Ludwig van Beethoven _ Biography, Music, & Facts _ Britannica

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Ludwig van Beethoven

German composer
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Ludwig van Beethoven
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Category: Arts & Culture
Baptized: December 17, 1770, Bonn,

archbishopric of Cologne [Germany]
Died: March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Notable Works: “Archduke Trio” •

“Battle Symphony” • “Choral Fantasy
in C Minor” • “Christ on the...(Show
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Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major

Excerpt from Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 61, by Ludwig van
Beethoven, with a pianist playing the orchestra's part. ...(more)
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn,

archbishopric of Cologne [Germany]—died March 26, 1827,
Vienna, Austria) German composer, the predominant musical
figure in the transitional period between the Classical and
Romantic eras.
Widely regarded as the greatest composer who ever lived, Ludwig

van Beethoven dominates a period of musical history as no one
else before or since. Rooted in the Classical traditions of Joseph
Haydn and Mozart, his art reaches out to encompass the new
spirit of humanism and incipient nationalism expressed in the
works of Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, his elder
contemporaries in the world of literature; the stringently
redefined moral imperatives of Kant; and the ideals of the French
Revolution, with its passionate concern for the freedom and
dignity of the individual. He revealed more vividly than any of his
predecessors the power of music to convey a philosophy of life
without the aid of a spoken text; and in certain of his
compositions is to be found the strongest assertion of the human
will in all music, if not in all art. Though not himself a Romantic,
he became the fountainhead of much that characterized the work
of the Romantics who followed him, especially in his ideal of
program or illustrative music, which he defined in connection
with his Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony as “more an expression of
emotion than painting.” In musical form he was a considerable
innovator, widening the scope of sonata, symphony, concerto,
and quartet, while in the Ninth Symphony he combined the
worlds of vocal and instrumental music in a manner never before
attempted. His personal life was marked by a heroic struggle
against encroaching deafness, and some of his most important
works were composed during the last 10 years of his life when he
was quite unable to hear. In an age that saw the decline of court
and church patronage, he not only maintained himself from the
sale and publication of his works but also was the first musician
to receive a salary with no duties other than to compose how and
when he felt inclined.
Life and work
The early years
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Ludwig van Beethoven.
Beethoven was the eldest surviving child of Johann and Maria

Magdalena van Beethoven. The family was Flemish in origin and
can be traced back to Malines. It was Beethoven’s grandfather
who had first settled in Bonn when he became a singer in the
choir of the archbishop-elector of Cologne; he eventually rose to
become Kappellmeister. His son Johann was also a singer in the
electoral choir; thus, like most 18th-century musicians,
Beethoven was born into the profession. Though at first quite
prosperous, the Beethoven family became steadily poorer with
the death of his grandfather in 1773 and the decline of his father
into alcoholism. By age 11 Beethoven had to leave school; at 18 he
was the breadwinner of the family.
Having observed in his eldest son the signs of a talent for the
piano, Johann tried to make Ludwig a child prodigy like Mozart
but did not succeed. It was not until his adolescence that
Beethoven began to attract mild attention.
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When in 1780 Joseph II became sole ruler of the Holy Roman

Empire, he appointed his brother Maximilian Francis as adjutant
and successor-designate to the archbishop-elector of Cologne.
Under Maximilian’s rule, Bonn was transformed from a minor
provincial town into a thriving and cultured capital city. A liberal
Roman Catholic, he endowed Bonn with a university, limited the
power of his own clergy, and opened the city to the full tide of the
German literary renaissance associated with Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and the young Goethe and
Schiller. A sign of the times was the nomination as court organist
of Christian Gottlob Neefe, a Protestant from Saxony, who
became Beethoven’s teacher. Although somewhat limited as a
musician, Neefe was nonetheless a man of high ideals and wide
culture, a man of letters as well as a composer of songs and light

theatrical pieces; and it was to be through Neefe that Beethoven
in 1783 would have his first extant composition (Nine Variations
on a March by Dressler) published at Mannheim. By June 1782
Beethoven had become Neefe’s assistant as court organist.
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In 1783 he was also appointed continuo player to the Bonn opera.

