(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.
Biography by: Honey Fox
Submitted On : 08.25.00
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