Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptised in Bonn on 17 December 1770. His family, of Flemish origin, served the Prince-Elector of Cologne: his grandfather and namesake was Kapellmeister, and his father Johann was a court tenor. Johann, wanting to turn his son into a new Mozart, subjected him to a harsh training in piano and violin, sometimes waking him at night to practise. Ludwig gave his first public concert in Cologne in 1778, at seven.

He found a real teacher in Christian Gottlob Neefe, the court organist, who introduced him to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and published his first works. In 1782 he became assistant organist and later viola player in the court orchestra. In 1787 he went to Vienna, perhaps to study with Mozart, but his mother’s illness called him back to Bonn; she died soon after. As his father sank into alcoholism, Ludwig, at nineteen, had to take charge of his two younger brothers.

In 1792, with the support of Count Waldstein, he settled in Vienna for good to study with Haydn, then with Albrechtsberger and Salieri. He soon became known as a prodigious pianist and improviser with a powerful, passionate style. Princes of the Viennese aristocracy such as Lichnowsky, Lobkowitz and Archduke Rudolf supported him and became his patrons. He published his first trios, sonatas and piano concertos, which caused a sensation.

But around 1798 Beethoven noticed the first signs of a deafness that would steadily worsen. In 1802 at Heiligenstadt near Vienna he wrote a heartbreaking letter to his brothers, the “Heiligenstadt Testament”, confiding his despair but also his resolve to live for his art. He then entered a period of extraordinary creativity: the “Moonlight” Sonata (1801) and the “Eroica” Symphony (1804), which he intended for Napoleon before violently scratching out the dedication when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor.

On 22 December 1808, at a marathon concert of more than four hours in a freezing theatre, he premiered the Fifth Symphony, with its famous “fate” motif, and the Sixth, the “Pastoral”, which evokes nature and a storm. He also composed the “Emperor” Piano Concerto No. 5, his only opera Fidelio, a hymn to freedom and married love whose final version dates from 1814, and more intimate pieces such as Für Elise. In 1809 three aristocrats pledged him an annuity so that he would stay in Vienna.

From 1818 Beethoven was almost totally deaf and communicated with visitors through “conversation books”. He went through difficult years: poor health, lawsuits to gain guardianship of his nephew Karl, isolation. Yet he composed his boldest works: the last piano sonatas, the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, premiered on 7 May 1824. For the first time a symphony included singers and a choir, on Schiller’s Ode to Joy. At the end Beethoven, who could not hear the applause, had to be turned to face the audience by a singer.

His late string quartets (1825–26), of astonishing depth and modernity, baffled his contemporaries. He died in Vienna on 26 March 1827, during a thunderstorm. Nearly twenty thousand people attended his funeral; the young Schubert carried a torch. Beethoven bridged Classicism and Romanticism and transformed the image of the composer into that of a free, creative artist. The Ode to Joy has become the anthem of the European Union.