The soundtrack of Beethoven’s life
“Beethoven’s music… opens up to us the kingdom of the gigantic and the immeasurable… [it] moves the lever controlling horror, fear, dread, pain and awakens that infinite longing that is the essence of Romanticism.” So wrote the author ETA Hoffmann in 1810, after falling under the spell of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 5.
This assessment might have been news to the composer. He had come of age during the Aufklärung, the age of Reason (when scepticism, rationality and an adherence to the laws of science became the west’s dominant philosophy). Yet today, as the world celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth, Beethoven can seem more a creature of the Romantics (a new wave of artists who celebrated emotion, nature and the past) than he would ever have considered himself. He was both a pioneer of his art and inescapably a child of his time.
Musical heritage
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on (probably) 16 December 1770, the eldest surviving son of Johann van Beethoven, a musician employed by the archbishop of Cologne. Ludwig’s Flemish-born grandfather, also called Ludwig, had been Kapellmeister in Bonn, head of music to the town, an influential figure of whose heritage his youthful namesake was proud.
The younger Ludwig had far less confidence in his father, though. Johann tried to turn the gifted lad into a performing prodigy; no wonder Beethoven later had a problem with authority figures attempting
