A passionate musician. A troubled soul. A desperate lover.
From his traumatic childhood to his premature death, Ludwig van Beethoven was a legendary musician who suffered intensely in his tumultuous life. This December marks the month of his 250th birthday. In the past 250 years, Beethoven’s work contributed not only to his own fame, but also to cultures across the world. After all, who doesn’t recognize the da-da-da-daaa motif? In this article, I hope to bring light to some of Beethoven’s most enduring accomplishments and reflect upon his tortured existence.
Beethoven was born in December 1770 in Bonn, Germany. He was also born to a musical world dominated by Classical-era composers like Haydn, Beethoven’s future teacher, and Mozart, Europe’s supreme musician. This had two effects on Beethoven’s trajectory. First, Beethoven’s father, Johann van Beethoven, saw how brilliant of a composer Mozart was and wanted the same for his son. He began teaching Ludwig music early in his childhood and, being an alcoholic, often subjected poor Ludwig to verbal abuse and drunken beatings. This frustrating childhood experience would forever affect Beethoven and violently influence his works.
Second, when Ludwig moved to Vienna to study under Haydn and continue his compositions as a young man, he inherited a musical style defined by precise rhythms, simple melodies, and balanced expression. This was the style of the Classical era, which, having largely coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, reflected the importance of human rationality. While the Classical era produced elegant masterpieces, it restricted artists to narrow expectations that prevented them from fully expressing human emotions, most likely because the expression of emotion was seen as contrary to the Enlightenment-esque exercise of reason. Beethoven was a very emotional composer.
At first, he mostly followed the Classical-era paradigm (and this can be seen with his earlier, more temperate works), but began to stray from it later on in his life with his explosive energy, disruptive rhythms, and moving melodies. He effectively shook the foundation of the Classical era and redefined the meaning of being human, pioneering the era of Romanticism—the counterculture to the Age of Enlightenment and the Classical era—and paving the path for creative minds like Liszt, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky to cultivate truly sublime art.
Throughout his life, Beethoven was severely misunderstood. He was an antisocial drinker with an angry face and unkempt hair who scratched musical notes on the walls of his bedroom. When he became deaf, he only became all the more morose. He never married, and he had no children. Understandably, Beethoven earned a reputation as an unpleasant man with an irritable temper. In reality, however, Beethoven was a musician with a benevolent heart whose feelings of lovelessness and isolation from deafness hardened his features and worsened his outside temperament. Beethoven strove to articulate this through both music and writing. In his music, the emotional tension that built up inside him would explode on his scores as violent chords and hurried rhythms, such as those present in the second movement of his Ninth Symphony and the first movement of his Fifth Symphony. These musical elements deviated outrageously from Classical-era expectations.
In his writing, Beethoven contemplated often about love and fate. Although he never had any truly long-term relationships, he addressed a series of letters to an individual he affectionately called his “Immortal Beloved.” In a letter to his brothers Carl and Johann, he wrote about his infuriating struggles with deafness, occasional suicidal thoughts, and hope that “the world may be reconciled to [him] after [his] death.” Beethoven ended that letter tenderly with the request, “do not wholly forget me when I am dead; I deserve this from you, for during my lifetime I was thinking of you often and of ways to make you happy—please be so.” Beethoven was a turbulent man, but he had a very generous heart. Today, even though Beethoven deserved better in his life, we can be thankful for Beethoven’s misery, for it was this misery that spawned his emotionally touching masterpieces and powerfully enduring legacy.
Beethoven was also one of the world’s most passionate champions of freedom and social harmony. When he was writing his third symphony, Beethoven looked up to Napoleon Bonaparte for his ideals of liberty and his battles against Europe’s monarchs. He had the intention of naming this work the “Napoleonic Symphony” in Napoleon’s honor. However, when Beethoven learned that Napoleon had crowned himself as emperor of France, he became so exasperated that he erased Napoleon’s name from the musical score with so much fury that he teared right through the paper. Napoleon had betrayed Beethoven’s high opinion, and Beethoven remained staunchly attached to his ideals.
In another instance, it is theorized that when he was writing his Symphony No. 5 (the one with the da-da-da-daaa), Beethoven used the French term for liberty, “la liberté,” as inspiration for his short-short-short-long sequence (just sound out the syllables of “la liberté”), which persists until the defiantly cheerful fourth movement of the symphony. Beethoven effectively used his music as a powerful form of political subversion in conservative, monarchical Vienna. Moreover, because this symphony embodied triumph and freedom– the Allies used Symphony No. 5 as a communication of victory in the Second World War by tapping the short-short-short-long sequence followed by the letter “V” in Morse code.
Near the end of his life, Beethoven composed his Symphony No. 9, an epic hour-long piece that ended with a chorus and his famous “Ode to Joy.” He composed this masterpiece to express his sincere hope for a world cultivated by joyous inhabitants living together in unity and consonance. Beethoven was already entirely deaf by the time he had written this. It is said that during the symphony’s premier, due to his loss of hearing, Beethoven was several bars off in the score and continued to conduct even after the orchestra had finished playing the last movement. Finally, someone stopped his conducting and turned him around to reveal an overjoyed audience blowing kisses and giving standing ovations. Today, the European Union uses Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as its anthem for its ideals of social harmony.
Beethoven is now exalted as one of the world’s finest musicians, if not the finest. For a quarter of a millennium, his music has inspired artistic expression, politics, and pop culture. From the comfort and COVID-inflicted containment of our own homes, I encourage everyone to discover some of Beethoven’s awe-inspiring works and give them a listen. They convey the tones of isolation, frustration, and hope that have become so emblematic of pandemic life.
Ludwig, happy 250th birthday. I hope you continue to rest in peace—the peace that you could never have in life.
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