New Illustrated Lives of Great Composers: Ludwig van Beethoven

By Simon Ferris

The New Illustrated Lives of Great Composers: Ludwig van Beethoven brings to life the works, the key performances and the personal story of one of the world’s greatest composers with rich illustrations.

One of the most celebrated and influential composers of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven was a child prodigy, who, At 21, moved to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. He would subsequently create a monumental body of work including 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, 1 violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, the Missa Solemnis and the opera Fidelio.

Yet Beethoven was a troubled man, often intolerant of the intrusions of day-to-day life upon his work and a victim of both chronic abdominal pain and encroaching deafness. While his gradual loss of hearing did not affect his ability to compose, it did eventually caused him to abstain from performing and conducting. At his death in 1827 he was already a legendary figure.

This illustrated biography is the best way to uncover the tragic life of one the most talented musicians to have ever walked the earth; see the man himself, the places where he lived and the people who swirled around him. This is an essential read for any classical music fan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787590762

Book preview

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1. Bonn: childhood

Beethoven’s birth house.

In the late 18th century, Germany was a patchwork quilt of ancient, independent Kleinstaaten (‘little states’). These were as various as they were numerous and comprised ecclesiastical principalities, secular principalities, kingdoms, Duchies, Margraviates, Landgraviates, Free Imperial City-States and Imperial abbeys, all forming part of the northern territories of the Holy Roman Empire. At its height, this had stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic, but by Beethoven’s time it was entering the final decades of its 1000-year history, its power reduced almost to nothing by centuries of accommodation to the interests of minor local potentates. In effect the ‘empire’ in northern Europe was merely a loose confederation of German-speaking states, and the Holy Roman Emperor to whom they nominally pledged allegiance was little more than a figurehead. In the words of the Enlightenment Swiss historian Johannes von Müller, it all amounted to ‘an ill-cohering, clumsy mass’.

Beethoven’s corner of this tangled geopolitical landscape was the Rhineland town of Bonn. At the time of his birth this was a provincial town of 10,000 inhabitants, which enjoyed the distinction of being the official seat of the Archbishop-Elector of the ecclesiastical principality of Cologne, one of the seven traditional ‘electors’ of the Holy Roman Empire.

Archbishop Maximilian Friedrich held the elector post from 1761 to 1784, presiding over an ecclesiastical court not immune to the attractions of the idle life, and not impervious to the charms of mixed company (he is known to have kept a mistress – Countess Caroline von Satzenhofen, Abbess of Vilich – and is also known to have shared her with his first minister, the able and wily Kaspar Anton von Belderbusch).

Naturally enough for an establishment that placed social diversion at a premium, music in various forms featured prominently at his court. An account in the Bonnischer Anzeiger listing the activities staged to celebrate the Archbishop’s 59th birthday in May 1767 gives a good flavour of what was on offer:

A map of Germany, Hungary, Transylvania and the Swiss cantons, 1736.

1. Early in the morning three rounds from the cannon on the city walls

2. The court and public graciously permitted to kiss His Transparency’s hand

3. Solemn high mass

4. Grand dinner in public… accompanied by exquisite Tafelmusik

5. After dinner a numerously attended assembly

6. A serenata composed especially for this most joyful day and a comic opera in the palace theatre

7. Supper of 130 covers

8. Bal masqué until 5am

Palace records tell us that overseeing the musical events throughout the day was the court Kapellmeister, Ludwig van Beethoven, the composer’s grandfather.

Old Ludwig van Beethoven was a highly-accomplished musician, and an impressive individual (alongside his successful musical career he managed a profitable side enterprise as a wine wholesaler). An excellent keyboardist and singer, he had been invited in 1733 by Maximilian Friedrich’s predecessor, Clemens August, to come to Bonn from his native Brabant (he was baptised Lodewyjk van Beethoven in the town of Mechelen, which is now in the Flemish region of modern-day Belgium). His initial appointment was as ‘Court Musician’ on a salary of 400 florins per annum. That same year he married a young Bonn woman, Maria Josepha Poll, and by 1761 his star had risen sufficiently for him to be promoted to Kapellmeister.

The Kapellmeister role brought much prestige. It entailed managing all aspects of the music-making and overseeing the company of musicians employed at court. In many cases there would be the added responsibility of producing new compositions for court events, but if the elder Ludwig did compose, nothing of his work has survived. It was an oftendifficult role (with many vexations arising from the fragile temperaments of the musicians under his charge) but it did allow Ludwig a means of providing gainful employment for his ne’erdo-well only surviving child, Johann.

Maximilian Friedrich, Archbishop Elector of Cologne.

Johann van Beethoven, the composer’s father, looms large in the early part of this story. Beethoven’s boyhood friend Franz Wegeler described him as ‘not particularly distinguished for either his intellect or his morals’, and later biographers have gone much further: Maynard Solomon writes of Beethoven’s ‘all-too-painful knowledge of his father as wastrel, second-rate musician, toady, possible police agent, drunkard and hapless extortionist’. To which might be added that the composer in adulthood chose effectively not to acknowledge his father’s existence, and showed reluctance up until his final months to quash the widely-published rumour that he was not Johann van Beethoven’s son at all, but instead the illegitimate offspring of a Prussian King (either Frederick the Great or Friedrich William II, depending upon which source you read).

