Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptised on 17 December 1770 in Bonn, in the Catholic parish of St Remigius; his date of birth has not been recorded, although 16 December is often given. His grandfather Ludwig was Kapellmeister to the Elector of Cologne and his father Johann a singer in the court chapel. Family life was by tradition difficult; he found support with the Von Breuning family.

His father taught him intensively. From 1780 or 1781 Christian Gottlob Neefe became his main teacher; under his guidance he played, among other things, from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and from 1784 he was a paid assistant organist. Elector Maximilian Franz supported him and helped with his move to Vienna in 1792.

In Vienna Beethoven studied with Joseph Haydn and then with, among others, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri. He made his name as a pianist and improviser in the salons of the nobility. His first major publications were the piano trios Op. 1 (1795); his First Symphony premiered in 1800 and his first string quartets appeared in 1801.

From about 1798 his hearing deteriorated. In October 1802 he wrote an unsent letter to his brothers at Heiligenstadt about his despair and his decision to carry on working. A period of larger-scale works followed: the Eroica (1803–1804), the opera Fidelio (1805), the violin concerto and, in 1808, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.

By about 1818 he was almost completely deaf; visitors wrote their questions in 'conversation books'. Even so he wrote the Missa solemnis (1819–1823), the Ninth Symphony (1824) and the late string quartets (1824–1826), works with a freer form. The finale of the Ninth sets Schiller's poem 'An die Freude' (1785) for soloists and chorus.

Beethoven lived in the age of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Bonn had an enlightened circle around the Elector; Vienna, residence of the Habsburg emperor, was occupied by French troops in 1805 and 1809. According to his pupil Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven withdrew the dedication of the Eroica to Napoleon after Napoleon had himself crowned emperor.

After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) the Habsburg monarchy was ruled by Metternich, with censorship and police surveillance. Musical life shifted from court and church to salons, concert halls and publishers. Beethoven lived largely on commissions, publications and concerts; in those years Rossini's operas were very popular in Vienna.

Beethoven worked for a circle of patrons, including Prince Lichnowsky, Prince Lobkowitz and Archduke Rudolph. When Jérôme Bonaparte offered him a post in Kassel in 1808, Archduke Rudolph and the Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky granted him an annuity of 4,000 florins in 1809, on condition that he stay in Vienna. He also earned money from publications and concerts.

His music changed the expectations of audiences and composers. The symphony became a larger, more dramatic genre and his quartets and sonatas became objects of study. In 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann counted him among the Romantic composers. Part of his late work, such as the Grosse Fuge (Op. 133), was found difficult by his contemporaries.

Beethoven died on 26 March 1827 in Vienna after a long illness. An estimated ten to thirty thousand people attended the funeral on 29 March. The autopsy found a severely shrunken liver. A study of locks of hair in 2023 pointed to a hereditary risk of liver disease and a hepatitis B infection, but gave no clear explanation for his deafness.

In 1972 the Council of Europe chose the melody of the finale of the Ninth Symphony, in an arrangement by Herbert von Karajan, as the European anthem; in 1985 the European Community, the predecessor of the European Union, adopted it too. It is an instrumental melody without official words. The nineteenth-century Beethoven cult gave his life an idealised image, which biographers examine critically.