Beethoven – The Greatest Composer Documentary

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The man known to history as Ludwig van Beethoven was most likely born on the 16th of December 1770 in the city of Bonn in Germany. There is no record of his birth, but he was baptised on the 17th of December and the custom at the time in Germany was for new-borns to be baptised the day after they were born. His father Johann van Beethoven was a singer at the court of Maximilian Friedrich, the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. Johann’s father Ludwig, whom the child was named after, served as Kapellmeister or music director at the Elector’s court in Bonn. The “van” in the family name indicates that the family came from the Low Countries, hailing from the Belgian village of Bettincourt, known in Dutch as Betouwe or Bettenhoven, though unlike the German “von,” this was not necessarily an indication of noble heritage. His mother, Maria Magdalena Keverich, was the daughter of the head chef for the Archbishop-Elector of Trier. Following the death of her first husband, she married Johann van Beethoven in 1767. The couple would have seven children, of whom only three boys survived infancy: Ludwig, Caspar Carl, and Nikolaus Johann. Beethoven’s native Archbishop-Electorate of Cologne was one of over three hundred states of the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval political entity that claimed political authority over much of Germany. As his title indicates, the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne was one of the several imperial princes who had the right to vote for the Holy Roman Emperor. From the 15th century, the Emperor was almost always a member of the House of Habsburg, the rulers of Austria, but archbishop-electors such as Maximilian Friedrich exercised considerable political and spiritual authority in their own domains. Politically and culturally, the German people looked for guidance from the imperial court of Vienna, where Empress Maria Theresa ruled alongside her son Joseph II. Though the Habsburgs were traditionally responsible for leading the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe, the Austrian Habsburgs of the 18th century introduced reforms that weakened the Catholic Church and expanded religious toleration. In 1773, following the death of Ludwig’s namesake and grandfather, Johann van Beethoven sought to succeed his late father as Kapellmeister but was denied the appointment. In around 1775, Johann turned his energies to developing the musical talent of his eldest surviving son, teaching him basic musical theory, as well as how to play the violin and a range of keyboard instruments. The most popular keyboard instrument at the time was still the harpsichord, in which sound is generated by plucked strings. Over the course of the 18th century, the pianoforte or piano became increasingly popular among keyboard players. By hitting the strings with small hammers, the piano allows the player greater control of the volume and duration of the notes. Johann’s methods of instruction included beating his son or locking him in the cellar if he made mistakes, an approach which caused the young Beethoven to emotionally detach from his father. Ludwig was also taught by local musicians, including the violinist Franz Anton Ries and Tobias Pfeiffer, an insomniac who frequently forced the child to wake up late at night for keyboard lessons. The brutal instruction notwithstanding, Ludwig soon exhibited great promise as an instrumentalist, developing a talent for improvisation that irritated his unimaginative father. On the 26th of March 1778, Ludwig performed in public for the first time, giving a recital in Cologne at the age of seven, though the posters advertising the concert claimed he was only six. Johann hoped that his son might follow the example of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who impressed Maria Theresa in Vienna as a six-year-old prodigy in 1762, but Ludwig’s performance on this occasion drew little attention. At around this time, Ludwig started his schooling, where he learned Latin and French. While he struggled with numbers and letters, he continued to show promise as a musician, learning to write music at around the age of ten. Given his musical promise and the expectation he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a court musician for the Archbishop-Elector, in late 1781 Ludwig’s education was entrusted to Christian Gottlob Neefe, Maximilian Friedrich’s Court Organist. Neefe had studied music in Leipzig, where the great Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach had spent his final years before his death in 1750. In addition to introducing Beethoven to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, already a popular source of instruction for young musicians, Neefe further enhanced Beethoven’s understanding of songs and choral music. By June 1782, the eleven-year-old Beethoven was deputising for his tutor on the organ at the court chapel and later that year his first published composition appeared, a set of nine piano variations to a march by the late Ernst Christoph Dressler, written under Neefe’s guidance. In March 1783, Neefe wrote an article in a music magazine that suggested that Beethoven’s talent could rival that of Mozart, who was then establishing himself in Vienna, where Joseph II had been sole ruler since his mother’s death in 1780. In October 1783, Ludwig accompanied his mother Maria Magdalena to the Netherlands, where he gave several concerts. On the 23rd of November, a few weeks shy of his thirteenth birthday, Beethoven was given sixty-three florins after performing at a royal concert in The Hague, his first paid engagement. After his return to Bonn, having dedicated a set of three piano sonatas to the Archbishop-Elector in 1783, Beethoven was formally appointed Assistant Court Organist in February 1784 and paid an allowance, enabling him to support his family at a time when his father was descending into alcoholism. In April 1784, Maximilian Friedrich died at the age of seventy-six. His successor as Archbishop-Elector was the twenty-seven-year-old Maximilian Franz, younger brother to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Despite his imperial brother’s later patronage of Mozart, Maximilian Franz sought to cut back on court entertainment. As part of the changes to the court chapel, Beethoven was promoted to organist with 150 florins while Neefe had his salary cut in half to 200 florins. Beethoven’s salary was soon adjusted in line with Neefe’s, creating tensions