Ludwig van Beethoven

Baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, archbishopric of Cologne Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria

German composer, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. A universal genius widely regarded as the greatest composer who ever lived, Ludwig van Beethoven dominates a period of musical history as no one else before or since. Rooted in the Classical traditions of Haydn and Mozart, his art reaches out to encompass the new spirit of humanism expressed in the works of Goethe and Schiller, his elder contemporaries in the world of literature, and above all in the ideals of the French Revolution, with its passionate concern for the freedom and dignity of the individual. He revealed more vividly than any of his predecessors the power of music to convey a philosophy of life without the aid of a spoken text; and in certain of his compositions is to be found the strongest assertion of the human will in all music, if not in all art. Though not himself a Romantic, he became the fountainhead of much that characterized the work of the Romantics who followed him, especially in his ideal of program or illustrative music, which he defined in connection with his Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony as an expression of emotion than painting. In musical form he was a considerable innovator, widening the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto, and quartet; while in the Ninth Symphony he combined the worlds of vocal and instrumental music in a manner never before attempted. His personal life was marked by a heroic struggle against encroaching 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. In an age that saw the decline of court and church patronage, he not only maintained himself from the sale and publication of his works but also was the first musician to receive a salary with no duties other than to compose how and when he felt inclined. Life and work The early years Baptized on December 17, 1770, in Bonn, northwest Germany, Beethoven was the eldest surviving child of Johann and Maria Magdalena van Beethoven. The family was Flemish in origin and can be traced back to Malines. It was Beethoven's grandfather who had first settled in Bonn when he became a singer in the choir of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. He eventually rose to become Kappellmeister. His son Johann was also a singer in the electoral choir; thus, like most 18th-century musicians, Beethoven was born into the profession. Though at first quite prosperous, with the death of his grandfather in 1773 and the decline of his father into alcoholism, the Beethoven family became steadily poorer. By the age of 11 Beethoven had to leave school; at 18 he was the breadwinner of the family. Having observed in him signs of a talent for the piano, Johann had tried to make of his son a child prodigy like Mozart but without success. It was not until his adolescence that Beethoven began to attract mild attention. When, in 1780, Joseph II became sole ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, he appointed his brother Maximilian Francis as adjutant and successor-designate to the archbishop-elector of Cologne. Under Maximilian's rule, Bonn was transformed from a minor provincial town into a thriving and cultured capital city. A liberal Roman Catholic, he endowed Bonn with a university, limited the power of his own clergy, and opened the city to the full tide of the German literary renaissance associated with Lessing, Klopstock, and the young Goethe and Schiller. A sign of the times was the nomination as court organist of Christian Gottlob Neefe, a Protestant from Saxony, who became Beethoven's teacher. Although somewhat limited as a musician, Neefe was nonetheless a man of high ideals and wide culture, a man of letters as well as a composer of songs and light theatrical pieces; and it was to be through Neefe that Beethoven in 1783 would have his first extant composition (Variations on March by Dressler) published at Mannheim. By June 1782 Beethoven had become Neefe's assistant as court organist. In 1783 he had also been appointed continuo player to the Bonn opera. By 1787 he had made such progress that Maximilian Francis, archbishop-elector since 1784, was persuaded to send him to Vienna to study with Mozart. The visit was cut short when, after only two months, Beethoven received the news of his mother's death. According to tradition, Mozart was highly impressed with Beethoven's powers of improvisation and told some friends that this young man will make a great name for himself in the world. For the next five years, Beethoven remained at Bonn. To his other court duties was added that of playing viola in the theatre orchestra; and, although the archbishop for the time being showed him no further mark of special favour, he was beginning to make valuable acquaintances. Sometime previously he had come to know the widow of the chancellor, Joseph von Breuning, and she engaged him as music teacher to two of her four children. From then on, the Breunings' house became for him a second home, far more congenial than his own. Through Mme von Breuning, Beethoven acquired a number of wealthy pupils. His most useful social contact came in 1788 with the arrival in Bonn of Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, a member of the highest Viennese aristocracy and a music lover. Waldstein became a member of the Breuning circle, where he heard Beethoven play and at once became his devoted