Born in 1739 or 1740, Johann van Beethoven inherited some of his father’s talent, but all of his mother’s fondness for the bottle (she spent the final years of her life institutionalised in Cologne for alcoholism). Johann received instruction in music from his father and entered the choir at court as a boy treble in 1752, eventually proceeding to a paid post in his early twenties. He supplemented his modest salary with additional income from teaching (he was a respectable, if not brilliant, keyboardist and singer) and in 1767 felt himself sufficiently advanced in the world to propose marriage to a young woman from the nearby town of Ehrenbreitstein.

Maria Magdalena Leym (née Keverich) was the daughter of the court cook to the Elector of Trier. At sixteen she had married Johann Georg Leym, one of the Elector’s personal valets, but his early death left her a widow before her nineteenth birthday. Inauspiciously, both the bride’s mother and the groom’s father opposed the marriage, but still the wedding went ahead and, after a short honeymoon, the couple moved into lodgings in Bonn, taking the garden wing of a house at 515 Bonngasse.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the composer’s grandfather. Portrait by Leopold Radoux.

The street housed a little enclave of court musicians and servants, the names of several of whom will recur in these pages. So, in the front part of the Beethovens’ house lived the Salomon family; Grandfather Ludwig moved into a flat at No. 386; next door to him at No. 387 lived the Ries family; and at the end of the road was Nikolaus Simrock, a horn player in the court orchestra and founder of the famous publishing company.

Their first child (a son, Ludwig Maria) was baptised in April 1769 but lived only six days, the second such loss for Maria Magdalena (a son born to her first marriage had also died in infancy). Her ill fortune was to change though. A year later she gave birth to another son, and this time the child survived.

Ludwig van Beethoven, named after his grandfather, was baptized in the church of St Remigius on December 17, 1770. Despite the survival of church records the precise date of his birth cannot be firmly established. The convention in Catholic Germany was for a child to be baptised within one or two days of birth, so Ludwig would probably have been born on either December 15 or 16.

Johann and Maria Magdalena van Beethoven, the composer’s parents.

Of Beethoven’s earliest years few records remain, but we do have the testimony of Franz Wegeler who writes that ‘Little Ludwig clung with great affection to [his] grandfather… and… retained the most vivid early impression of him’. Those vivid impressions didn’t have long to form: old Ludwig suffered an incapacitating stroke in January 1773 and died on Christmas Eve, a few days after his grandson’s third birthday. In later life Beethoven would speak proudly and in reverential tones about the Kapellmeister grandfather whose painted portrait was one of the few permanent fixtures in his ever-changing household arrangements. But in reality, the lives of the two Ludwigs overlapped by very little.

With money inherited from old Ludwig’s estate the family moved in 1774 into more spacious lodgings on Dreieckplatz. There, in early April, another son was born, Caspar Anton Carl. Within a couple of years the family relocated again, this time to more modest accommodation in a cheaper part of town, a downsizing reflecting declining financial fortunes. The move took them to the house known as Zum Walfisch, owned by the baker Fischer, who lived there with his wife and young family. For Johann it was a return to lodgings in which he had lived with his father before he was married; for Ludwig it was to be to a house in which he would spend most of his childhood, and one in which he was to be joined by a second brother, Nikolaus Johann, who was born in October 1776.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s early years were not happy ones. He attended the Bonn Tirocinium (elementary school) until the age of 10 at which, according to a contemporary, ‘he learned absolutely nothing’ (a comment given some credence by the astonishing fact that Beethoven demonstrated in adulthood the inability to perform even the simplest multiplication tasks, instead writing numbers out in columns as many times as they had to be multiplied so that he could get to the result by addition). At school he also showed some signs of what now would be read as neglect. His school fellow Joseph Wurzer later wrote that: ‘Apparently his mother was already dead at this time [she wasn’t], for Ludwig van Beethoven was distinguished by uncleanliness, negligence, etc.’ If his appearance was grubby, it wasn’t solely for the want of a mother’s attention (the great 19th-century United States biographer, Alexander Wheelock Thayer¹ suggests that Maria Magdalena’s ‘care in externals was not always of the best’) but as much his own lack of concern about such matters. Occasionally friends took him to task about it. For instance, Cäcilie Fischer, the baker’s daughter, once admonished him with ‘How dirty you’re looking again! You ought to keep yourself properly clean’, to which he somewhat insouciantly replied, ‘What difference does that make? When I become a gentleman nobody will care’.

Beethoven may not have promised much as a young scholar, but his musical gifts fast became impossible to ignore. When the time came to progress from the Tirocinium to the Gymnasium, he was instead withdrawn from school to continue a more intense programme of musical study with his father.

Johann van Beethoven, who taught Ludwig keyboard and violin from the age of four or five, was a brutal, cruel teacher who bullied and berated his son, and was often violent – there are just too many accounts and from too many different sources for this to be in any doubt. So we have a school friend writing in later life that it was ‘by using violence that Beethoven’s father began his musical studies’. Then there’s the testimony of Johann Windeck, who had a memory of seeing ‘little Ludwig... standing in front of the clavier and weeping’.

All of which leads us to question what was the conduct of, wife and mother, Maria Magdalena? It seems that she also led a largely unhappy life in the Beethoven household. Only a few years into her marriage she advised young Cäcilie Fischer not to consider embarking on one of her own:

If you want to take my good advice, remain single… For what is marriage? A little joy, but then a chain of sorrows.

Nonetheless, she does appear to have held the household and family together, albeit in a slightly joyless and long-suffering way. And despite there being no record of her ever intervening on her eldest son’s behalf, Ludwig in later life had only kind words to say about