between the master and his teenage pupil. Despite these tensions, the fourteen-year-old Beethoven continued to write music, increasingly influenced by Mozart. With the court orchestra of some thirty players at his disposal, he began experimenting with instrumentation, working out how the different sections of the orchestra fitted together. However, over a four-year period during Beethoven’s late teens between 1785 and 1789, he wrote less music than he would at other points in his life, perhaps as a result of his numerous duties as a court musician. In addition to playing the organ at mass every morning, he performed as a court pianist and served as an accompanist for the Elector’s opera singers during rehearsals. In the court orchestra, Beethoven either directed the orchestra from the harpsichord or played the viola in the string section. In early 1787, perhaps following a suggestion from Neefe, Max Franz proposed sending the promising young musician to Vienna to study under Mozart. The Archbishop-Elector agreed to sponsor the trip, hoping that Beethoven would be in a position to increase the prestige of his patron’s court upon his return to Bonn. Beethoven left Bonn in late March and would have arrived in Vienna around the 8th of April. During his first visit to the imperial capital, Beethoven recalled being impressed upon catching sight of Emperor Joseph. While Beethoven only mentioned seeing Mozart play, it is possible that the latter may have offered the young man some instruction. However, after less than two weeks in Vienna, Beethoven received the alarming news that his mother was seriously ill and was forced to return home. Weakened by tuberculosis, Maria Magdalena died at the age of forty on the 17th of July 1787. The sixteen-year-old Ludwig was devastated at the loss of a loving mother, leaving him with an emotionally distant and alcoholic father. His depression was tempered by frequent visits to Helene von Breuning, a wealthy widow who employed him to tutor her four children in music. While Madame von Breuning took the role of a substitute mother, Beethoven enjoyed playing piano duets alongside her sixteen-year-old daughter Eleonore, and would later become a close friend of her thirteen-year-old brother Stephan. In addition to emotional support from members of the family, Beethoven received an informal education in German literature, history, geography, and science from the Breunings and their high-society guests. The teenager read plenty of literature and poetry and was particularly inspired by Schiller’s ode An die Freude or “To Joy,” which celebrated the divine gifts of love, brotherhood, and freedom. One member of the Breuning circle was Franz Gerhard Wegeler a science student at the University of Bonn. Through Wegeler’s efforts, Ludwig managed to enrol at the university as a part-time student of philosophy. Beethoven’s duties as a court musician increased after a new court opera company was formed in January 1789. Later that year Beethoven was finally granted his raise when his drunkard father was pensioned off with half of his salary of 400 florins. The remaining 200 was given to Ludwig, who effectively assumed responsibility for his father and his two younger brothers. As Beethoven turned nineteen in December 1789, he had just lived through one of the most consequential years in European history. For several years, King Louis XVI of France had been struggling to replenish the empty French state coffers, caused partly by his decision to support the United States of America’s successful struggle for independence against the British Empire. By 1789, as famine swept over the country and the nobility resisted higher taxes, a National Assembly representing the commoners took control of the government. Meanwhile in Vienna, Joseph II’s radical reforms had been facing considerable resistance at the local level, and the frustrated emperor decided to reverse most of his measures. Not long afterwards, Joseph died at the age of fifty in February 1790. At the court of Cologne, Max Franz declared public mourning for his brother. Beethoven was asked to compose a memorial cantata set to a text by the poet Severin Averdonk. Although he produced a profound forty-minute composition in C minor, a key that Beethoven would use throughout his career to symbolise tragedy, for unknown reasons the cantata was never performed until it was rediscovered by Johannes Brahms almost a century later. A second cantata, written on the accession of Joseph’s brother Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor, was also withdrawn before it was due to be performed. Less than two years after Joseph II’s death, the musical world was shocked to learn of Mozart’s own passing on the 5th of December at the young age of just thirty-five. The exact cause of his death has been a matter of wide-ranging debate, with everything from poisoning to kidney failure being proposed. His premature death meant that the sixty-year-old Franz Joseph Haydn was now once again considered the leading composer in Europe. Haydn’s greatest contribution to musical form was to popularise the symphony, writing over one hundred during his lifetime. While symphonies had initially been three-movement instrumental pieces used to introduce operas, Haydn transformed them into standalone four-movement orchestral works, introducing a dance as a third movement in between a fast opening movement, a slow second movement, and a faster finale. While on his way to the first of two celebrated visits to England, Haydn had passed through Bonn in late 1790, where he was shown one of Beethoven’s cantatas and recognised his abilities. While Haydn was in London, Beethoven was promoted to Court Pianist in addition to his existing duties as Court Organist. In March 1791 Beethoven wrote the Ritterballet, a composition influenced by German folk dances to accompany a dance spectacle organised by Count Waldstein. On the 1st of March 1792, after a brief reign of two years, Emperor Leopold II died at the age of forty-four and was succeeded by his son, the twenty-four-year-old Emperor Franz II. Just weeks later, the French revolutionary government declared war on Austria in response to Austrian preparations to do the same in defence of Queen Marie Antoinette, the new emperor’s aunt, who was now effectively a prisoner in Paris of the revolutionaries. Much of the war over the next three years would focus on the Austrian Netherlands around modern-day Belgium and Prussia’s territories in the Rhineland region of western Germany where Beethoven’s native Bonn lay. With the region