admirer. At a fancy dress ball given in 1790, the ballet music, according to the Almanach de Gotha (a journal chronicling the social activities of the aristocracy), had been composed by Count Waldstein; but it was generally known that Beethoven had written it for him. The same year saw the death of the emperor Joseph II. Through Waldstein again, Beethoven was invited to compose a funeral ode for soloists, chorus, and orchestra; but the scheduled performance was cancelled because the wind players found certain passages too difficult. He then added to it a complementary piece celebrating the accession of Joseph's brother Leopold II; but there is no record that either was ever performed until the end of the 19th century, when the manuscripts were rediscovered in Vienna and pronounced authentic by Johannes Brahms. But in 1790 another great composer had seen and admired them: that year Haydn, passing through Bonn on his way to London, was feted by the elector and his musical establishment; when shown Beethoven's score, he was sufficiently impressed by it to offer to take Beethovenas a pupil when he returned from London. Beethoven accepted Haydn's offer and in the autumn of 1792, while the armies of the French Revolution were storming into the Rhineland provinces, Beethoven left Bonn, never to return. The album that he took with him (preserved in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn) indicates the wide circle of his acquaintances and friends in Bonn. The most prophetic of the entries, written shortly after Mozart's death, runs: The spirit of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her beloved. With the inexhaustible Haydn she found repose but no occupation. With the help of unremitting labour you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands. (Count Waldstein.) The compositions belonging to the years at Bonn excluding those probably begun at Bonn but revised and completed in Vienna are of more interest to the Beethoven student than to the ordinary music lover. They show the influences in which his art was rooted as well as the natural difficulties that he had to overcome and that his early training was inadequate to remedy. Three piano sonatas written in 1783 demonstrate that, musically, Bonn was an outpost of Mannheim, the cradle of the modern orchestra in Germany, and the nursery of a musical style that was to make a vital contribution to the classical symphony. But, at the time of Beethoven's childhood, the Mannheim school was already in decline. The once famous orchestra was, in effect, dissolved after the war of 1778 between Austria and Prussia. The Mannheim style had degenerated into mannerism, which took the form of trivial and often inappropriate experimenting with dynamic contrasts as reflected even in Mozart's Piano Sonata in C major, K 309. The preoccupation with extremes of piano (soft) and forte (loud), often in contradiction to the musical phrasing, is found in Beethoven's early sonatas and in much else written by him at that time which is not surprising, since the symphonies of later Mannheim composers formed the staple fare of the Bonn court orchestra. But what was for Mozart only a deviation from his normal style was to remain a fundamental element in that of Beethoven. The sudden pianos, the unexpected outbursts, the wide leaping arpeggio figures (chord notes played rapidly up or down over several octaves) known as “Mannheim rockets”—all these are central to Beethoven's musical personality and were to help him toward the liberation of instrumental music from its dependence on vocal style. Beethoven may, indeed, be described as the last and finest flower on the Mannheim tree. Early Influences Like other composers of his generation, Beethoven was subject to the influence of popular music and of folk music, influences particularly strong in the Waldstein ballet music of 1790 and in several of his early songs and unison choruses. Heavy Rhineland dance rhythms can be found in many of his mature compositions; but he could assimilate other local idioms as well—Italian, French, Slavic, and even Celtic. Although never a nationalist or folk composer in the 20th-century sense, he often allowed the unusual contours of folk melody to lead him away from traditional harmonic procedure. French music impinged on him from two main directions: from Mannheim, whose artistic links with Paris had always been strong, and from the Bonn Nationaltheater, which relied mainly for its repertory on comic operas translated from the French. In fashionable Bonn society, sympathy with the French Revolution was very strong, and the flavour of the French Revolutionary march is present in many of Beethoven's symphonic allegros. The jigging rhythms to be found in several of his scherzos are also clearly of French provenance. Like all pianists of the late 18th century, Beethoven was raised on the sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the chief exponent of “expressive” music at a time when music was regarded as the art of pleasing sounds. These sonatas, with their quirks of rhythms and harmony and their occasional wordless recitative, were equally familiar to Haydn and Mozart; but in Beethoven they evoked a much readier response, not only for reasons of temperament, but also because of the intellectual climate in which he himself was reared. The favourite literary fare of the Breunings and their friends was associated with the Sturm und Drang, a reaction against the rationalism of the early 18th century, an exaltation of feeling