Beethoven

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.