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Biography - Ludwig van Beethoven
 Beethoven was born in Bonn on December 16, 1770, the son of Johann van Beethoven, tenor in the choir of the archbishop-elector of Cologne, and his wife, Maria Magdalena. His first music lessons were from his father, an unstable yet ambitious man whose rough temper, excessive drinking, and anxiety to mould a second Mozart did not destroy Beethoven’s talent or his love for music. He studied and performed successfully, despite becoming the main breadwinner of the family by the time he was 18. His father’s increasingly serious alcoholism and the earlier death of his grandfather (1773) had plunged the family into deepening poverty.
Despite his father’s hopes, Beethoven made little impact on the musical world until he was 11, when he left school and became assistant organist to Christian Gottlob Neefe at the court of Bonn, receiving instruction from him and other musicians. In 1783 he became the continuo player for Bonn opera, and accompanied their rehearsals on the keyboard. In 1787 he was sent to Vienna to receive further instruction, and took some lessons from Mozart. However, he returned in two months, called back by the death of his mother.
In 1789 he started to play the viola in the Opera Orchestra, while also composing and teaching. In 1790 he met Haydn, who agreed to teach him in Vienna, and Beethoven moved to Vienna permanently. There he also studied with Albrechtsberger and, possibly, Salieri. He was befriended by Prince Karl Lichnowsky (to whom he dedicated his Piano Sonata in C Minor, the Pathétique ). Lichnowsky was the first of many friends to give him financial support throughout his working life. In 1795 he performed in public in Vienna for the first time, and published his Op.1 trios and Op.2 piano sonatas. Subsequent appearances in Prague, Dresden, and Berlin brought him growing fame as a pianist, and especially as an improviser.
Beethoven’s creative life is traditionally divided into three periods. In the first (1792--1802), the individuality of his style gradually developed, and he composed mainly for the piano. Among these works were his Symphony no.1 in C (1800) and Symphony no.2 in D (1802), his first six quartets, and the Pathétique (1799). The Moonlight Sonata in C Sharp Minor (1801) heralded the beginning of the second period.
In 1802 Beethoven suffered seriously from depression, brought about by a realization that his hearing problems, first noticed in 1796, were becoming critical and would lead to incurable deafness. Deafness did not effect his ability to compose, but it curtailed his ability to perform and teach (as all communication with him had to be through written notes). In his despair he wrote a will-like document to his two brothers, known as the “Heliegenstadt Testament”, in which he confessed his misery and indicated that he felt close to death. He recovered, however, and the works of this middle period, known as his “heroic period’, show him determined to strive creatively in the face of despair - in his own words “seizing fate by the throat’.
His third symphony (twice the then normal length for a symphony) was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he saw as a revolutionary hero and liberator. But when Beethoven heard Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor, he defaced the title page in disillusionment and called the work Eroica (1803). Other works during this period include the Kreuzer Sonata (1803), symphonies 3--7, the Violin Concerto in D Major (1806), the Razumovsky Quartets (1806), the Emperor Concerto (1809), and the Archduke Trio Op.97 (1811).
In his only opera, Fidelio (written 1805, revised 1806 and 1814), the dominating themes are fidelity, personal liberation, and a symbolic passage from darkness into light. That married infidelity is central to the opera probably reflects Beethoven’s desire to marry. At the time of the composition he was deeply in love with a socially unattainable pupil, Josephine von Brunsvik. In 1801 he had wanted to marry Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, also a pupil, to whom he had dedicated the Moonlight Sonata, but she eventually married someone else in 1803. Beethoven always regretted not marrying, but even his love for Therese Malfatti in 1810 ended without marriage. On his death a letter, written in 1812, was found among his belongings. It was addressed to his “Immortal Beloved”, and various suppositions have been made about the identity of the recipient (if, indeed, it had ever been sent). It seems, however, that despite his yearning for marriage Beethoven was probably too absorbed in his music and too emotionally high-charged to sustain such a relationship.
From 1813 (the beginning of his third period, also known as the "silent period") he composed less, and his domestic life became increasingly chaotic. He lived in squalor and dressed negligently, although he was always a prolific bather, and theories about the cause of his deafness stemming from rheumatic inflammation centre around his habit of pouring cold water over his head while composing, to refresh himself, and then not drying his plentiful hair, but impatiently working or walking with it wet in all weather.
He became increasingly argumentative and irascible as he became more and more tormented by his deafness. In 1812, Goethe described him as “an utterly untamed personality’, whose aggressive attitude to life was perhaps understandable but not easy to live with. However, despite his difficult personality and anti-social eccentricities, the poet Franz Grillparzer, who wrote a funeral address for Beethoven, summed up the feelings of Beethoven’s friends with these words: “despite all these absurdities, there was something so touching and ennobling about him that one could not help admiring him and feeling drawn to him’.
Beethoven gave his last public performance on the piano in 1814, but continued to be respected as an important composer by Viennese society, despite his unkemptness and arrogance. His achievements in the last decade of his life include the Diabelli Variations (1820--3), the last piano sonatas, the last six string quartets, the Mass in D Major, Missa Solemnis (1823), and the Choral Symphony, no. 9 (1824) - in which he set An die Freude (Ode to Joy) by Friedrich von Schiller in the final movement. (Beethoven greatly admired the work of Schiller and Goethe; the emotion of Sturm und Drang.)
In late March of 1827, precious few days before Beethoven’s death, Schindler wrote to Moscheles: “He feels the end coming, for yesterday he said to me and H. v. Breuning, ‘Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est.’ (Applaud, friends, the comedy is ended.)” The same day Schindler wrote to Moscheles, Ludwig fell into a deep coma and it would last until his death on March 26th. As legend has it, right before his death Beethoven awoke from his coma, lifted his clenched fist into the air, and then collapsed back into his pillow, dead. Thus passed the man who single-handedly harkened in the Romantic Era of music.
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