Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770, in Bonn, which was at this time the seat of the elector of Cologne. His family was Flemish-his grandfather had emigrated from Belgium to Bonn to become court singer to the elector. Beethoven's father, Johann, held the same position, and he trained Ludwig from early childhood to sing and to play several musical instruments. The boy showed promise, and received tuition from other local musicians and instrumentalists. His early musical training was patchy, and his formal education ended after elementary school-throughout his life, Beethoven was unable to write fluently, and he was capable of only the simplest arithmetic. He made his first public appearance at the age of seven, playing clavier at a concert given by one of his father's students.

By the age of eleven, Beethoven was studying with Christian Gottlob Neefe, who became court organist to the elector in 1781. Neefe gave Beethoven lessons in theory, composition, organ, piano, and continuo playing, as well as opening Beethoven up to the world of J. S. Bach. Neefe then hired the promising boy as his assistant while continuing his musical education. When Neefe left Bonn for a few weeks in 1782, the eleven year-old Beethoven successfully took over Neefe's duties, and in 1782 his first public composition-a series of variations on a march by Dressler-was published. Neefe taught Beethoven to play Bach's The Well-Tempered Klavier and describes his playing in a magazine article as "a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart." At the age of thirteen, he joined the court orchestra as harpsichordist, which extended his musical experience further and exposed him particularly to the popular operas of the time. He continued to perform as a virtuoso keyboard player, concentrating more and more on his own compositions, and in 1783 he toured Holland, playing his first really ambitious pieces, the three youthful piano sonatas dedicated to the Elector Maximilian Friedrich, and an early concerto in E flat major.

Composers and musicians of the eighteenth century depended for their livelihood on the patronage of the noble and wealthy. Beethoven lived at a time of social instability and political upheaval. Europe was undergoing great changes, some of them revolutionary, and the old system of patronage could no longer be relied upon as a reliable source of income. When Maximilian Friedrich died, the new elector made economies. Neefe was forced to pay Beethoven out of his own pocket, and Beethoven had to neglect composition and spend more time on the concert platform in order to support himself and his family. In 1787, on his first visit to Vienna during which he almost certainly met and played for Mozart (1756–1791), he heard that his mother was dying of tuberculosis. His father's career had fallen into decline, largely through alcohol abuse, and after his mother's death in the winter of 1787, Beethoven took the extraordinary step of petitioning to have himself made legal head of the family. The petition was granted in 1789, along with half his father's income, which Beethoven used to support his brothers. This early assertion of personal authority was characteristic of Beethoven. Throughout his life, he could be extremely self-assertive, even willful and impatient, and he was never afraid to take heavy burdens of responsibility on to himself, professionally or personally, when he believed he was more capable than other people.

From 1789 until 1792, Beethoven played viola with the orchestras of the court chapel and the court theatre. These were probably the happiest years of his life, during which he performed with and befriended some of the finest musicians in Europe-many of these friendships would last through his whole life. His genius began to achieve wider recognition, both as a performer and as a composer. He received commissions and offers of patronage, most significantly from Count Ferdinand Waldstein, who became Beethoven's devoted friend and supporter. It was Waldstein who encouraged Beethoven to go back to Vienna. In a prior visit to Bonn, Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809) had admired a Beethoven score, and in 1792 Beethoven accepted Haydn's offer to become his pupil in Vienna, the city that was to be his home for the rest of his life.

When Beethoven arrived in Vienna, the city was still mourning the death the year before of its resident genius, Mozart. Beethoven devoted himself to his studies to the exclusion of friends and family. His father's death in December 1792 went unrecorded in his diary, and while he worked diligently under Haydn, he found himself unable to reciprocate his teacher's affection. Haydn had no children, and he wished his young pupil to regard him not only as a teacher but also as in some sense a father-figure. The ambitious and single-minded Beethoven, however, sought no such intimate relationship, and quickly became critical of Haydn's teaching, which he regarded as careless. He secretly sought the guidance of Mozart's friend, the composer Johann Schenk (1753–1836), and later Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) for his studies in composition and counterpoint.

Beethoven broke with Haydn altogether in 1794. Further periods of study with other teachers followed, most notably with Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). But none of these pupilages lasted long. It was rapidly becoming clear that the young man had more to offer the world than his teachers could offer him. Waldstein was able to introduce Beethoven into the wealthiest aristocratic and artistic circles in Vienna-noblemen such as Prince Lobkowitz and the Russian Count Rasumovsky, who maintained private orchestras and welcomed virtuoso performers to their great houses-and Beethoven very quickly became a celebrity. The 1790s were a period of furious activity for Beethoven, both as composer and performer. He conducted his First Symphony in 1800, and though it was not received with great enthusiasm, it was an indication of the scope of the composer's ambition. This was to come into full flower in his Third Symphony, the Eroica, which was first performed in 1803. Originally intended to be called the Bonaparte, Beethoven changed the name when he heard that Napoleon had declared himself emperor. Beethoven admired revolutionary ideals, but detested tyranny.

Apart from occasional visits to the countryside and to his home city of Bonn, Beethoven passed the rest of his life in Vienna, producing music of increasing power, brilliance, depth, complexity, and amazing originality. He grew to dislike travel, and never married-although Beethoven was almost invariably in love. In 1802 he became aware that he was losing his hearing. Eventually, he gave up playing in public, and concentrated solely on composing. While he was by no means a recluse, he was embarrassed and infuriated by his worsening deafness, and his solitary working habits gave rise to stories of bizarre eccentricities, neglectfulness of his personal appearance, and a highly irregular diet-he often ate as he worked, and visitors to his studio would sometimes find morsels of half-eaten food amongs piles of manuscript paper.

Beethoven is rightly regarded as the link between eighteenth-century Classical music, with its formal rigor and precise symmetry, and the Romantic music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its concentration on inspiration, invention, and self-expression as individual destiny. Every musical form that Beethoven touched, he transformed. He expanded sonata form, mixing in procedures from various musical resources while maintaining a highly structured and complex whole. The string quartet became the laboratory, or workshop, for experiment and exploration-the three symphonic-style Rasumovsky Quartets, composed in 1806, introduce extremes far beyond the technical and expressive scope of anything written up to that time. In his last six string quartets, the ghosts of Classical formalism flicker radiantly through a musical landscape so strange and new that it still has power to shock the listener. These quartets, heard as mysterious and problematic in their time, were to become one of the touchstones of twentieth-century modernism. His single opera, Fidelio (1805, revised 1806 and 1814), was conceived on a dramatic scale that anticipated Richard Wagner (1813–1883). And the Missa Solemnis (1819–1822) looked back beyond the examples of Bach and Handel towards the earlier masters of religious music, Giovanni Palestrina (ca. 1525–1594) and Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521), integrating their older techniques into a new musical language of religious celebration.

In Beethoven's hands, the symphony became, and remains, the central repository for the composer's most important musical ideas. His Fifth Symphony is possibly the most triumphant expression of sheer human exuberance in all music, and remains one of the most popular of all symphonies in the orchestral repertoire. His Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, is a glorious celebration of landscape and nature. In the Seventh Symphony Beethoven abandoned traditional tonal relationships, and the famous Allegretto, with its repetitions, embellishments, and strange digressions, is one of the most beautiful in conception-a set of variations superimposed over a slow movement sonata form. And the moment when he introduces the human voice for the first time into his Ninth-and last-Symphony, is possibly best described by Wagner as "a positive necessity," which "breaks the bounds of absolute music, stemming the tumult of the other instruments with its eloquence . . . and passes at last into a songlike theme whose simple stately flow bears with it, one by one, the other instruments, until it swells into a mighty flood."