now facing war, the Archbishop-Elector Max Franz decided to send Beethoven to Vienna to study under the great Haydn. Thus, in November 1792, a month shy of his twenty-second birthday, Beethoven negotiated his way through columns of soldiers marching to battle on his way to Vienna. He would live there for the rest of his life, an imperial capital of around 200,000 people dominated by the River Danube and the Hofburg, the Habsburg imperial palace. Beethoven arrived in Vienna with letters of introduction from Max Franz and Count Waldstein, but soon realised that the financial support promised by the emperor’s uncle was inadequate to meet his expenses. However, news soon arrived of the death of his father on the 18th of December. Ludwig, who had always had a strained relationship with him, did not return to Bonn, though his finances were improved when he inherited his father’s pension. Furthermore, his career started to make major advances after relocating to Vienna. In January 1793, Haydn joked that the young man was equipped to write grand operas while he himself would have to retire. Beethoven had taken lessons from Haydn due to the latter’s mastery of counterpoint, a musical interaction where two or more lines that differ in their rhythm and melody continue to maintain a harmonic relationship with each other. Haydn gave Beethoven hundreds of exercises in counterpoint but made few corrections to Beethoven’s mistakes. Within six weeks Beethoven decided that Haydn could not effectively teach him counterpoint, but continued to benefit from his ability to observe Haydn’s work at close quarters and from Haydn’s relationship with potential aristocratic patrons. Despite his struggles, Beethoven was already making a name for himself as a pianist in Viennese society. Among the influential individuals who took an interest in Beethoven’s career at this time was Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the director of the Imperial Library and a patron of Mozart and Haydn who dabbled in composition himself. Beethoven lived in an attic apartment above the residence of Prince Karl and Princess Christiane Lichnowsky, who also invited him to play at their Friday morning concerts. Prince Karl introduced the young musician to his brother Count Moritz, who would become a close friend. Other influential figures who would become important patrons were Joseph Franz Maximilian, Prince Lobkowitz, and Count Andrei Kirillovich Razumovsky, an amateur violinist who was appointed Russian ambassador to the Habsburg court in 1792 by Empress Catherine the Great. The young and ambitious Beethoven was not entirely amused by constant requests from his aristocratic admirers to improvise on the piano but knew that he had to do so in order to make a living, especially as it was not clear how much longer the Archbishop-Electorate of Cologne would survive before the arrival of a French army, a development which would preclude the possibility of returning home to Bonn. In France, both King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were executed by the revolutionary government in the course of 1793, a French Republic having been declared months earlier. Britain and the Dutch Republic now joined the war against France. Nevertheless, the armies of the Revolution continued to see success on multiple fronts. Despite the worsening wartime conditions, Beethoven continued to work, publishing a set of violin variations to an aria from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro dedicated to his childhood friend Eleonore von Breuning. During his first year in Vienna he also worked on a piano concerto in B-flat major which once completed would be his Piano Concerto No. 2. Haydn sent several of these compositions to Max Franz in Bonn, requesting an additional 500 florins, having already lent Beethoven an identical sum out of his own pocket. In his reply, the Elector claimed that most of the compositions in question had already been performed in Bonn, refused to increase Beethoven’s allowance, and indicated that he might recall the composer to Bonn. This incident, combined with Haydn’s departure for London for a second tour in 1794, saw Beethoven begin to study under Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, the Kapellmeister of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the centre of Vienna. In October 1794, French armies finally occupied Cologne, bringing hundreds of refugees to Vienna, including Beethoven’s younger brother Carl Caspar. The extinction of the Archbishop-Electorate which followed the French conquest resulted in the loss of Beethoven’s salary, but the Lichnowskys allowed him to continue to stay as an honoured guest at their house. On the upside, at just 24 years of age, he had begun to gain a reputation for his playing in the salons of Vienna. After more than a year of performing to aristocratic audiences, Beethoven made his public debut in Vienna at the Imperial Court Theater, more commonly known as the Burgtheater, on the 29th of March 1795, playing a new piano concerto in C major later known as his First Piano Concerto. Not long afterwards, he published his first composition, a set of three piano trios which he dedicated to Prince Karl Lichnowsky. Beethoven advertised the composition for sale at one ducat. It attracted 249 subscribers, making him a profit of just over a thousand florins, enough for a year’s expenses. He followed this initial success with a further set of three Piano Sonatas and was soon publishing a steady stream of chamber music over the next few years, including five trios for strings, three violin sonatas, and seven piano sonatas. His stature as a pianist also continued to grow and in 1796 he embarked on a tour of Bohemia and the German states of Saxony and Prussia. In Berlin, he performed twice for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, to whom he would dedicate two of his cello concertos. By the time Beethoven returned to Vienna from his tour in July, the city was disturbed by the military successes of General Napoleon Buonaparte, the young French revolutionary commander who inflicted a series of defeats against Austrian armies in northern Italy. By early 1797, Napoleon’s men had crossed into Austrian soil and were marching towards Vienna itself. During this anxious period, Haydn composed the Kaiserhymne in praise of Emperor Franz, which would become the national anthem of the Austrian empire before being appropriated by Germany as the Deutschlandlied. In April 1797, with Napoleon less than a hundred miles from Vienna, the city guard was mobilised and