Ludwig van Beethoven born Bonn, baptized 17 December 1770; died Vienna, 26 March 1827.
He studied first with his father, Johann, a singer and instrumentalist
in the service of the Elector of Cologne at Bonn, but mainly with C.G.
Neefe, court organist. At 11 ½ he was able to deputize for
Neefe; at 12 he had some music published. In 1787 he went to Vienna,
but quickly returned on hearing that his mother was dying. Five years
later he went back to Vienna, where he settled. He pursued his studies,
first with Haydn, but there was some clash of temperaments and
Beethoven studied too with Schenk, Albrechtsberger and Salieri. Until
1794 he was supported by the Elector at Bonn but he found patrons among
the music-loving Viennese aristocracy and soon enjoyed success as a
piano virtuoso, playing at private houses or palaces rather than in
public. His public debut was in 1795; about the same time his first
important publications appeared, three piano trios op.l and three piano
sonatas op.2. As a pianist, it was reported, he had fire, brilliance
and fantasy as well as depth of feeling. It is naturally in the piano
sonatas, writing for his own instrument, that he is at his most
original in this period; the Pathetique belongs to 1799, the Moonlight
('Sonata quasi una fantasia') to 1801, and these represent only the
most obvious innovations in style and emotional content. These years
also saw the composition of his first three piano concertos, his first
two symphonies and a set of six string quartets op.l8.
1802, however, was a year of crisis for Beethoven, with his realization
that the impaired hearing he had noticed for some time was incurable
and sure to worsen. That autumn, at a village outside Vienna,
Heiligenstadt, he wrote a will-like document, addressed to his two
brothers, describing his bitter unhappiness over his affliction in
terms suggesting that he thought death was near. But he came through
with his determination strengthened and entered a new creative phase,
generally called his 'middle period'. It is characterized by a heroic
tone, evident in the Eroica Symphony (no.3, originally to have been
dedicated not to a noble patron but to Napoleon), in Symphony no.5,
where the sombre mood of the c Minor first movement ('Fate knocking on
the door') ultimately yields to a triumphant C Major finale with
piccolo, trombones and percussion added to the orchestra, and in his
opera Fidelio. Here the heroic theme is made explicit by the story, in
which (in the post-French Revolution 'rescue opera' tradition) a wife
saves her imprisoned husband from murder at the hands of his oppressive
political enemy. The three string quartets of this period, op.59, are
similarly heroic in scale: the first, lasting some 45 minutes, is
conceived with great breadth, and it too embodies a sense of triumph as
the intense f Minor Adagio gives way to a jubilant finale in the major
embodying (at the request of the dedicatee, Count Razumovsky) a Russian
folk melody.
Fidelio, unsuccessful at its premiere, was twice revised by Beethoven
and his librettists and successful in its final version of 1814. Here
there is more emphasis on the moral force of the story. It deals not
only with freedom and justice, and heroism, but also with married love,
and in the character of the heroine Leonore, Beethoven's lofty,
idealized image of womanhood is to be seen. He did not find it in real
life he fell in love several times, usually with aristocratic pupils
(some of them married), and each time was either rejected or saw that
the woman did not match his ideals. In 1812, however, he wrote a
passionate love-letter to an 'Eternally Beloved' (probably Antonie
Brentano, a Viennese married to a Frankfurt businessman), but probably
the letter was never sent.
With his powerful and expansive middle-period works, which include the
Pastoral Symphony (no.6, conjuring up his feelings about the
countryside, which he loved), Symphony no.7 and Symphony no. 8, Piano
Concertos nos.4 (a lyrical work) and 5 (the noble and brilliant
Emperor) and the Violin Concerto, as well as more chamber works and
piano sonatas (such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata) Beethoven
was firmly established as the greatest composer of his time. His
piano-playing career had finished in 1808 (a charity appearance in 1814
was a disaster because of his deafness). That year he had considered
leaving Vienna for a secure post in Germany, but three Viennese
noblemen had banded together to provide him with a steady income and he
remained there, although the plan foundered in the ensuing Napoleonic
wars in which his patrons suffered and the value of Austrian money
declined.
The years after 1812 were relatively unproductive. He seems to have
been seriously depressed, by his deafness and the resulting isolation,
by the failure of his marital hopes and (from 1815) by anxieties over
the custodianship of the son of his late brother, which involved him in
legal actions. But he came out of these trials to write his profoundest
music, which surely reflects something of what he had been through.
There are seven piano sonatas in this, his 'late period', including the
turbulent Hammerklavier op.106, with its dynamic writing and its harsh,
rebarbative fugue, and op.110, which also has fugues and much eccentric
writing at the instrument's extremes of compass; there is a great Mass
and a Choral Symphony, no.9 in d Minor, where the extended
variation-finale is a setting for soloists and chorus of Schiller's Ode
to Joy; and there is a group of string quartets, music on a new plane
of spiritual depth, with their exalted ideas, abrupt contrasts and
emotional intensity. The traditional four-movement scheme and
conventional forms are discarded in favour of designs of six or seven
movements, some fugal, some akin to variations (these forms especially
attracted him in his late years), some song-like, some martial, one
even like a chorale prelude. For Beethoven, the act of composition had
always been a struggle, as the tortuous scrawls of his sketchbooks
show; in these late works the sense of agonizing effort is a part of
the music.
Musical taste in Vienna had changed during the first decades of the
19th century; the public were chiefly interested in light Italian opera
(especially Rossini) and easygoing chamber music and songs, to suit the
prevalent bourgeois taste. Yet the Viennese were conscious of
Beethoven's greatness: they applauded the Choral Symphony even though,
understandably, they found it difficuit, and though baffled by the late
quartets they sensed their extraordinary visionary qualities. His
reputation went far beyond Vienna: the late Mass was first heard in St.
Petersburg, and the initial commission that produced the Choral
Symphony had come from the Philharmonic Society of London. When, early
in 1827, he died, 10,000 are said to have attended the funeral. He had
become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike
composers of the preceding generation, he had never been a purveyor of
music to the nobility he had lived into the age - indeed helped create
it - of the artist as hero and the property of mankind at large.
