Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on the banks of the Rhine, into a household shadowed at once by music and hardship. His grandfather had been court Kapellmeister, his father a hard-drinking tenor eager to mold this precocious child into a second Mozart. As a boy Beethoven bore the family's livelihood at the keyboard, and under that harshness grew a stubborn, sensitive nature that would never bow—a temper that would later be both his burden and his strength.

As a young man he set out for Vienna, then the music capital of Europe. He first dazzled its salons as a pianist, winning aristocratic favor through improvisation and formidable technique, then turned his ambition toward composition. In the wake of masters like Haydn, he grew swiftly from a brilliant performer into a creator with a voice of his own, a fiercer, more personal emotion beginning to stir within Classical form.

Just as his career was rising, fate dealt him its cruelest blow: his hearing slowly slipped away. For a musician this was all but a sentence. In despair he wrote the Heiligenstadt letter to his brothers—never sent in his lifetime—confessing thoughts of death, yet choosing at last to live for his art. Out of that abyss he entered his heroic period: the Eroica, the Fifth, the Pastoral followed one another, and music spoke for the first time so directly of struggle, suffering, and transcendence.

As his deafness deepened, he withdrew his contact with the world onto the pages of 'conversation books,' and, worn down by a custody suit over his nephew, fell for a time into silence. Yet that silence did not confine him; it drove him toward a more inward, more expansive late period. Nearly wholly deaf, he completed the Missa Solemnis and wrote the Ninth Symphony, bringing the human voice and Schiller's Ode to Joy into the symphony—on its premiere night, he could not hear the thunderous applause behind him and had to be turned to face it.

In 1827 he died in Vienna; the funeral crowd is said to have numbered in the tens of thousands. Beethoven's significance far exceeds the immortal works he composed: he raised the composer from a servant's station to an independent artist, made the symphony a vessel for thought and conviction, and proved through his own fate that a man may attain the highest dignity in the deepest misfortune. He who 'seized Fate by the throat' has been revered ever since as the Great Composer, one of the wellsprings of Romanticism and of Western music as a whole.