By 1787 he had made such progress that Maximilian Francis,
archbishop-elector since 1784, was persuaded to send him to
Vienna to study with Mozart. The visit was cut short when, after
a short time, Beethoven received the news of his mother’s death.
According to tradition, Mozart was highly impressed with
Beethoven’s powers of improvisation and told some friends that
“this young man will make a great name for himself in the
world”; no reliable account of Beethoven’s first trip to Vienna
survives, however.
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For the next five years, Beethoven remained at Bonn. To his

other court duties was added that of playing viola in the theatre
orchestra; and, although the archbishop for the time being
showed him no further mark of special favour, he was beginning
to make valuable acquaintances. Sometime previously he had
come to know the widow of the chancellor, Joseph von Breuning,
and she engaged him as music teacher to two of her four
children. From then on, the Breunings’ house became for him a
second home, far more congenial than his own. Through Mme
von Breuning, Beethoven acquired a number of wealthy pupils.
His most useful social contact came in 1788 with the arrival in
Bonn of Ferdinand, Graf (count) von Waldstein, a member of the
highest Viennese aristocracy and a music lover. Waldstein

became a member of the Breuning circle, where he heard
Beethoven play and at once became his devoted admirer. At a
fancy dress ball given in 1790, the ballet music, according to the
Almanach de Gotha (a journal chronicling the social activities of
the aristocracy), had been composed by the count, but it was
generally known that Beethoven had written it for him. The same
year saw the death of the emperor Joseph II. Through Waldstein
again, Beethoven was invited to compose a funeral ode for
soloists, chorus, and orchestra, but the scheduled performance
was canceled because the wind players found certain passages
too difficult. He then added to it a complementary piece
celebrating the accession of Joseph’s brother Leopold II. There is
no record that either was ever performed until the end of the
19th century, when the manuscripts were rediscovered in Vienna
and pronounced authentic by Johannes Brahms. But in 1790
another great composer had seen and admired them: that year
Haydn, passing through Bonn on his way to London, was feted
by the elector and his musical establishment; when shown
Beethoven’s score, he was sufficiently impressed by it to offer to
take Beethoven as a pupil when he returned from London.
Beethoven accepted Haydn’s offer and in the autumn of 1792,
while the armies of the French Revolution were storming into the
Rhineland provinces, Beethoven left Bonn, never to return. The
album that he took with him (preserved in the Beethoven-Haus
in Bonn) indicates the wide circle of his acquaintances and
friends in Bonn. The most prophetic of the entries, written
shortly after Mozart’s death, runs:
The spirit of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her
beloved. With the inexhaustible Haydn she found repose but no
occupation. With the help of unremitting labour you shall receive
Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands. (Waldstein)
The compositions belonging to the years at Bonn—excluding

those probably begun at Bonn but revised and completed in
Vienna—are of more interest to the Beethoven student than to
the ordinary music lover. They show the influences in which his
art was rooted as well as the natural difficulties that he had to

overcome and that his early training was inadequate to remedy.
Three piano sonatas written in 1783 demonstrate that, musically,
Bonn was an outpost of Mannheim, the cradle of the modern
orchestra in Germany, and the nursery of a musical style that was
to make a vital contribution to the classical symphony. But, at the
time of Beethoven’s childhood, the Mannheim school was already
in decline. The once famous orchestra was, in effect, dissolved
after the war of 1778 between Austria and Prussia. The
Mannheim style had degenerated into mannerism; this particular
influence is reflected in a preoccupation with extremes of piano
(soft) and forte (loud), often deployed in contradiction to the
musical phrasing, that may be found in Beethoven’s early sonatas
and in much else written by him at that time—which is not
surprising, since the symphonies of later Mannheim composers
formed the staple fare of the Bonn court orchestra. But what was
only an occasional effect for Mozart and others influenced by the
Mannheim composers was to remain a fundamental element for
Beethoven. The sudden pianos, the unexpected outbursts, the
wide leaping arpeggio figures with concluding explosive effects
(known as “Mannheim rockets”)—all these are central to
Beethoven’s musical personality and were to help him toward the
liberation of instrumental music from its dependence on vocal
style. Beethoven may indeed be described as the last and finest
flower on the Mannheim tree.
Early influences of Ludwig van Beethoven
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Like other composers of his generation, Beethoven was subject to

the influence of popular music and of folk music, influences
particularly strong in the Waldstein ballet music of 1790 and in
several of his early songs and unison choruses. Heavy Rhineland

dance rhythms can be found in many of his mature
compositions; but he could assimilate other local idioms as well
—Italian, French, Slavic, and even Celtic. Although never a
nationalist or folk composer in the 20th-century sense, he often
allowed the unusual contours of folk melody to lead him away
from traditional harmonic procedure; moreover, that he resorts
to a folklike idiom in setting Schiller’s covertly nationalist text in
the Ninth Symphony accords well with nationalist practices of
the later 19th century.
French music impinged on him from two main directions: from

