Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven could no longer hear the applause his own music had earned. At the premiere on the 7th of May 1824, the contralto Caroline Unger had to turn him around so he could see the audience cheering behind his back. He had stood beside the conductor Michael Umlauf, beating time, though Umlauf had quietly warned the singers and orchestra to ignore him. The man who reshaped the symphony and the string quartet was, by then, deaf. This is the story of a German composer baptised on the 17th of December 1770 and dead by the 26th of March 1827. How did a boy dragged from his bed at night to a keyboard become the composer who pulled music out of the Classical period and toward something new? Why did he scratch a name from a title page in fury? And what does a phrase like Muss es sein, must it be, reveal about the questions he carried to his deathbed?
Johann van Beethoven lied on the posters. For his son's first public performance in March 1778, he claimed the boy was six, when Ludwig was actually seven, hoping to echo Leopold Mozart's success with young Wolfgang and Nannerl. The household behind these ambitions was unhappy. Johann's decline into alcoholism dominated the home, and the tuition he forced on his son was harsh, often reducing the boy to tears. A musician named Pfeiffer, an insomniac, conducted irregular late-night sessions, hauling the young Beethoven to the keyboard.
Christian Gottlob Neefe became the most important teacher of these Bonn years, beginning around 1780 or 1781. Under Neefe, Beethoven's first published work appeared in March 1783, a set of keyboard variations. By 1782 he was already working as Neefe's assistant organist, unpaid at first, then on the court chapel payroll by 1784. A printed notice in the Magazin der Musik described an eleven-year-old who played the piano skilfully and with power, and whose chief piece was Das wohltemperierte Klavier of Sebastian Bach.
The widowed Helene von Breuning offered the warmth his own home lacked. Beethoven gave piano lessons to some of her children, and she became a second mother to him, teaching refined manners and nurturing a passion for literature and poetry. Through this family he met Franz Wegeler, a young medical student who became a lifelong friend, and Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who became a friend and financial supporter. In 1791 Waldstein commissioned Beethoven's first work for the stage, a ballet. As Beethoven prepared to leave, Waldstein wrote a line that reads like prophecy: with the help of assiduous labour, he would receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands.
In 1799 Beethoven won a notorious piano duel at the home of Baron Raimund Wetzlar against the virtuoso Joseph Wolfl, and the next year triumphed again over Daniel Steibelt at the salon of Count Moritz von Fries. Before he was widely known as a composer, Vienna knew him as a performer and improviser in the salons of its nobility. He had moved there in November 1792, and shortly after departing learned that his father had died. Working under Joseph Haydn, he sought to master counterpoint, and he also took occasional instruction from Antonio Salieri in Italian vocal style.
The three Piano Trios, Opus 1, were the first works to which Beethoven assigned an opus number, dedicated to his patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky. They were a financial success, bringing him profits nearly sufficient to cover a year of living expenses. He withheld other works from publication so their eventual appearance would land with greater force. Several Viennese noblemen had recognised his ability, among them Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz and Baron Gottfried van Swieten.
Carl Czerny left a portrait of his teacher at their first meeting in 1801. Beethoven wore a jacket of shaggy dark grey material, his jet-black hair bristling around his head, his beard unshaven for several days, reminding the boy of Robinson Crusoe. The young Czerny studied with him from 1801 to 1803. Beethoven's eighth piano sonata, the Pathetique of 1799, surpassed his previous work in strength of character and depth of emotion, in the assessment of the musicologist Barry Cooper. His First Symphony was hired into the Burgtheater on the 2nd of April 1800, a concert one paper called the most interesting in a long time, though critics complained the players paid no attention to the soloist.
In a small Austrian town just outside Vienna, Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers that he never sent. He had moved to Heiligenstadt from April to October 1802 on his doctor's advice, trying to come to terms with his condition. The document, now called the Heiligenstadt Testament, records thoughts of suicide alongside a resolution to keep living for and through his art. It was discovered in his papers only after his death. He told the pianist Charles Neate in 1815 that his hearing loss had begun in 1798, during a heated quarrel with a singer, worsened later by a severe tinnitus. The probable cause was otosclerosis.
Beethoven refused despair in letters to friends. To Wegeler he declared his determination to seize Fate by the throat, insisting it would not crush him completely. In 1806 he scrawled on a musical sketch that his deafness should no longer be a secret, even in art. Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until 1812. He never became totally deaf; in his final years he could still distinguish low tones and sudden loud sounds, though performing in concerts, a vital source of income, grew steadily harder.
