1770–1827 · Austria · Classical
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer, pianist and conductor, the third and last of the Viennese classics after Haydn and Mozart. He lost most of his hearing as an adult but kept composing, and his music — from short pieces to the Ninth Symphony — remains among the most performed in the world.
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on 16 December 1770 and baptised there the next day. His father, Johann van Beethoven, sang tenor in the court chapel, while his mother, Maria Magdalena, was the daughter of a court chef in Koblenz; his parents had married in 1767. The composer's grandfather, also named Ludwig van Beethoven, had moved to Bonn from Mechelen in the Southern Netherlands (now Belgium) and risen in the same chapel from singer to Kapellmeister, so music ran in the family.
His father hoped to raise a second Mozart and began teaching him harpsichord and violin himself, giving him his first public performance in Cologne in 1778. Ludwig never turned into the prodigy his father wanted, so the boy was handed over to colleagues from the chapel, one of whom taught him the organ and another the violin.
In 1782 the organist and composer Christian Gottlob Neefe arrived in Bonn and quickly recognised the talent in the twelve-year-old Ludwig. He introduced his pupil to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, to Handel's music, and to the works of Haydn and Mozart. Thanks to Neefe, Beethoven's first published piece appeared — variations on a march by Dressler — while the boy was already working as assistant to the court organist.
After his father's death the family fell into poverty and Ludwig had to leave school early, though he taught himself Latin, Italian and French and read widely; among his favourite authors were Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller. During these Bonn years he began composing without rushing to publish — three childhood sonatas and a handful of songs, including "Marmotte", survive from this period.
In 1787 Beethoven visited Vienna for the first time. Hearing him improvise, Mozart remarked to those present that this young man would one day make the world talk about him. The lessons never began, though: word came that his mother was ill, and Ludwig hurried back to Bonn. She died on 17 July 1787, and the seventeen-year-old became head of the family, taking on the care of his younger brothers; he joined the court orchestra as a violist, where the operas of Gluck and Mozart made a particularly strong impression on him.
In 1789, wanting to continue his education, Beethoven began attending lectures at the university just as news of the revolution in France reached Bonn, and he wrote a "Song of the Free Man" of his own. A few years later Haydn stopped in Bonn on his way back from England and spoke approvingly of the young musician's compositions; in the autumn of 1792, shortly before Beethoven left Bonn, the two met again, and Haydn, recognising his talent, agreed to take him on as a pupil.
Once in Vienna, Beethoven began studying with Haydn, but the lessons quickly disappointed them both: Ludwig felt his teacher paid too little attention to his work, while Haydn himself was unsettled by his pupil's bold views and by melodies that struck him as gloomy for the time. Haydn soon left for England and handed Beethoven over to the theorist Albrechtsberger, and later the composer chose Antonio Salieri as his own mentor.
Within his first years in Vienna, Beethoven had already earned a reputation as a virtuoso pianist: he boldly used the extreme registers of the keyboard at a time when players stayed mostly in the middle range, made wide use of the pedal, and favoured massive chords — effectively creating a piano style far removed from the delicate manner of earlier harpsichordists. That style can be heard in Sonata No. 8, which he himself titled "Pathetique", and in No. 14, later nicknamed the "Moonlight" by the poet Rellstab — a name that really only fits the first movement, yet stuck to the whole work.
In his first decade in Vienna, Beethoven produced twenty piano sonatas, three piano concertos, eight violin sonatas, quartets and other chamber pieces, an oratorio built around Christ's night on the Mount of Olives, a ballet on the myth of Prometheus, and his First and Second Symphonies — works that sold well and brought him both fame and income.
In 1796 Beethoven began to notice the first signs of hearing loss, as tinnitus, an inflammation of the inner ear that causes ringing in the ears, developed. On his doctors' advice, he withdrew for a while to the small town of Heiligenstadt, but the quiet brought him no relief, and he came to understand that his deafness was incurable. In these difficult days he wrote the letter later known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he admitted that he had come close to taking his own life.
His friend J. N. Malzel, a mechanic who invented the metronome, made him ear trumpets, now kept in the Beethoven House museum in Bonn; Ludwig used them alongside the so-called conversation books, in which friends wrote down their remarks and he answered aloud or in writing. It was in Heiligenstadt that Beethoven began work on his new Third Symphony, which he would soon call the "Eroica".
When Beethoven was thirty-four, Napoleon declared himself emperor, and the composer abandoned his plan to dedicate his Third Symphony to him — the crossed-out dedication survives on the title page of the manuscript. The symphony was given the title "Heroic" instead.
As his deafness deepened Beethoven left home less and less, yet these were the years in which he produced one famous work after another. At the same time he was working on his only opera, "Fidelio" — success came only in 1814, when it was staged in Vienna, then in Prague, where the composer Weber conducted it, and finally in Berlin.
After 1812 Beethoven wrote less for a while, but three years on he returned to work with his old intensity: these years brought the piano sonatas from No. 28 through No. 32, two cello sonatas, quartets and the song cycle "To the Distant Beloved", along with arrangements of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Russian and Ukrainian folk tunes. But the most significant creations of these final years were his two largest-scale works, the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony with its choral finale.
The Ninth Symphony was first performed in 1824, and the audience gave the composer a long ovation — by then almost completely deaf, he stood with his back to the hall and heard nothing, until one of the singers turned him around to face the crowd waving handkerchiefs and hats.
Beethoven died in Vienna on 26 March 1827. More than twenty thousand people followed his coffin, and at the cemetery Luigi Cherubini's Requiem was performed along with a speech written by the poet Franz Grillparzer; in 1888 his remains were reburied at the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Beethoven wrote in nearly every genre of his time — from operas and choral works to symphonies, concertos and chamber music — but keyboard works hold a special place in his output, since he was himself a virtuoso pianist and wrote constantly for his own instrument. He is regarded as a key figure in the shift from classicism to romanticism, and the gap between his early works, still close to Haydn and Mozart, and his later ones, far bolder in harmony and form, is audible even without special training. The site collects excerpts from his sonatas, concertos, chamber ensembles and songs with piano, which are convenient to work through movement by movement.
For solo piano there are movements from Sonatas No. 1, 5, 6, 8 "Pathetique", 14 "Moonlight", 17, 19, 20, 23 "Appassionata", 24, 25, 27 and 32, the piece "Fur Elise", a minuet, a set of seven variations, a set of six variations, a prelude and a rondo a capriccio — ranging from intermediate to advanced, so a student can stay with this one composer for a long time, moving gradually from piece to piece.
A separate layer is his songs with piano set to German texts: "Das Blumchen Wunderhold", "Gottes Macht und Vorsehung", "Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur", "Mailied", "Busslied" and others; the piano part in these is usually simpler than in the sonatas, which suits players who sing and accompany themselves at once. The ensemble pieces include a piano trio, a sonata for piano and horn, violin sonatas, movements from a string quartet, romances for orchestra, an aria from the opera "Fidelio", and a choral arrangement of the "Ode to Joy" theme from the Ninth Symphony.
A good place to start is with movements where the melody and texture are clearest at an intermediate level — the choral "Ode to Joy" or the first movement of the "Pathetique" Sonata, for instance — before moving on to movements from Sonata No. 17 and more demanding pages such as the first movement of Sonata No. 5. This order lets a player get used to Beethoven's texture gradually — from a simple melody with accompaniment to the denser, almost orchestral piano writing of his later works — before tackling a whole sonata at once.