Mannheim, whose artistic links with Paris had always been
strong, and from the Bonn Nationaltheater, which relied for its
repertory mainly on comic operas translated from the French. In
fashionable Bonn society, sympathy with the French Revolution
was very strong, and the flavour of the French Revolutionary
march is present in many of Beethoven’s symphonic allegros. The
jigging rhythms to be found in several of his scherzos are also
clearly of French provenance.
Like all pianists of the late 18th century, Beethoven was raised on
the sonatas and teachings of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the
chief exponent of “expressive” music at a time when music was
regarded as the art of pleasing sounds. These sonatas, with their
quirks of rhythms and harmony and their occasional wordless
recitative, were equally familiar to Haydn and Mozart; but in
Beethoven they evoked a much readier response, not only for
reasons of temperament but also because of the intellectual
climate in which he himself was reared. The favourite literary
fare of the Breunings and their friends was associated with the
Sturm und Drang, a reaction against the rationalism of the early
18th century, an exaltation of feeling and instinct over reason. Its
gospel was enshrined in Goethe’s early novel The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), the language of which finds an echo in
certain of Beethoven’s letters and especially in the “Heiligenstadt
Testament” (see below).
In such a movement music took on a new importance as an art of

feeling. The sharp conflicts of mood that characterize the sonatas
of C.P.E. Bach appear much more powerfully again in Beethoven;
to Beethoven, “feeling” was as important in practice as it was in
theory to his master Neefe, who proclaimed it the only condition
of artistic value (moreover, for those who claim Beethoven as a
Romantic, this emphasis on feeling is paramount). His literary
world—he read widely and voraciously despite a formal
education that in arithmetic had not carried him as far as the
multiplication table—was rooted in the German classics, above

all Goethe and Schiller.
The Bonn compositions of most enduring interest date, as might

be expected, from the last years: a Rondino and an Octet, for
wind instruments, composed in 1792, probably for the elector’s
harmonie (wind band); a Trio in G Major for Flute, Bassoon,
and Piano (1791); and the two cantatas. The songs, which were
doubtless written under Neefe’s inspiration, show no great
feeling for the solo voice. This is strange in one whose father and
grandfather both had been singers, but it remained a limitation
that pursued Beethoven throughout his career. Of particular
interest are 24 variations on a theme by Vincenzo Righini, an
Italian composer, which, like the String Trio in E-flat Major,
Opus 3, Beethoven revised and then published at a much later
date. These variations, representing a compendium of
Beethoven’s piano technique, for a long time were to serve as the
mainstay of his repertory in the salons of Vienna.
Vienna
Before Beethoven left Bonn, he had acquired a very considerable

reputation in northwest Germany as a piano virtuoso, with a
particular talent for extemporization. Mozart had been one of the
finest improvisers of his age; by all accounts Beethoven
surpassed him. In the age of sensibility he could move an
audience to tears more easily than any other pianist of the time.
For this reason especially he was taken up by the Viennese
aristocracy almost from the moment he set foot in Vienna.
Waldstein had, of course, prepared the way with his talk of a
successor to Mozart; and it is significant that Beethoven’s earliest
patrons in Vienna were Gottfried, Baron van Swieten and Karl,
Fürst (prince) von Lichnowsky, who alone among the aristocracy
had remained Mozart’s supporters until his death. Perhaps, as
well, Beethoven traded on the “van” in his name—which was
widely if wrongly understood to denote noble lineage—to gain
easier access to aristocratic circles. In the Vienna of the 1790s,
music had become more and more the favourite pastime of a
cultured aristocracy, for whom politics under the reactionary
emperor Francis II were now discreditable and dangerous and
who had, moreover, never shown a like appreciation of any of the
other fine arts. Many played instruments themselves well enough
to be able to take their place beside professionals. Probably at no
other time and in no other city was there such a high standard of
amateur and semiprofessional music-making as in the Vienna of
Beethoven’s day.
As a composer, however, Beethoven still had many technical

