It’s almost impossible to see Beethoven with fresh eyes. His music surrounds us, whether you know it or not, and those who can’t recognize a note of it surely recognize the archetype he inspired.

As socio-historian Paul Johnson noted in “Birth of the Modern,” our vision of the creative genius, of the artist standing above and beyond all norms, began with Beethoven. Before him, artists were considered tradesmen. Beethoven was the giant who broke free.

Jan Swafford’s massive, 1,100-page biography, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph,” does a splendid job of detailing the man and his times, interspersing the narrative with musical analysis of most of the key compositions. And he carries through on the title, detailing the anguish and stressing the triumph.

Beethoven’s music has dominated the canon for two centuries, and there is a great body of writing on his compositions. So Swafford’s book is most powerful in its non-musical aspects.

He makes no attempt to buff up the great man’s image. He bluntly characterizes Beethoven as misanthropic, solipsistic, devious in business dealings and intolerant, a man whose knee-jerk reactions were frequently just plain cruel to others … a singularly unlovable man, despite occasional moments of generosity.

It is often chilling reading, as Swafford’s relentless recounting of Beethoven’s physical maladies and unremitting paranoia draw a dreadful picture of misery. Beethoven’s early deafness is the stuff of legend, but Swafford details a catalog of maladies – almost lifelong bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, recurring fevers, weeklong debilitating headaches, abscesses, liver disease – that seems unendurable. All this implies that Beethoven was virtually never in good health, and Swafford seems to target the era’s cheap wine as the villain – wine adulterated with an extract of lead to sweeten it.

The Beethoven Swafford presents is most remarkable as a man for his strength, discipline and surety of purpose, a man who could overcome all obstacles.

Swafford is one of the finest writers on classical music of our time, particularly adept at reaching the casual fan. His previous massive biographies of Brahms and Ives (the indispensable Ives bio) set the stage for his take on Beethoven.

Swafford sets the composer in his time expertly, from Beethoven’s early years in Bonn, a city aflame with the Enlightenment, deism and Freemasonry, through his move to the courtly artifice and duplicity of Vienna, through the epochal Napoleonic rise and fall, to the birth of Romanticism, which anointed Beethoven as its first deity.

And an odd deity he was. In the last decades of his life, Beethoven was considered quite mad by most who encountered him. Unkempt and badly dressed, he would walk for hours, composing in his head, waving his arms to the music he alone heard and shouting to hear himself over his deafness. Once in Baden, away from Vienna where he was famous, he was arrested as a mad tramp.

All of the details of Beethoven’s personal failings put the poetry and humanity of Swafford’s musical biography in a blunt duality: Almost incapable of coping with the world of people, Beethoven lived in an inner world more sublime and more vivid than we can imagine. The conceit of Beethoven as the champion who travelled to realms we cannot imagine to return with priceless gifts carries throughout the narrative. His detailing of the young Beethoven being sent to Vienna to study with Haydn with the intention of all involved that he become the next Mozart is thrilling material.

As a child of the Enlightenment (which Swafford characterizes expertly, both on broad and on personal terms), Beethoven hated the arch phoniness of Vienna and never felt at home there. His constant struggle for income, either from annuities from aristocrats or the sale of his scores, is the third string in the weave of his health and creativity.

It has been said that the great composers did not begin movements, they ended them, and Swafford’s musical analysis carries that out. Swafford says that Beethoven stretched the Classical paradigms of Mozart and Haydn to and then beyond their limits before he broke free.

Beethoven’s artistic journey was full of waymarks. After a musical upbringing in Bonn, where he excelled as a keyboardist, his residency in Vienna to study with Haydn was partly financed by the Elector of the Bonn. Though his unpolished manners did not fit in Vienna, he dazzled all who heard him with his virtuosity, and especially his ability to improvise.

After writing some wonderful chamber music in the style of Haydn and Mozart, in 1802 he announced to a friend, “I intend to embark on a new path.” And he did, producing the works that defined his second period, the Heroic period, in his Third Symphony, the Eroica (still the most important symphony ever written), and in dramatic chamber works such as the Waldstein Sonata.

Swafford’s depiction of the loneliness of Beethoven (reinforced by his self-absorption) is strong stuff, and the author represents the third period of Beethoven’s creative life as having sprung from his final, failed love for “the Immortal Beloved” of the famous unmailed letter. Who this mystery woman could have been, the one who broke his heart for the last time, has been biographical sport for many decades. But Swafford makes a compelling case that she was, indeed, Bettina Brentano, a flirtatious arts groupie who befriended Goethe, Liszt, Schumann, Ralph Waldo Emerson … even Karl Marx.

After the 1812 “Immortal Beloved” letter, a dejected, all but shattered Beethoven charts a new path. As he becomes more profoundly deaf, he becomes more misanthropic and more a citizen of his own inner world. And he creates a whole new kind of music, string quartets and piano works that still confound and amaze, as unique today as then.

Music historians call this his Late Period, but Swafford does a fine job of characterizing it as his Poetic Period. In a single sentence about Beethoven’s transition, Swafford describes the shift from the Classical era to the Romantic: “Narrative and drama were to give way to poetic fantasy.”

Swafford illuminates many of the mysteries of the late works. The book contains a great deal of musical analysis, set aside from the narrative. (The Missa Solemnis tops all these sections: 22 pages.) You may find yourself reaching for a CD or clicking over to Spotify as you read.

In the end, Swafford presents the motto theme of Beethoven’s life as Triumph, much like his rescue opera “Fidelio,” with the exulting final statement of the Ninth, his reshaping of the centuries to come with his dramatic expansion and recasting of once-tidy sonata forms, the final accolades from the public. It makes for a satisfying narrative, but perhaps misses the point.

Beethoven’s triumph was one of process, of constantly evolving, of never basking in success. He was man like none of us, supremely gifted with musical intellect and massively crippled with personality and health defects. It seems the theme of his life was determination. The rest was a gift to him and to posterity.