Ludwig van Beethoven : Biography
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| Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van
Beethoven : Biography
Ludwig van Beethoven was a deaf German
composer and the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between
the Classical and Romantic eras.
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven was
baptized on December 17, 1770, in Bonn, Germany. He was an innovator, widening
the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto and quartet, and combining vocals and
instruments in a new way. His personal life was marked by a struggle against
deafness, and some of his most important works were composed during the last 10
years of his life, when he was quite unable to hear.
Early Years
Composer and pianist Ludwig Van
Beethoven, widely considered the greatest composer of all time, was born on or
about December 16, 1770 in the city of Bonn in the Electorate of Cologne, a
principality of the Holy Roman Empire. Although his exact date of birth is
uncertain, Beethoven was baptized on December 17, 1770.
Since as a matter of law and custom,
babies were baptized within 24 hours of birth, December 16 is his most likely
birthdate. However, Beethoven himself mistakenly believed that he was born two
years later, in 1772, and he stubbornly insisted on the incorrect date even
when presented with official papers that proved beyond any reasonable doubt
that 1770 was his true birth year.
Beethoven had two younger brothers who
survived into adulthood, Caspar, born in 1774, and Johann, born in 1776.
Beethoven's mother, Maria Magdalena van Beethoven, was a slender, genteel, and
deeply moralistic woman. His father, Johann van Beethoven, was a mediocre court
singer better known for his alcoholism than any musical ability. However,
Beethoven's grandfather, godfather and namesake, Kapellmeister Ludwig van
Beethoven, was Bonn's most prosperous and eminent musician, a source of endless
pride for young Ludwig.
Sometime between the births of his two
younger brothers, Beethoven's father began teaching him music with an
extraordinary rigor and brutality that affected him for the rest of his life.
Neighbors provided accounts of the small boy weeping while he played the
clavier, standing atop a footstool to reach the keys, his father beating him
for each hesitation or mistake.
On a near daily basis, Beethoven was
flogged, locked in the cellar and deprived of sleep for extra hours of
practice. He studied the violin and clavier with his father as well as taking
additional lessons from organists around town. Whether in spite of or because
of his father's draconian methods, Beethoven was a prodigiously talented
musician from his earliest days and displayed flashes of the creative
imagination that would eventually reach farther than any composer's before or
since.
Hoping that his young son would be
recognized as a musical prodigy à la Mozart, Beethoven's father arranged his
first public recital for March 26, 1778. Billed as a "little son of six
years," (Mozart's age when he debuted for Empress Maria Theresia) although
he was in fact seven, Beethoven played impressively but his recital received no
press whatsoever. Meanwhile, the musical prodigy attended a Latin grade school
named Tirocinium, where a classmate said, "Not a sign was to be
discovered& of that spark of genius which glowed so brilliantly in him
afterwards."
Beethoven, who struggled with sums and
spelling his entire life, was at best an average student, and some biographers
have hypothesized that he may have had mild dyslexia. As he put it himself,
"Music comes to me more readily than words." In 1781, at the age of
10, Beethoven withdrew from school to study music full time with Christian
Gottlob Neefe, the newly appointed Court Organist. Neefe introduced Beethoven
to Bach, and at the age of twelve Beethoven published his first composition, a
set of piano variations on a theme by an obscure classical composer named
Dressler.
By 1784, his alcoholism worsening and
his voice decaying, Beethoven's father was no longer able to support his
family, and Ludwig van Beethoven formally requested an official appointment as
Assistant Court Organist. Despite his youth, his request was accepted, and
Beethoven was put on the court payroll with a modest annual salary of 150
florins.
In an effort to facilitate his musical
development, in 1787 the court decided to send Beethoven to Vienna to study
with Mozart. Upon his arrival, Beethoven auditioned for Mozart and the great
composer remarked, "Keep your eyes on him; some day he will give the world
something to talk about." However, only a few weeks after he arrived in
Vienna, Beethoven learned that his mother had fallen desperately ill, and he
immediately rushed home to Bonn. She died several months later, sending her son
into a fit of depression that lasted several years. Remaining in Bonn, Beethoven
continued to carve out his reputation as the city's most promising young court
musician.