problems to overcome, and it soon became clear that Haydn was
not the best person to help him. Outwardly their relations
remained cordial; but Beethoven soon began taking extra lessons
in secret. One of his teachers was the organist of St. Stephen’s
Cathedral, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, a learned
contrapuntist of the old school who equipped him with the
comprehensive technique that he needed. He also studied vocal
composition with Antonio Salieri, the imperial Kappellmeister.
By 1794, when Haydn had left for his second visit to London,
there was no longer any question of Beethoven’s returning to
Bonn, which was then in French hands. The elector himself had
left, and consequently Beethoven’s subsidy came to an end. But
he had no need to worry for, apart from what he was able to earn
by teaching and playing, he received free board and lodgings
from Prince Lichnowsky. The year 1795 marked Beethoven’s first
public appearance as a pianist in Vienna. He played a concerto
(No. 2, Opus 19) of his own and one by Mozart and also took part
in a benefit concert for Haydn. More important still, his Three
Trios for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Opus 1, were published with a
long list of aristocratic subscribers. In the next three years he
undertook concert tours in Berlin and Prague and might have
traveled more widely still had the international situation
permitted. In 1800 he launched a public concert on the grand
scale, in which one of his own piano concerti, the Septet (Opus
20), and the First Symphony were given, together with works by
Haydn and Mozart. The event contributed a great deal to the
spread of Beethoven’s fame abroad.
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Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major

First movement, “Adagio molto—Allegro con brio,” of Beethoven's
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Opus 21; from a recording by the Vienna…
...(more)
The turn of the century concluded what is generally referred to as

Beethoven’s first period, although some usefully extend it to the
summer of 1802, when he wrote the “Heilgenstadt Testament”
(see below); during this period his art stayed mainly within the
bounds of 18th-century technique and ideas. Most of his
published works during that time are for the piano, alone or with
other instruments, important exceptions being the String Trio in
E-flat Major, Opus 3; the Three String Trios, Opus 9; the Six
String Quartets, Opus 18; and the First Symphony. Beethoven
extended his range slowly and methodically, but he was still a

piano composer par excellence. Load Next Page
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4/7/24, 11:06 PM Ludwig van Beethoven | Biography, Music, & Facts | Britannica

Home keyboard_arrow_right Entertainment & Pop Culture keyboard_arrow_right Music, Classical

Arts & Culture

Ludwig van Beethoven

print Print verified Cite share Share message Feedback more_vert

Written by Julian Medforth Budden , Raymond L. Knapp See All

toc Table of Contents

Ludwig van Beethoven

See all media

Category: Arts & Culture

Baptized: December 17, 1770, Bonn,

Died: March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria

Notable Works: “Archduke Trio” •

See all related content →

What is Ludwig van Beethoven known for? expand_more

What did Ludwig van Beethoven compose? expand_more

Was Ludwig van Beethoven deaf? expand_more

How did Ludwig van Beethoven change music? expand_more

Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major

Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn,

Widely regarded as the greatest composer who ever lived, Ludwig

Life and work

The early years

Ludwig van Beethoven.

Beethoven was the eldest surviving child of Johann and Maria

Composers & Their Music

German music throughout history

When in 1780 Joseph II became sole ruler of the Holy Roman

culture, a man of letters as well as a composer of songs and light

In 1783 he was also appointed continuo player to the Bonn opera.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive

For the next five years, Beethoven remained at Bonn. To his

highest Viennese aristocracy and a music lover. Waldstein

The compositions belonging to the years at Bonn—excluding

art was rooted as well as the natural difficulties that he had to

Early influences of Ludwig van Beethoven

How Ludwig van Beethoven revolutionized music

Like other composers of his generation, Beethoven was subject to

several of his early songs and unison choruses. Heavy Rhineland

French music impinged on him from two main directions: from

In such a movement music took on a new importance as an art of

multiplication table—was rooted in the German classics, above

The Bonn compositions of most enduring interest date, as might

Before Beethoven left Bonn, he had acquired a very considerable

As a composer, however, Beethoven still had many technical

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major

The turn of the century concluded what is generally referred to as

extended his range slowly and methodically, but he was still a

Information from your device can be used to personalize your ad experience.

Do not sell or share my personal information.

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Ludwig van Beethoven _ Biography, Music, & Facts _ Britannica

Ludwig van Beethoven _ Biography, Music, & Facts _ Britannica