Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist who spent most of his working life in Vienna. He began within the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart and stretched it until it broke open, writing nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, sixteen string quartets, an opera and much else, much of it after he had lost his hearing. He became the model of the Romantic artist as a heroic individual, and his music has been claimed by almost every political cause since.

Beethoven was baptised in Bonn on 17 December 1770 and was probably born the day before. Bonn was the seat of the Elector of Cologne, one of the church princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and the family were court musicians of Flemish origin: his grandfather and namesake was the elector's music director, and his father, Johann, a tenor in the court chapel. Johann drank heavily and drilled his son hard, hoping to present him as a second Mozart.

His real teacher was the court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, who from about 1781 gave him Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier to study and helped publish his first piece in 1783. Beethoven became assistant organist and a viola player in the court orchestra. In 1787 he travelled to Vienna, perhaps hoping to study with Mozart, but was called home within weeks because his mother was dying. With his father declining into alcoholism, he became, still in his teens, the main support of his two younger brothers.

In November 1792 the elector sent him back to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. The lessons were not a great success, and Beethoven also took counterpoint from Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and vocal writing from Antonio Salieri. French revolutionary armies soon overran the Rhineland, the electorate vanished, and Beethoven never went home.

He made his name first as a pianist of extraordinary power and improvising skill. Aristocratic patrons, among them Prince Karl Lichnowsky and Prince Joseph Lobkowitz, gave him money, lodgings and access to their private orchestras, and he treated them with a pride few musicians had dared. His publications in the 1790s, the piano trios of Opus 1, the Pathétique Sonata and the first string quartets, showed a composer absorbing the forms of Haydn and Mozart while pushing their contrasts harder. His First Symphony was performed in 1800.

From around 1798 Beethoven noticed his hearing failing, together with constant ringing in his ears. In the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna in October 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers, never sent and found after his death, admitting that despair had brought him close to suicide and that only his art held him back. The Heiligenstadt Testament has become one of the most quoted documents in music.

What followed is often called his heroic or middle period. The Third Symphony, the Eroica, completed in 1804, was longer and more dramatic than any symphony before it. Beethoven had admired Napoleon as a champion of the ideals of the French Revolution and planned to dedicate the work to him, but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor he scratched out the name in fury. In the next few years came the Appassionata and Waldstein sonatas, the Razumovsky quartets, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos and the opera Fidelio, about a wife who rescues her husband from a political prison. The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the second a portrait of the countryside, were premiered in a single marathon concert in December 1808.

In 1809, when he was offered a post at Kassel by Napoleon's brother Jérôme, three noblemen including his pupil Archduke Rudolph agreed to pay him a lifelong annuity to stay in Vienna. It made him one of the first composers to live largely independent of a court or church post, though wartime inflation soon eroded its value. The Napoleonic Wars reached his door: during the French bombardment of Vienna that year he sheltered in a cellar, covering his ears with pillows.

In 1812, at the spa of Teplitz in Bohemia, Beethoven met Goethe, who admired his talent but found him untamed. That summer he also wrote a passionate letter to an unnamed Immortal Beloved; most scholars now think she was Antonie Brentano, a married woman, but the question is unsettled. He never married. The Seventh and Eighth Symphonies followed, and around the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to 1815 he enjoyed his greatest public popularity, with the noisy Wellington's Victory and a revised Fidelio.

His productivity then fell. After his brother Kaspar Karl died in 1815, Beethoven fought Kaspar's widow through the courts for years for custody of his nephew Karl, a struggle that exhausted him and ended badly when Karl attempted suicide in 1826. By about 1818 he was almost totally deaf, and visitors had to write their questions in conversation books, hundreds of which survive.

Beethoven's final decade produced music that puzzled many listeners in his time and has fascinated them ever since. The Hammerklavier Sonata, the last three piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations explore extremes of length, fugue and stillness. The Missa solemnis was written for Archduke Rudolph's installation as archbishop of Olomouc. The Ninth Symphony, premiered in Vienna on 7 May 1824, ended with a choral setting of Friedrich Schiller's ode To Joy, a hymn to human brotherhood; Beethoven, on stage, had to be turned round to see the applause. His late string quartets, including the Grosse Fuge, are often considered the summit of the form.

He died in Vienna on 26 March 1827, aged 56, after months of illness probably caused by liver disease; the cause of his deafness remains uncertain. An estimated ten thousand people followed his funeral procession.

Beethoven changed what music was thought to be for. Where earlier composers wrote largely for patrons and occasions, his works were heard as personal statements meant to last, and the concert hall became a place for serious listening to a canon of great works with his symphonies at its centre. His expansion of the symphony and sonata set the scale for Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, and the story of a deaf composer defying fate became a central Romantic legend.

His music was used by very different regimes and movements, from German nationalists and the Nazi state to socialists and liberal democrats. The Ode to Joy became the anthem of the Council of Europe and later of the European Union, and the Ninth Symphony was performed in Berlin in December 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Wall. Born in what is now Germany and buried in Austria, he belongs to the musical history of both, and his birthplace in Bonn is now a museum and research centre.