have met and formed a friendly attachment to Beethoven; she becomes his librettist.

The other is Thankful, an invented teenage girl from nearby Martha’s Vineyard, where in the 1830s there was a high incidence of hereditary deafness in the community, with the result that the locals had their own sign language; Thankful teaches their sign language to the deaf Beethoven.

Even this all-but-miraculous turn of events would, like everything else in the book, have been possible--if only Beethoven had lived long enough and gone to Boston in the first place.

Above all the three Bostonians praised the title character himself, who, for all his formality (the character only speaks in phrases and sentences written during his lifetime by the real Ludwig van Beethoven) becomes a believable and sympathetic human being on the page.

Anyone interested who missed the one-hour event can still enjoy it on the Handel and Haydn Society website by clicking on the Watch + Listen column. An audio-book of Mr. Beethoven, read by the author, is also available on both sides of the Atlantic.