When the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II
died in 1790, a 19-year-old Beethoven received the immense honor of composing a
musical memorial in his honor. For reasons that remain unclear, Beethoven's
composition was never performed, and most assumed the young musician had proven
unequal to the task. However, more than a century later, Johannes Brahms
discovered that Beethoven had in fact composed a "beautiful and noble"
piece of music entitled Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II. It is now
considered his earliest masterpiece.
Composing for
Audiences
In 1792, with French revolutionary
forces sweeping across the Rhineland into the Electorate of Cologne, Beethoven
decided to leave his hometown for Vienna once again. Mozart had passed away a
year earlier, leaving Joseph Haydn as the unquestioned greatest composer alive.
Haydn was living in Vienna at the
time, and it was with Haydn that the young Beethoven now intended to study. As
his friend and patron Count Waldstein wrote in a farewell letter,
"Mozart's genius mourns and weeps over the death of his disciple. It found
refuge, but no release with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him, now, it seeks
to unite with another. By means of assiduous labor you will receive the spirit
of Mozart from the hands of Haydn."
In Vienna, Beethoven dedicated himself
wholeheartedly to musical study with the most eminent musicians of the age. He
studied piano with Haydn, vocal composition with Antonio Salieri and
counterpoint with Johann Albrechtsberger. Not yet known as a composer,
Beethoven quickly established a reputation as a virtuoso pianist who was
especially adept at improvisation.
Beethoven won many patrons among the
leading citizens of the Viennese aristocracy, who provided him with lodging and
funds, allowing Beethoven, in 1794, to sever ties with the Electorate of
Cologne. Beethoven made his long-awaited public debut in Vienna on March 29,
1795. Although there is considerable debate over which of his early piano
concerti he performed that night, most scholars believe he played what is known
as his "first" piano concerto in C Major. Shortly thereafter,
Beethoven decided to publish a series of three piano trios as his "Opus
1," which were an enormous critical and financial success.
In the first spring of the new
century, on April 2, 1800, Beethoven debuted his Symphony No. 1 in C major at
the Royal Imperial Theater in Vienna. Although Beethoven would grow to detest
the piece -- "In those days I did not know how to compose," he later
remarked -- the graceful and melodious symphony nevertheless established him as
one of Europe's most celebrated composers.
As the new century progressed,
Beethoven composed piece after piece that marked him as a masterful composer
reaching his musical maturity. His "Six String Quartets," published
in 1801, demonstrate complete mastery of that most difficult and cherished of
Viennese forms developed by Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven also composed The
Creatures of Prometheus in 1801, a wildly popular ballet that received 27 performances
at the Imperial Court Theater.
Around this time Beethoven, like all
of Europe, watched with a mixture of awe and terror as Napoleon Bonaparte
proclaimed himself First Consul, and later Emperor, of France. Beethoven
admired, abhorred and, to an extent, identified with Napoleon a man of
seemingly superhuman capabilities, only one year older than himself and also of
obscure birth.
In 1804, only weeks after Napoleon
proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven debuted his Symphony No. 3 in Napoleon's honor.
Later renamed the "Eroica Symphony" because Beethoven grew
disillusioned with Napoleon, it was his grandest and most original work to date
-- so unlike anything heard before that through weeks of rehearsal, the
musicians could not figure out how to play it. A prominent reviewer proclaimed
Eroica, "one of the most original, most sublime, and most profound
products that the entire genre of music has ever exhibited."
Losing Hearing
At the same time as he was composing
these great and immortal works, Beethoven was struggling to come to terms with
a shocking and terrible fact, one that he tried desperately to conceal. He was
going deaf. By the turn of the century, Beethoven struggled to make out the
words spoken to him in conversation.
Beethoven revealed in a
heart-wrenching 1801 letter to his friend Franz Wegeler, "I must confess
that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any
social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am
deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity;
but in my profession it is a terrible handicap." At times driven to
extremes of melancholy by his affliction, Beethoven described his despair in a
long and poignant note that he concealed his entire life.
Dated October 6, 1802 and referred to
as "The Heiligenstadt Testament," it reads in part, "O you men
who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do
you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to
you and I would have ended my life -- it was only my art that held me back. Ah,
it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I
felt was within me."
