Beethoven was born in Bonn in December of 1770. As you can see from the
map at the beginning of this chapter, Bonn sat at the Western edge of the German-
ic lands, on the Rhine River. Those in Bonn were well-acquainted with traditions
of the Netherlands and of the French; they would be some of the first to hear of
the revolutionary ideas coming out of France in the 1780s. The area was ruled by
the Elector of Cologne. As the Kapellmeister for the Elector, Beethoven’s grandfa-
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ther held the most important musical position in Bonn; he died when Beethoven
was three years old. Beethoven’s father, Johann Beethoven, sang in the Electoral
Chapel his entire life. While he may have provided his son with music lessons at an
early stage of Ludwig’s life, it appears that Johann had given into alcoholism and
depression, especially after the death of Maria Magdalena Keverich (Johann’s wife
and Ludwig’s mother) in 1787.
Although hundreds of miles east of Vienna, the Electorate of Cologne was un-
der the jurisdiction of the Austrian Habsburg empire that was ruled from this East-
ern European city. The close ties between these lands made it convenient for the
Elector, with the support of the music-loving Count Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von
Waldstein (1762-1823), to send Beethoven to Vienna to further his music training.
Ferdinand was the youngest of an aristocratic family in Bonn. He greatly support-
ed the arts and became a patron of Beethoven. Beethoven’s first stay in Vienna in
1787 was interrupted by the death of his mother. In 1792, he returned to Vienna
for good.
Perhaps the most universally-known fact of Beethoven’s life is that he went
deaf. You can read entire books on the topic; for our present purposes, the timing
of his hearing loss is most important. It was at the end of the 1790s that Beethoven
first recognized that he was losing his hearing. By 1801, he was writing about it to
his most trusted friends. It is clear that the loss
of his hearing was an existential crisis for Bee-
thoven. During the fall of 1802, he composed a
letter to his brothers that included his last will
and testament, a document that we’ve come to
know as the “Heiligenstadt Testament” named
after the small town of Heiligenstadt, north of
the Viennese city center, where he was staying.
(To view the Testament go to https://en.wiki-
pedia.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament#/
media/File:Beethoven_Heiligenstaedter_Tes-
tament.jpg) The “Heiligenstadt Testament”
provides us insight to Beethoven’s heart and
mind. Most striking is his statement that his ex-
periences of social alienation, connected to his hearing loss, “drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I have ended my life-it was only my art that held me back.” The idea that Beethoven found in art a reason to
live suggests both his valuing of art and a certain self-awareness of what he had to
offer music. Beethoven and his physicians tried various means to counter the hear-
ing loss and improve his ability to function in society. By 1818, however, Beethoven
was completely deaf.
Beethoven had a complex personality. Although he read the most profound phi-
losophers of his day and was compelled by lofty philosophical ideals, his own writing
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was broken and his personal accounts show errors in basic math. He craved close
human relationships yet had difficulty sustaining them. By 1810, he had secured
a lifetime annuity from local noblemen, meaning that Beethoven never lacked for
money. Still, his letters—as well as the accounts of contemporaries—suggest a man
suspicious of others and preoccupied with the compensation he was receiving.