Beethoven composed a war song entitled “Ein grosses, deutsches Volk,” “A Great German Nation,” but a preliminary peace signed at Leoben on the 18th of April meant that the song was never performed. The following March, Viennese society was awe-struck by a grand oratorio by Haydn, The Creation, who demonstrated he could still write magnificent music in his late sixties. Beethoven still had to prove himself as a composer and decided to quit the Lichnowsky residence in favour of a rented apartment which he could now afford thanks to the money he was making from his printed music. On the 2nd of April 1800, Beethoven gave a concert at the Burgtheater. In addition to a Mozart symphony and a couple of numbers from Haydn’s The Creation, the programme included three of his own compositions: a piano concerto, a septet for four stringed instruments and three woodwind instruments, and a new symphony. The piano concerto was most likely his Second, in B-flat major, the melodious septet became his most popular work yet, while his Symphony No. 1 in C major, signalled his entry into the field that Haydn and Mozart had made their own. At the age of twenty-nine, having spent seven-and-a-half years in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven was finally established as a popular composer in his own right. Following his initial financial difficulties, he was making good money from his published compositions, his performances and from teaching piano students, in addition to 600 florins a year from Prince Lichnowsky. In the summer of 1800 he moved out of the city centre to the suburban village of Unterdöbling. Henceforth he would spend much of his time in the countryside taking inspiration for his compositions from nature, before wintering in Vienna refining his compositions and performing. Around this time, the Austrian army fought and lost a second war against Revolutionary France. In November 1799, General Bonaparte, overthrew the French government in Paris and established himself as First Consul of the French Republic. Although an allied Russo-Austrian army had reconquered northern Italy, Bonaparte took back Italy following victory at Marengo in June 1800, while his colleague General Moreau decisively defeated the Austrians at Hohenlinden in Bavaria in December. By February 1801, another peace treaty in which Austria lost further lands was signed at Lunéville. Although his position as a German composer in the Austrian capital should have dictated otherwise, Beethoven, like many European intellectuals, admired Bonaparte and viewed him as a figure who might extend the ideals of the European Enlightenment across the continent. In the spring of 1801, he wrote the music for The Creatures of Prometheus, an allegorical ballet based on the myth of Prometheus, the ancient Greek god who breathed life into mankind and gave them fire. It may have been a thinly disguised commentary on Bonaparte, though Beethoven had to be careful to get around the censors in Vienna. The ballet was performed twenty-seven times and further increased the composer’s renown. At the age of thirty, Beethoven seemed destined to climb to greater heights as a musician and composer. But his closest friends knew a terrible truth about Ludwig: he was losing his hearing. In June 1801, he wrote to his old friend from Bonn, Franz Wegeler, that his hearing had been deteriorating for the past three years, and that after consulting doctors with mixed success, he continued to suffer from tinnitus, a severe ringing in the ears. Not only did this mean that he struggled to hear the music he was playing and composing, but he had trouble hearing what people were telling him in the theatre and on social occasions, causing him to isolate himself from society, a development which somewhat explains his decision to go and reside to an increasing extent outside Vienna in the countryside. Here he fought his growing depression at this turn of events by continuing to write music. One work from this time is Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor. In this Beethoven opened the piece softly, mournfully in the lower octaves before the introduction of the main theme with a slow, repeated G-sharp note on a higher register. Dedicated to his Italian student and love interest Countess Giulietta Guicciardi under the Italian title Sonata quasi una Fantasia, “like a fantasy,” it would later acquire the nickname “Moonlight.” Although Beethoven never completely departed from the Classical framework laid down by Haydn and Mozart, the “Moonlight” Sonata was an early example of the Romanticism of 19th century music. In April 1802, following the advice of his doctor, Beethoven moved to Heiligenstadt, a quiet spa town outside Vienna, where he struggled to come to terms with his progressive deafness. While out on a walk with his student and soon-to-be secretary Ferdinand Ries, the son of his one-time tutor in Bonn, the latter remarked on the melodiousness of a tune emanating from a distant shepherd’s pipe, but Beethoven was unable to hear it despite following the music towards its source. Months later, in October 1802, he drafted what has become known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In this he addressed his brothers and admitted his deafness and the difficulties it was beginning to cause him professionally and socially. He had, he confessed, even considered ending his life, only to be held back by his dedication to his art. Despite his difficulties, he soon returned to Vienna keen to create a work which would fit the heroic spirit of the age. What caused his deafness has never been satisfactorily resolved, with theories ranging from syphilis or typhus to lead poisoning and even a habit he developed early in life of plunging his head into cold water when he wanted to wake himself up in order to continue working. Of course all of this raises a question: if Beethoven increasingly could not hear, then how did he continue to compose and write orchestral arrangements of the quality that he did for so many years to come? The answer is complex. Firstly, Beethoven had lived half his life able to hear and so he knew what instruments sounded like and how to arrange music through his memory of what certain notes and combinations would result in a specific sound. It has also been suggested in recent times by Evelyn Glennie, an award-winning multi-percussionist who has been deaf herself since she was 12 years old, that other parts of the body can learn to hear when the ears fail and so the body becomes like a giant ear. In Beethoven’s case he trained the rest of his body