and instinct over reason. Its gospel was enshrined in Goethe's early novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Werther), the language of which finds an echo in certain of Beethoven's letters and especially in the “Heiligenstadt Testament” (see below). In such a movement music took on a new importance as an art of feeling. The sharp conflicts of mood that characterize the sonatas of C.P.E. Bach appear much more powerfully again in Beethoven; to Beethoven “feeling” was as important in practice as it was in theory to his master Neefe, who proclaimed it the only condition of artistic value. All of this does not make Beethoven a Romantic, although Romantics attempted to claim him as one of themselves. His literary world—he read widely and voraciously despite a formal education that in arithmetic had not carried him as far as the multiplication table—was rooted in the German classics, above all Goethe and Schiller. Like them he was to achieve in music a balance of form and emotion that can only be called classical. The Bonn compositions of most enduring interest date, as might be expected, from the last years: a Rondino and an Octet, for wind instruments, composed in 1792, probably for the elector's harmonie (wind band); a Trio in G Major for Flute, Bassoon, and Piano (1791); and the two cantatas. The songs, which were doubtless written under Neefe's inspiration, show no great feeling for the solo voice. This is strange in one whose father and grandfather both had been singers, but it remained a limitation that pursued Beethoven throughout his career. Of particular interest are 24 variations on a theme by Vincenzo Righini, an Italian composer, which, like the String Trio in E Flat Major, Opus 3, Beethoven revised and then published at a much later date. These variations, representing a compendium of Beethoven's piano technique, for a long time were to serve as the mainstay of his repertory in the salons of Vienna. Vienna Before Beethoven left Bonn he had acquired a very considerable reputation in northwest Germany as a piano virtuoso, with a particular talent for extemporization. Mozart had been one of the finest improvisers of his age; by all accounts Beethoven surpassed him. In the age of sensibility he could move an audience to tears more easily than any other pianist of the time. For this reason especially he was taken up by the Viennese aristocracy almost from the moment he set foot in Vienna. Count Waldstein had, of course, prepared the way with his talk of a successor to Mozart; and it is significant that Beethoven's earliest patrons in Vienna were Baron van Swieten and Prince Karl Lichnowsky, who alone among the aristocracy had remained Mozart's supporters until his death. In the Vienna of the 1790s, music had become more and more the favourite pastime of a cultured aristocracy, for whom politics under the reactionary emperor Francis II were now discreditable and dangerous and who had, moreover, never shown a like appreciation of any of the other fine arts. Many played instruments themselves well enough to be able to take their place beside professionals. Probably at no other time and in no other city was there such a high standard of amateur and semiprofessional music making as in the Vienna of Beethoven's day. As a composer, however, Beethoven still had many technical problems to overcome, and it soon became clear that Haydn was not the best person to help him. Outwardly their relations remained cordial; but Beethoven soon began taking extra lessons in secret. One of his teachers was the organist of St. Stephen's Cathedral, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, a learned contrapuntist of the old school who equipped him with the comprehensive technique that he needed. He also studied vocal composition with Antonio Salieri, the imperial Kappellmeister. By 1794, when Haydn had left for his second visit to London, there was no longer any question of Beethoven's returning to Bonn, which was then in French hands. The elector himself had left, and consequently Beethoven's subsidy came to an end. But he had no need to worry for, apart from what he was able to earn by teaching and playing, he received free board and lodgings from Prince Lichnowsky. The year 1795 marked Beethoven's first public appearance as a pianist in Vienna. He played a concerto (No. 2, Opus 19) of his own and one by Mozart and also took part in a benefit concert for Haydn. More important still, his Three Trios for Piano, Violin and Cello, Opus 1, were published with a long list of aristocratic subscribers. In the next three years he undertook concert tours in Berlin and Prague and might have travelled more widely still had the international situation permitted. In 1800 he launched a public concert on the grand scale, in which one of his own piano concerti, the Septet (Opus 20), and First Symphony were given, together with works by Haydn and Mozart. The event contributed a great deal to the spread of Beethoven's fame abroad. The turn of the century concluded what is generally referred to as Beethoven's first period, a period during which his art stayed within the bounds of 18th-century technique and ideas. Most of his published works during that time are for the piano, alone or with other instruments, important exceptions being the String Trio in E Flat Major, Opus 3; the Three String Trios, Opus 9; the Six String Quartets, Opus 18; and the First Symphony. Beethoven extended his range slowly and methodically, but he was still a piano composer par excellence.