From 1814 onward he relied on ear-trumpets designed by the inventor Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, several now displayed at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. By early 1818 his hearing had deteriorated so far that conversations had to be written down. These conversation books survive as a rich record of his music, business, and personal life from that point on. The violinist Louis Spohr watched him play his Archduke Trio in 1814 on a badly out-of-tune piano, which Beethoven minded little because he could not hear it, and came away deeply saddened.
Beethoven scratched Napoleon's name from the title page of his Third Symphony with such force that he tore the manuscript. He had originally titled the work Bonaparte, sympathetic to the revolutionary leader, with the idea possibly suggested to him by General Bernadotte in 1798. When Napoleon declared himself Emperor in 1804, Beethoven's admiration curdled. The symphony was published in 1806 as the Eroica, subtitled to celebrate the memory of a great man. It was longer and larger in scope than any symphony before it, and its 1805 premiere drew a mixed reception, some objecting to its length, others hailing a masterpiece. After a Leipzig performance in 1807, the public demanded a repeat a week later.
Felix Radicati told Beethoven that the Razumovsky string quartets were not music. Beethoven replied that they were not for him, but for a later age. In 1810 the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann ranked Beethoven ahead of Haydn and Mozart, declaring that the Fifth Symphony set in motion terror, fear, horror, and pain, awakening the infinite yearning that is the essence of romanticism.
Archduke Rudolf of Austria, the youngest son of Emperor Leopold II, became perhaps Beethoven's most important aristocratic patron. He began studying piano and composition around 1803 or 1804, and the two became friends whose meetings continued until 1824. Beethoven dedicated fourteen compositions to Rudolf, including the Archduke Trio of 1811. When Napoleon's brother Jerome Bonaparte offered Beethoven a well-paid Kapellmeister post in Cassel in 1808, Rudolf joined Prince Kinsky and Prince Lobkowitz in pledging a yearly pension of 4000 florins to keep him in Vienna. Of the three, only Rudolf paid his share on the agreed date.
A ten-page love letter, addressed only to an Immortal Beloved, was written at Teplitz in 1812 and never sent. The recipient's identity became a long subject of debate. The musicologist Maynard Solomon argued for Antonie Brentano, while other candidates included Julie Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti, and Josephine Brunsvik. Each had been regarded by Beethoven as a possible soulmate during his first decade in Vienna.
Julie Guicciardi flirted with him but never took serious interest, marrying Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg in November 1803. Beethoven dedicated his 1802 Sonata Op. 27 No. 2, known as the Moonlight, to her. He fell in love with Josephine Brunsvik while teaching her and her sister, daughters of the Hungarian Countess Anna Brunsvik, in 1799. After Josephine's elderly husband Count Joseph Deym died in 1804, Beethoven visited her and began a passionate correspondence, though by 1807 he acknowledged she held little feeling for him.
Therese Malfatti, the niece of his doctor, received a proposal in 1810 when Beethoven was forty and she was nineteen. She rejected it, and is now remembered as the possible recipient of the bagatelle known as Fur Elise. Antonie Brentano, ten years younger than Beethoven, appears to have had an affair with him during 1811 and 1812 before leaving Vienna with her husband in late 1812. After that year, his correspondence and conversation books record no further romantic liaisons of that kind.
After his brother Kaspar died on the 15th of November 1815, Beethoven plunged into a protracted legal dispute over a nine-year-old boy. The child was Kaspar's son Karl, and a late codicil to the will had granted joint guardianship to Beethoven and the boy's mother Johanna. Beethoven had his nephew removed from her custody in January 1816 and placed in a private school. The struggle dragged on. In 1818, asked to prove noble birth before the Landrechte court, he could not, and on the 18th of December 1818 the case moved to the civil magistrate, where he lost sole guardianship. He regained custody only after intensive struggles in 1820.
Between 1815 and 1819 Beethoven's output dropped to a level unique in his mature life. He blamed part of it on an inflammatory fever lasting more than a year from October 1816, and Solomon points also to the legal turmoil and to Beethoven finding himself increasingly at odds with current musical trends. He turned instead toward study of Bach, Handel, and Palestrina. The Hammerklavier Sonata of 1818, a summit of the piano literature, prompted him to write that now he knew how to write music. Its first public performance came in 1836, given by Franz Liszt.