to hear. He would place his teeth on the keys of the piano to ‘hear’ the vibrations through his mouth and also had a megaphone attached to it so that the vibrations coursed through his body when he played. Some of this may have resulted in his distinctive sound. The violent nature of some of the arrangements and instrumentation in his works was something of a by-product of the manner in which he pounded on the keys of his piano to feel the sound it was making, particularly so from 1812 onwards when he effectively became completely deaf. These impediments would make the music he composed in the second half of his life all the more incredible. In the early summer of 1802, Beethoven began to sketch a series of fifteen variations and a fugue on a theme from his Prometheus ballet. For the first time in a decade, the European continent was briefly at peace, after Britain and France made peace at Amiens in March 1802. Keen to leave a legacy not only as a general but as a statesman, Napoleon was in the process of reforming French law, which soon after its publication in March 1804 came to be known as the Napoleonic Code. By early 1803, Beethoven continued to play around with his Prometheus theme and soon created the framework for what would become his Third Symphony. Composed in E-flat major, it would become one of his greatest and most revered works. An epic opening movement was balanced by a funeral march in the second movement, followed by a quick and joyful scherzo in the third movement, reminiscent of a drinking party in an army camp, before an epic finale featuring ten variations on the same Prometheus theme that Beethoven had grown to love. Destined to be grander and longer than any of Mozart or Haydn’s symphonies, Beethoven named his work-in-progress “Bonaparte.” It was also during this period that he premiered his Second Symphony on the 4th of April 1803 at the Theater-an-der-Wien in Vienna. After moving back to the countryside for the summer of 1803, Beethoven completed his Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major dedicated to Count Waldstein, who gifted him a French piano in August. He continued to work on his “Bonaparte” symphony, playing extracts on the piano in the presence of his students. By June 1804 he was able to present it to Prince Lobkowitz’s orchestra for a first rehearsal. The first movement opened with two powerful E-flat major chords before the cellos take up the theme in an energetic exposition which introduced a level of harmonic and rhythmic complexity that confused the orchestra and forced them to start again. Shortly before the recapitulation of the main theme, Beethoven intended for a horn to introduce the theme while the strings finished the development. Standing next to Beethoven, Ries assumed the horn had come in too early and shouted, “That damned horn player! Can’t he count?” According to Ries, Beethoven did not forgive him for a long time for unintentionally slandering his orchestral arrangement. After doubtless many more undocumented rehearsals to familiarise the Lobkowitz players with the innovative symphony, Beethoven’s princely patron and his orchestra decamped to his summer palace with the manuscript in August. By the time Beethoven returned to Vienna in late 1804, his emotional energies were diverted to the romantic pursuit of his recently-widowed student, Countess Josephine von Brunsvik, writing her a series of love letters in early 1805. At around this time, he wrote his Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, the tempestuous “Appassionata” Sonata, which he considered his finest of the genre. When Josephine rejected him Beethoven turned to an opera he was writing based on Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s play Leonore. Set to a German libretto by Joseph Sonnleithner of the Burgtheater, the plot was inspired by a real-life tale of a young aristocratic woman who disguised herself as a boy to free her husband from prison during the French Revolution. Having been spurned by his latest and most passionate love interest, Beethoven feared that the subject matter of the fidelity of married love was one that he would never achieve. It would prove to be the case. He never married. In December 1804, First Consul Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in what to people many seemed like a betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution. It was around this time that Beethoven furiously scratched out the name of Bonaparte from the title page of his Third Symphony, which premiered in public on the 7th of April 1805. After rededicating the symphony to Lobkowitz for 400 florins, Beethoven retitled the symphony Eroica, or Heroic, subtitled “composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Like the Lobkowitz orchestra during its first rehearsal, the audience was bewildered and only after several performances did the critics catch up with the great composer. In August 1805, Austria joined Russia and Britain in a Third Coalition against France, which soon ran into disaster when Napoleon comprehensively defeated the Austrians in the Ulm region of southern Germany. Just as Beethoven was putting the finishing touches on his opera, renamed Fidelio at the last moment, Napoleon advanced on and then entered Vienna with his forces on the 13th of November. While his aristocratic patrons fled the capital, Beethoven’s Fidelio received its premiere on the 20th of November. It was not a success, and Beethoven withdrew the opera after a revised two-act version staged in the spring of 1806 achieved equally disappointing results. Beethoven was somewhat upset by the response to Fidelio but he nevertheless continued to create splendid masterpieces in the years that followed, including his Fourth Piano Concerto in G major, a Violin Concerto in D major, and his Fourth Symphony in B-flat major. Beethoven’s departure from Classical norms often troubled his listeners. When the violinist Felix Radicati failed to appreciate them, Beethoven shot back, “They are not for you, but for a later age.” Despite such statements of confidence in himself, he was clearly troubled by both his own personal circumstances and the response by some critics to his work. His behaviour was increasingly erratic during this period, including regular fights with his two brothers, arguments with close friends, and an attempt to throw a chair at Prince Lichnowsky, which caused the prince to stop paying his annual subsidy of 600 florins. Over the course of 1807, Beethoven composed some of his most famous pieces, including two symphonies and a fifth and