Approaching Deafness

The change in direction occurred with Beethoven's gradual realization that he was becoming deaf. The first symptoms had appeared even before 1800, yet for a few years his life continued unchanged: he still played in the houses of the nobility, in rivalry with other pianists, and performed in public with such visiting virtuosos as violinist George Bridgetower (to whom the Kreutzer Sonata was originally dedicated). But by 1802 he could no longer be in doubt that his malady was both permanent and progressive. During a summer spent at the country village of Heiligenstadt he wrote the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” Ostensibly intended for his two brothers, the document begins: O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so. From childhood my heart and mind was disposed to the gentle feeling of good will. I was ever eager to accomplish great deeds, but reflect now that for six years I have been in a hopeless case, made worse by ignorant doctors, yearly betrayed in the hope of getting better, finally forced to face the prospect of a permanent malady whose cure will take years or even prove impossible. He was tempted to take his own life, “But only Art held back; for, ah, it seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce. . . .” There is a Werther-like postscript: As the leaves of autumn wither and fall, so has my own life become barren: almost as I came, so I go hence. Even that high courage that inspired me in the fair days of summer has now vanished. More significant, perhaps, are his words in a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler: “I will seize fate by the throat. . . .” Elsewhere he remarks, “If only I were rid of my affliction I would embrace the whole world.” He was to do both, though the condition he hoped for was not fulfilled. From then on his days as a virtuoso were numbered. Although it was not until about 1819 that his deafness became total, making necessary the use of those conversation books in which friends wrote down their questions while he replied orally, his playing degenerated as he became able to hear less and less. He continued to appear in public from time to time, but most of his energies were absorbed in composing. He would spend the months from May to October in one or another of the little villages near Vienna. Many of his musical ideas came to him on long country walks and were noted in a sketchbook. These sketchbooks, many of which have been preserved, reveal much about Beethoven's methods of work. The man who could improvise the most intricate fantasies on the spur of the moment took infinite pains in the shaping of a considered composition. In the sketchbooks such famous melodies as the adagio of the Emperor Concerto or the andante of the Kreutzer Sonata can be seen emerging from a trivial and characterless beginning into their final form. It seems, too, that Beethoven worked on more than one composition at a time and that he was rarely in a hurry to finish anything that he had on hand. Early sketches for the Fifth Symphony, for instance, date originally from 1804, although the finished work did not appear until 1808. Sometimes the sketches are accompanied by verbal comments as a kind of aide-mémoire. Sometimes, as in the sketching of the Third (Eroica) Symphony, he would leave several bars blank, making it clear that the rhythmic scheme had preceded the melodic in his mind. Many of the sketches consist merely of a melody line and a bass enough, in fact, to establish a continuity. But in many works, especially the later ones, the sketching process is very elaborate indeed, with revisions and alterations continuing up to the date of publication. If, in general, it is only the primitive sketches and jottings that have survived, this is because Beethoven kept them beside him as potential sources of material for later compositions. The working out of a musical composition in all its detail ceased to interest him once the piece had been completed.

Beethoven and The Theatre

The next few years were those of Beethoven's short-lived connection with the theatre. In 1801 he had provided the score for the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (The Creatures of Prometheus). Two years later he was offered a contract for an opera on a classical subject with a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, who had achieved fame and wealth as the librettist of Mozart's Magic Flute and who was then impresario of the Theater an der Wien. Two or three completed numbers show that Beethoven had already begun work on it before Schikaneder himself was ousted from the management and the contract annulled—somewhat to Beethoven's relief, as he had found Schikaneder's verses “such as could only have proceeded from the mouths of our Viennese applewomen.” When the new management re-engaged Beethoven the following year, it was largely on the strength of his now almost forgotten oratorio, Christus am Ölberg (Christ on the Mount of Olives), which had been given in an all-Beethoven benefit concert, together with the first two symphonies and the Third Piano Concerto. The year 1804 was to see the completion of the Third Symphony, regarded by most biographers as a landmark in Beethoven's development. It is the answer to the “Heiligenstadt Testament”: a symphony on an unprecedented scale and at the same time a prodigious assertion of the human will. The work was to have been dedicated to Napoleon, one of Beethoven's heroes, but Beethoven struck out the dedication on hearing that Napoleon had taken the title of emperor. Outraged in his republican principles, he later substituted the words “for the memory of a great man.” From then on the masterworks followed hard on one another's heels: the Piano Sonata in F Minor, Opus 57, known as the Appassionata; the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Opus 58; the three Razumovsky Quartets, Opus 59; the Fourth Symphony, Opus 60; the Violin Concerto, Opus 61. To this period also belongs his one opera, Fidelio, commissioned for the winter season of 1805. The play concerns a wife who disguises herself as a boy in order to rescue her imprisoned husband, and, in setting this to music, Beethoven was influenced by Paer and by Luigi Cherubini, composer of similar “rescue” operas and a musician whom he greatly admired. Fidelio enjoyed no great success at first, partly because the presence of French troops, who had occupied Vienna after the Battle of Austerlitz, kept most of the Viennese away. With great difficulty Beethoven was persuaded to make certain changes for a revival in the following spring, with modified libretto. This time the opera survived two performances and would have run longer, but for a quarrel between Beethoven and the management, after which the composer in a fury withdrew his score. It was not until eight years later that Fidelio, heavily revised by Beethoven himself and a new librettist, returned to the Vienna stage, to become one of the classics of the German theatre. Beethoven later turned over many other operatic projects in his mind but without bringing any to fruition.

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