Ludwig van Beethoven

Musical Youth

Like so many other composers of his time, Beethoven came from a musical family: his grandfather and father were musicians in the service of the Electorate of Cologne, whose court sat in Bonn. Beethoven was already an accomplished organist by the age of eleven, wrote his first compositions not long after and played in civic orchestras as a teenager. He relocated to Vienna aged 21, initially to learn from the many composers based in the city, and made it his home. He worked as a pianist – by all accounts something of a virtuoso – before embarking on a full-time composing career.

Money Matters

The formal patronage system had been make-or-break for the Viennese composers of the generation above Beethoven: Haydn had held a court post, and Mozart’s inability to find one had plunged him into poverty. By Beethoven’s time, this system was declining, and new mechanisms were enabling composers to make a living. Beethoven profited from informal private patronage by playing at salons in aristocratic homes, and eventually a group of noblemen granted him an allowance to provide him with a secure income, in order to dissuade him from leaving Vienna. By now, there were also freelance opportunities for composers to make money from the publication of their works and Beethoven engaged actively with publishers, in Austria and abroad.

Personal Challenges

By 1802, when Beethoven was only in his early thirties, it became apparent that he was losing his hearing. This plunged him into a significant period of crisis and he sent his brothers a heartfelt document, known as ‘The Heiligenstadt Testament’, in which he expressed his despair. If Beethoven was unlucky in his health, he was also unlucky in love. It is known that he sought many romantic attachments, but with women who were for various reasons unavailable, including one whom he addressed in a passionate letter as his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Beethoven suffered regular depressive episodes, and became almost entirely deaf by 1818, but mustered the resilience to set these feelings aside and keep composing.

Reputation

Beethoven’s greatness was already apparent to audiences during his lifetime, even though they sometimes found his music challenging. His fame was international: the Ninth Symphony was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London. After Beethoven’s death, 10,000 people lined the streets to pay their respects as his funeral cortège passed through Vienna. His reputation would intimidate his successors: many later composers felt the ‘shadow of Beethoven’ looming above them, particularly as they tried their own hands at writing symphonies or piano sonatas.

Beethoven was profoundly influenced by the music of Mozart, hearing many of his works and performing them himself as a young man in Bonn. Whether the two men’s paths crossed in Vienna is not categorically known. Beethoven studied with Haydn on his arrival in the city, but only briefly. He pursued more rigorous studies in counterpoint and fugue with the admired composer and theorist Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and also took lessons periodically with Antonio Salieri. Beethoven admired the music of his contemporary Luigi Cherubini, though Cherubini was sometimes rather less complimentary about his own.

Instrumental and Chamber Works

Beethoven’s talent as a pianist naturally led him to focus upon solo works for the keyboard in his early career, although he soon embraced all musical genres. Youthful piano works such as the ‘Pathétique’ and ‘Moonlight’ Sonatas, written around the turn of the 19th century, showed an inventive approach to the genre as well as immense melodic imagination. Later sonatas such as ‘Hammerklavier’ show him moving closer to the Romantic style with its emotional turbulence. Beethoven was a ground-breaking composer of chamber music – his late string quartets, which broke free of formal conventions, are regarded as among the most significant in the repertoire.

Symphonies

Beethoven is widely regarded as one of the pre-eminent masters of the symphonic genre. His nine symphonies are still celebrated over two centuries on for their melodic qualities and formal innovations. Some are characterised by a heroic tone, such as the Third Symphony (the ‘Eroica’, initially dedicated to Napoleon) and the Fifth Symphony, whose striking first theme is often said to represent fate knocking on a door. The Sixth Symphony, the ‘Pastoral’, is programmatic in nature. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was ground-breaking in its use of voices and idealistic in its setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, and has regularly been appropriated for political purposes.

Other Works

Beethoven was broad-ranging as a composer, tackling all major genres, although he wrote only a single opera, Fidelio, which addresses the themes of freedom and justice as well as love. His output also includes celebrated concertos for piano and violin, and a choral work on an epic scale, the Missa solemnis. Over the course of his career, Beethoven moved away from the elegant clarity and balance of the Classical style, pushing stylistically towards the greater emotional intensity, harmonic richness and formal freedom of the emerging Romantic style.

Beethoven’s works have always been at the core of the LSO’s repertoire, under many conductors. The Orchestra has also committed significant recordings of the composer’s works to disc, most notably Bernard Haitink’s set of the complete symphonies on LSO Live, recorded in 2005–06. Beethoven’s music featured at the LSO’s inaugural concert at the Queen’s Hall on 9 June 1904, alongside music by Wagner, Bach, Mozart, Liszt and Elgar. The Finale of the Fifth Symphony also opened our Centenary Concert at the Barbican in 2004, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Beethoven was a well-connected composer, interacting with many contemporaries who sought to profit from the rich musical life on offer in Vienna. Johann Nepomuk Hummel was a leading light in the city as a piano virtuoso and made arrangements of Beethoven’s music. The two men were friendly but had periodic fallings out. Schubert, 27 years Beethoven’s junior, overlapped with him in Vienna: he absorbed some influence from the older composer, though often found his works puzzling. Beethoven is also thought to have met the younger Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini when he visited the city. The two men’s outputs are often held up as representing two extremely different, contrasting poles of early 19th-century music: Rossini’s southern, crowd-pleasing and full of sparkling joie de vivre, Beethoven’s northern, serious and philosophical.