final piano concerto. With Haydn nearing his death, Beethoven was emerging as his successor as the giant of European music, despite the naysayers who continued to critique his work on occasion in Vienna. Meanwhile, Napoleon had followed up his occupation of Vienna with a string of further military victories which extended the French Empire across much of Beethoven’s native Germany. As master of Europe, he began to place his brothers and relations on the thrones of client kingdoms, including his youngest brother Jerome who was crowned King of Westphalia, with his capital in the state of Hesse. Jerome soon invited Beethoven to become his Kapellmeister in October 1808. Beethoven was inclined to accept Jerome’s offer, having been rejected by the Burgtheater for an increase in pay to 2,400 florins a year. He was further motivated by the sense that Vienna did not appreciate his genius, a feeling which was compounded when a major concert of his in Vienna on the 22nd of December 1808 at the Theater-an-der-Wien did not live up to his exacting standards. This was despite it being the occasion of the premier of his Fifth Symphony, with its four-note opening motif consisting of three short Gs followed by a long E, one of the most recognisable motifs in musical history. On the 7th of January 1809, Beethoven accepted the offer to become Kapellmeister at Jerome’s court in Westphalia. However, he did not take up the position, and instead used it as leverage to improve his financial position in Austria. Austrian society was preparing for another war against Napoleon, but three aristocratic benefactors were sufficiently alarmed by the thought of Beethoven leaving to offer him 4,000 florins a year to stay in the Habsburg Empire. Among the three men was Archduke Rudolf, the youngest brother of Emperor Franz, who had been studying piano with Beethoven for over a year. In April 1809, with Napoleon’s armies once again at the gates of Vienna in a fresh war, Beethoven completed his Fifth Piano Concerto in E-flat major. Dedicated to Archduke Rudolf, the militaristic composition would later be called the “Emperor” Concerto, more likely inspired by Napoleon than the unimaginative Franz. On the 4th of May, as Rudolf was obliged to evacuate the capital, Beethoven completed his Piano Sonata No. 26, commonly known as Les adieux, or Farewell. At the end of the month, with Vienna yet again under French occupation, Franz Joseph Haydn died at the age of seventy-seven. Several days before Haydn’s death, the Austrian army under the Emperor’s brother Archduke Charles prevented Napoleon from crossing the Danube at the Battle of Aspern-Essling on the great plain to the northeast of Vienna, fuelling hopes in the city that Napoleon might be expelled soon. However, Napoleon won the close-fought rematch on the same ground at Wagram in July, leading to a peace treaty sealed by the marriage of Napoleon and Archduchess Marie Louise, the teenage daughter of the Austrian emperor. The second French occupation of Vienna in the space of four years left behind a devastated economy, and Beethoven’s 4,000 florins a year was at risk. Although he managed to write an overture for Wolfgang Goethe’s play Egmont performed in June 1810, Beethoven’s creative energies appear to have ebbed. The previous winter, the forty-year-old musician attempted to woo his eighteen-year-old student, Therese Malfatti, for whom he may have dedicated his Bagatelle No. 25, later known as Für Elise. It has since become one of his most popular works. In March 1811, Beethoven completed his Piano Trio No. 7, a work similar in vein to the “Emperor” Concerto and dedicated to Archduke Rudolf. While Rudolf continued to pay his share of Beethoven’s annuity, the other two members of the syndicate, Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky, were slow making payments, with the former rumoured to be on the verge of bankruptcy. In the summer of 1812, Beethoven completed his Seventh Symphony in A major, an expansive work of a martial quality, followed by his Eighth Symphony in F major, a much shorter and joyful piece distinguished by an unusually long final movement. Beethoven travelled to the spa town of Teplitz in Bohemia to be close to Antonie Brentano, an Austrian patroness of the arts who he had known for some time and had developed affections for, but who was already married. Upon his arrival at Teplitz, he wrote an impassioned letter to his “Immortal Beloved,” whose identity remained a mystery until Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon identified her as Antonie in the 1970s. Despite Beethoven’s desire to remain with Antonie, who reciprocated his love emotionally if not physically, she would soon return to Frankfurt with her husband. By the time of his parting with Antonie, Beethoven was forty-two years old. During the past decade, he had written some of his grandest and best-known compositions, including the Eroica, the Fifth Symphony, the Pastoral, the “Emperor” Concerto, and the “Appassionata” and “Kreutzer” sonatas. As he entered middle age, he began to transition to a more introverted style. In Teplitz, he met one of the giants of European culture of the day, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust, on several occasions, but despite positive first impressions, the writer considered the composer too depressive, while the composer felt that the writer was more interested in discussing the latest political developments in the aristocratic milieu. Napoleon had just invaded Russia with over half a million men in late June and for once Austria was an ally, albeit a reluctant one. While the Austrian contingent saw relatively little action on the southern front, Napoleon was drawn deep into the Russian heartland, occupying Moscow in September before being forced into an infamous winter retreat. With his reputation of invincibility shattered, Napoleon’s Austrian and Prussian allies prepared to switch sides in 1813. In addition to the departure of his “Immortal Beloved,” Beethoven was also having his fair share of personal troubles. He unsuccessfully sought to prevent his brother Nikolaus Johann’s marriage to a woman with an illegitimate child, while his patron Prince Kinsky died in November after falling from his horse, prompting Beethoven to sue the bereaved widow for the continued payment of his subsidy. With his other brother Caspar ill from tuberculosis, Beethoven persuaded him to transfer the legal guardianship of his six-year-old son, Karl, upon his death. In the summer of 1813, Vienna heard the news of the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon’s