There was revolution in the arts, too, with Romanticism already well established in literature, led in Germany by Goethe (whom Beethoven hugely admired but did not meet until 1812) and in Britain by Wordsworth and the Lakeland poets. It was a time of turmoil around the world – the US was only a little more than a decade old, while the reverberations of the 1789 French Revolution, and Napoleon’s rise to power in its wake, were being felt across Europe, and the beginnings of the industrial revolution were creating massive social changes of their own. ![]() Napoleon, whom Beethoven greatly admired – until he declared himself emperor. When he made his public debut as a pianist, in 1795, it was playing what is now known as his Second Piano Concerto (actually written before the first). In Vienna, he studied briefly with Haydn, but really began to establish himself as a pianist rather than a composer, although he was already attracting a number of wealthy sponsors, as he was able to do for much of his life. And, as his father’s alcoholism got steadily worse, young Ludwig increasingly took on the responsibility of supporting his family through teaching and playing the viola (getting to know the opera repertory in the process). He started formal composition and piano lessons at 10, and even published some pieces in his early teens, but little of what he wrote between 1785 and his move to Vienna in 1792 was heard in his lifetime. He was born in Bonn, where his father (a tenor in service of the archbishop-elector of Cologne) gave Ludwig his earliest music lessons. If the great composers of those eras were often able to transcend such constraints to create music that was elegant and profoundly personal, Beethoven was determined to take that idea of creative independence much farther. ![]() ![]() His life …īefore Beethoven, composers mostly wrote music to order, whether for the church or rich patrons (as JS Bach did) or as employees of European noble courts (as Haydn and Mozart were for much of their creative lives). Such familiar works hardly hint at his significance or the magnitude and breadth of his achievement, let alone explain why he is such a pivotal figure in the history of what we generally regard as “classical” music, and how it developed from the baroque of the 17th century to the modernism of the 20th. The music by which he’s known to the wider world – whether it’s his Fifth Symphony, with its V for Victory motto that became such a symbol of hope for the allies during the second world war, the setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy that ends his Ninth, or piano works such as the Moonlight Sonata and the bagatelle Für Elise, known to generations of aspiring pianists – tells only a small part of the Beethoven story.
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