Almost miraculously, despite his
rapidly progressing deafness, Beethoven continued to compose at a furious pace.
From 1803-1812, what is known as his "middle" or "heroic"
period, he composed an opera, six symphonies, four solo concerti, five string
quartets, six string sonatas, seven piano sonatas, five sets of piano
variations, four overtures, four trios, two sextets and 72 songs. The most
famous among these were symphonies No. 3-8, the "Moonlight Sonata,"
the "Kreutzer" violin sonata and Fidelio, his only opera. In terms of
the astonishing output of superlatively complex, original and beautiful music,
this period in Beethoven's life is unrivaled by any of any other composer in
history.
Despite his extraordinary output of
beautiful music, Beethoven was lonely and frequently miserable throughout his adult
life. Short-tempered, absent-minded, greedy and suspicious to the point of
paranoia, Beethoven feuded with his brothers, his publishers, his housekeepers,
his pupils and his patrons. In one illustrative incident, Beethoven attempted
to break a chair over the head of Prince Lichnowsky, one of his closest friends
and most loyal patrons. Another time he stood in the doorway of Prince
Lobkowitz's palace shouting for all to hear, "Lobkowitz is a donkey!"
For a variety of reasons that included
his crippling shyness and unfortunate physical appearance, Beethoven never
married or had children. He was, however, desperately in love with a married
woman named Antonie Brentano. Over the course of two days in July of 1812,
Beethoven wrote her a long and beautiful love letter that he never sent.
Addressed "to you, my Immortal Beloved," the letter said in part,
"My heart is full of so many things to say to you -- ah -- there are
moments when I feel that speech amounts to nothing at all -- Cheer up -- remain
my true, my only love, my all as I am yours."
The death of Beethoven's brother
Caspar in 1815 sparked one of the great trials of his life, a painful legal
battle with his sister-in-law, Johanna, over the custody of Karl van Beethoven,
his nephew and her son. The struggle stretched on for seven years during which
both sides spewed ugly defamations at the other. In the end, Beethoven won the
boy's custody, though hardly his affection.
Acclaimed Works
and Death
Somehow, despite his tumultuous
personal life, physical infirmity and complete deafness, Beethoven composed his
greatest music -- perhaps the greatest music ever composed -- near the end of
his life. His greatest late works include Missa Solemnis, a mass that debuted
in 1824 and is considered among his finest achievements, and String Quartet No.
14, which contains seven linked movements played without a break.
Beethoven's Ninth and final symphony,
completed in 1824, remains the illustrious composer's most towering
achievement. The symphony's famous choral finale, with four vocal soloists and
a chorus singing the words of Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy,"
is perhaps the most famous piece of music in history.
While connoisseurs delighted in the
symphony's contrapuntal and formal complexity, the masses found inspiration in
the anthem-like vigor of the choral finale and the concluding invocation of
"all humanity."
Beethoven died on March 26, 1827, at
the age of 56. An autopsy revealed that the immediate cause of death was
post-hepatitic cirrhosis of the liver. The autopsy also provided clues to the
origins of his deafness. While his quick temper, chronic diarrhea and deafness
are consistent with arterial disease, a competing theory traces Beethoven's
deafness to contracting typhus in the summer of 1796.
Recently, scientists analyzing a
remaining fragment of Beethoven's skull noticed high levels of lead and
hypothesized lead poisoning as a potential cause of death, but that theory has
been largely discredited.
Ludwig van Beethoven is widely
considered the greatest composer of all time. He is the crucial transitional
figure connecting the Classical and Romantic ages of Western music. Beethoven's
body of musical compositions stands with Shakespeare's plays at the outer
limits of human accomplishment.
And the fact Beethoven composed his
most beautiful and extraordinary music while deaf is an almost superhuman feat
of creative genius, perhaps only paralleled in the history of artistic
achievement by John Milton writing Paradise Lost while blind. Summing up his
life and imminent death during his last days, Beethoven, who was never as
eloquent with words as he was with music, borrowed a tag line that concluded
many Latin plays at the time. "Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est,"
he said. "Applaud friends, the comedy is over."
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