Karl perceived his uncle's later interference as overbearing, and in August he attempted suicide by shooting himself. He survived, recuperating afterward in the village of Gneixendorf with Beethoven and his uncle Johann. There Beethoven completed the Quartet in F major, Op. 135, under whose closing chords he wrote the question Muss es sein, must it be, answered by Es muss sein, it must be, the whole movement headed The difficult decision.
Applaud, friends, the comedy is over. Beethoven said this in Latin, Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est, to Schindler and the others gathered at his bedside on the 24th of March 1827. He had been attended through December by Andreas Ignaz Wawruch, who noted fever, jaundice, and dropsy with swollen limbs, and several operations were carried out to drain fluid from his abdomen. When wine arrived from his publisher Schotts later that day, he whispered, Pity, too late. He died on the 26th of March 1827 at the age of fifty-six. An autopsy revealed significant liver damage, possibly from heavy alcohol consumption, and considerable dilation of the auditory and related nerves.
The final years had still produced summits. The Ninth Symphony was the first major example of a choral symphony, and his late string quartets, including the Grosse Fuge of 1825 and 1826, are considered pinnacles of the genre. He rated the String Quartet No. 14, with its seven linked movements, as his most perfect single work. The Missa solemnis carried an inscription that read, from the heart, may it return to the heart.
An estimated 10,000 people attended his funeral procession in Vienna on the 29th of March 1827. Franz Schubert and the violinist Joseph Mayseder were among the torchbearers, and a funeral oration by the poet Franz Grillparzer was read by the actor Heinrich Anschutz. His remains, first buried in the Wahring cemetery, were exhumed for study in 1863 and moved in 1888 to Vienna's Zentralfriedhof, reinterred in a grave beside Schubert's. The writer Alex Ross notes one strange measure of his reach: the duration of first-generation compact discs was fixed at seventy-five minutes so the Ninth Symphony could unfurl without interruption.
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Common questions
Who was Ludwig van Beethoven and what was he known for?
Ludwig van Beethoven, baptised on the 17th of December 1770 and dead on the 26th of March 1827, was a German composer, conductor, and pianist. His musical style was a key driver of the transition from the Classical period to Romantic music, and he expanded popular forms such as the symphony and string quartet.
When and where was Ludwig van Beethoven born?
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, at what is now the Beethoven House Museum at Bonngasse 20. No authentic record of his birth date survives, but his baptism is registered in the Catholic Parish of St. Remigius on the 17th of December 1770, and there is consensus that he was born on the 16th of December.
Why did Beethoven scratch Napoleon's name off the Eroica Symphony?
Beethoven originally titled his Third Symphony Bonaparte out of sympathy for the revolutionary leader. When Napoleon declared himself Emperor in 1804, a disillusioned Beethoven scratched the name from the manuscript's title page, and the symphony was published in 1806 as the Eroica, subtitled to celebrate the memory of a great man.
How did Beethoven's deafness affect his career?
Beethoven told the pianist Charles Neate in 1815 that his hearing loss began in 1798, probably caused by otosclerosis. It made performing in concerts increasingly difficult, drove his social withdrawal, and by early 1818 forced him to use written conversation books, though he never became totally deaf and could still distinguish low tones and sudden loud sounds in his final years.
Who was Beethoven's Immortal Beloved?
The Immortal Beloved was the unnamed recipient of a ten-page love letter Beethoven wrote at Teplitz in 1812 but never sent. The musicologist Maynard Solomon argued the intended recipient was Antonie Brentano, while other candidates included Julie Guicciardi, Therese Malfatti, and Josephine Brunsvik.
How did Ludwig van Beethoven die?
Beethoven died on the 26th of March 1827 at the age of fifty-six after several months of illness that left him bedridden. He was attended by Andreas Ignaz Wawruch, who noted fever, jaundice, and dropsy, and an autopsy revealed significant liver damage and considerable dilation of the auditory nerves.
What did Beethoven compose in his late period?
Beethoven's late period, from 1812 to 1827, included the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, both premiered in 1824, with the Ninth being the first major example of a choral symphony. It also produced the Diabelli Variations, the Hammerklavier and other late piano sonatas, and the late string quartets including the Grosse Fuge of 1825 and 1826.