brother King Joseph of Spain at the Battle of Vitoria on the 21st of June. Beethoven was invited to write a “battle symphony,” mixing British and French patriotic songs with the sound of cannon fire and musketry. Although eviscerated by modern-day critics as one of his worst-ever compositions, Wellington’s Victory, was enthusiastically received upon its premiere alongside the Seventh Symphony at a charity concert on the 8th of December 1813, a few weeks after Napoleon had been defeated at the climactic Battle of Leipzig in eastern Germany, liberating Germany from French rule. Fuelled by the sense of optimism around him, in 1814 Beethoven was persuaded to revive his opera Fidelio, working with court librettist Georg Friedrich Treitschke to revise it. On the 11th of April, he was at the piano to premiere the “Archduke” Trio, but his hearing had deteriorated to the extent that he struggled to control his tone and soon chose to stop playing in public. When the third version of Fidelio was staged on the 23rd of May, it was received with greater acclaim than its predecessors. This success, on top of his many others over the years, ensured that when Europe’s rulers and statesmen converged on Vienna in the autumn of 1814 for a Congress which would reshape Europe politically after a decade and a half of Napoleonic domination, Beethoven was in major demand. He wrote a cantata entitled Der glorreiche Augenblick, “The Glorious Moment” to celebrate the Congress, which was performed before a distinguished audience including Tsar Alexander I of Russia and King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia on the 29th of November 1814. Four weeks later a semi-disaster occurred. As Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister and the architect of the Congress of Vienna, ushered in a new era of peace in Europe in the aftermath of Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815, Ludwig’s brother Caspar died on the 15th of November 1815, resulting in a protracted legal battle between Beethoven and Caspar’s widow, Johanna over custody of nine-year-old Karl. After accusing his sister-in-law of loose morals and neglecting the child, Beethoven was initially granted custody in January 1816. In letters to female acquaintances, Beethoven referred to Karl as his son. For much of the mid-1810s, Beethoven dedicated himself to the upbringing of his nephew while his musical output ground to a halt. It was only in 1818 that Beethoven returned to work, writing his Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, the Hammerklavier, one of the most challenging pieces in the piano repertoire. By late 1818, with Beethoven ill, deaf, and struggling to manage his household, Johanna sought to take back her son. During another round of litigation at the end of the year, Karl ran away to his mother on the 3rd of December, to the despair of his uncle. While Johanna brought the child back to Beethoven the following day, the mother and son subsequently informed the court of Beethoven’s often erratic behaviour. Beethoven responded by mobilising support from his imperial patron Archduke Rudolf, winning back custody in April 1820. In March 1819, Rudolf was appointed Archbishop of Olmütz in the modern-day Czech Republic by the Pope. Beethoven was motivated to compose a solemn mass for the Archduke’s installation scheduled for March 1820, but after writing two movements of the Missa Solemnis in 1819, he was distracted by the litigation over his nephew and realised he could not finish the composition in time. No longer restricted by a deadline and determined to create a masterpiece, Beethoven spent four years crafting the Missa, during which he took a greater interest in religion and spirituality, attracted not only by Christian beliefs but those from Ancient Egypt, India, and China. Beethoven’s interest in spirituality was also likely motivated by thoughts of his own mortality, prompted by an attack of rheumatism in 1821, the same year Napoleon died at the age of fifty-two in exile on the remote island of St Helena. When asked to write an elegy to commemorate the late emperor, Beethoven replied that he had already written the appropriate music for such an occasion, most likely referring to his Eroica symphony. Between 1820 and 1822 Beethoven composed his last three piano sonatas, Nos. 30-32. In early 1823 he finished writing his thirty-three Diabelli Variations on a waltz theme written by Viennese music publisher Antonio Diabelli. Diabelli had asked fifty composers to write one variation each to his theme as part of a charitable project, and though Beethoven initially refused to get involved, he soon appreciated that the theme had significant potential, forming the basis for his longest piano composition. Upon its publication as Beethoven’s Opus 120, it is the only one of Beethoven’s works publicly dedicated to Antonie Brentano, a woman who amongst Beethoven’s many love interests seems to have been his truest love. With the variations out of the way, Beethoven put the finishing touches to his Missa Solemnis, but with the mass to solemnise Rudolf’s consecration already having been celebrated, it was not until January 1825 that Beethoven sent the manuscript to Schott’s in Mainz for publication. The Missa Solmenis received its premiere in the Russian capital of St Petersburg on the 7th of April 1824 at a concert organised by Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, an amateur cellist and Beethoven admirer. In November 1822, Golitsyn commissioned three string quartets from Beethoven, promising to pay any sum for them, a clear of indication of the international standing of the composer in his twilight year. In the meantime, his former secretary Ferdinand Ries informed him that the London Philharmonic Society had offered him fifty pounds for a new symphony. As early as 1815, Beethoven had been coming up with short musical snippets that would eventually find their way into his Ninth Symphony. By the spring of 1824, the symphony was ready for its premiere. On the 7th of May 1824, Beethoven stood on the podium beating time alongside conductor Michael Umlauf. The orchestra began with a low buzzing drone interrupted by broken fifths on the higher strings as if players were still tuning up, the hum gradually increasing in volume until the full orchestra introduced a theme that Beethoven first jotted down in 1817. In the chorale finale, Beethoven fulfilled his teenage ambition to set Schiller’s ode “To Joy” to music. Written for four soloists and a choir accompanied by the