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Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Ludwig van Beethoven is arguably the defining figure in the history of Western music.
Life and Music
- Virtually all romanticised notions of what a classical artist is - or should be - are derived from the Beethoven model.
- Those who heard him play his own music were invariably stunned into submission.
- Beethoven's musical instincts somehow survived the bullyboy regime enforced by his alcoholic father, which nonetheless left him with a lack of social etiquette that often set him on a collision course with even his most devoted patrons and sponsors.
- The majority of those who followed him, Beethoven was a godlike figure. Mendelssohn's Second Symphony, 'Hymn of Praise', could not have been written without Beethoven's exemplar.
- Wagner saw the 'Choral' Symphony as the ultimate fusion of symphonic and poetic expression.
- Works as contrasted in style as the symphonies of Berlioz and Schumann share a common ancestor in Beethoven.
- Brahms was so inhibited by what he described as Beethoven's 'giant's feet' trampling along behind him that he spent an amazing 20 years, on and off, refining his First Symphony before allowing it to be aired publicly.
- If 19th-century composers found Beethoven's middle-period works an endless source of inspiration, his late masterpieces, most particularly the ground-breaking last four string quartets, left them baffled.
- Bela Bartok composed the first of his string quartets in 1908 that seriously took up the challenge set by Beethoven's painfully introspective final musings.
- Occasionally someone would grasp the full implications of Beethoven's work, perhaps most famously in the cast of ETA Hoffman, whose report on the premiere of the Fifth Symphony in the July 1810 edition of the Allgemeine Zeitung set the pattern: "More than any other of his works, [the Fifth] unfolds Beethoven's romantic spirit in a climax rising straight to the end, and carries the listener away irresistibly into the wondrous, spiritual world of the infinite."
Did you know?
Even though Beethoven was deaf, he could compose the music in his head and then write it down on paper, and when he lo