orchestra, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy begins with an instruction to friends to cast away the gloom in favour of an uplifting melody that is known throughout the world as a celebration of humanity. By the end of the performance, Beethoven, almost completely deaf, was unaware of the thunderous applause that greeted his new composition. The alto, Caroline Unger, tapped him on the shoulder and made him turn to face the enthusiastic crowd. The Ninth Symphony is widely regarded as one of the supreme accomplishments of western Classical music, a triumphant conclusion to Beethoven’s career. In the summer of 1824, Beethoven turned his attention to fulfilling Prince Golitsyn’s commissions. Despite failing health, over the next two years, he produced three quartets dedicated to the Russian prince, No. 12 in E-flat major, No. 13 in B-flat major, and No. 15 in A minor. He had enough left within him to write two more string quartets, No. 14 in C-sharp minor, which he considered his finest composition, and No. 16 in F major. He adapted his original finale for String Quartet No. 13 which appeared as the Grosse Fuge or Great Fugue, another composition that proved to be ahead of its time. Taken together, the quartets and the fugue are regarded by modern musicologists as the pinnacle of western instrumental music. No. 14, Beethoven’s favourite, quoted a theme from his song cycle To the Distant Beloved, an indication that Antonie was still a permanent fixture in Beethoven’s thoughts during his final years. Despite briefly reconciling with his brother Johann, Beethoven’s family troubles remained with him. By late 1824 his nephew Karl had turned eighteen and dreamed of a military career, an aspiration that his uncle desperately sought to prevent being realised. Karl initially agreed to study at the Polytechnic Institute, but in the summer of 1826 he began to seek refuge with his mother before attempting suicide on the 6th of August. When Karl was discharged from hospital in late September, Johann van Beethoven invited his brother and nephew to join him at his estate of Gneixendorf in the Danube Valley. After leaving Vienna on the 28th of September with his nephew, Beethoven made the finishing touches to his String Quartet No. 16 in F major, cryptically annotating the words “Must it be?” and “It must be!” to two sets of three notes. Either unwilling to be parted from Karl or foreseeing his imminent death, Beethoven appeared reluctant to leave his brother’s house. Convinced that Beethoven was seeking to delay Karl’s interview with the army, Johann urged his guests to return to the capital. Taking an unfinished string quintet with him, Beethoven and Karl headed back in wintry conditions on the 1st of December 1826. By the time Beethoven returned to the capital on the 2nd of December he was seriously ill and put straight to bed. Dr. Andreas Ignaz Wawruch diagnosed him with pneumonia and pleurisy. Within a week, Beethoven was strong enough to write letters to friends, but by the 13th he was confined to bed again with dropsy. A week later, Wawruch was obliged to administer an abdominal tap to release more than a hundred pounds of fluid from Beethoven’s body. Over the course of December Karl showed great concern for his uncle, but had to leave to join his regiment on the 2nd of January 1827. Beethoven dedicated his String Quartet No. 14 to Karl’s regimental commander, Lieutenant Field Marshal Joseph von Stutterheim. By late January, Dr. Giovanni Malfatti, whose cousin Therese, Beethoven once courted, prescribed the patient with alcohol, perhaps recognising that there was little else that could be done. Beethoven wrote to his Mainz publisher Schott’s requesting a case of wine from his native Rhine region. By March old friends including Count Moritz Lichnowsky, Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Antonio Diabelli were calling on the dying composer. On the 23rd of March, Beethoven designated his nephew Karl as his heir in his will. When the case of wine arrived from Mainz on the 24th, Beethoven was already too ill and remarked, “Pity, it’s too late!” The end came during the afternoon of the 26th of March 1827. According to the composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner, one of two people in the room at the time, at five o’clock, a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder caused Beethoven to lift his right hand clenched into a fist for several seconds before falling back dead, aged fifty-six. On the 29th of March Beethoven’s body was buried at the Währing cemetery to the northwest of Vienna. His great admirer Franz Schubert was among the torchbearers at the funeral. In less than two years, Schubert himself was laid to rest at the same cemetery in a nearby plot. Ludwig van Beethoven is celebrated as one of the greatest composers who ever lived. From a modest background in Bonn, with assistance from aristocratic patrons, he established himself in Vienna during the early 1790s, beginning to fill the void recently left by Mozart’s death by writing music inspired by Haydn and Mozart. A piano virtuoso, he delighted the salons of Vienna with his improvisation skills and from the 1800s onwards composed some of the most revered orchestral music in the western tradition, notably the Gross Fuge, the Fidelio and his Third and Fifth Symphonies. What is most incredible about his life and career was that it was threatened by his progressive deafness and he had to overcome thoughts of killing himself when he first started to lose his ability to hear to find new methods of working. Despite these triumphs, Beethoven was romantically unfulfilled and prone to anger, causing him to channel his fury into works such as the “Appassionata” sonata. The turmoil of his personal life was compounded by a prolonged custody struggle over his nephew Karl that distracted him from his work for several years in the mid-1810s. Nevertheless, during his final decade, Beethoven was able to write some of his most ambitious compositions, including the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy finale, demonstrating that he was at the peak of his powers before illness carried him away at a still relatively young age. Many people consider him to be the greatest composer of western Classical music to have ever lived. What do you think of Ludwig van Beethoven? Was he the greatest composer in the history of western Classical music, particularly so given the personal adversity he had to overcome, or should he share that title with others like his near-contemporary Mozart? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.