LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

A Baby With a Paper Trail Problem

I was baptised on 17 December 1770 in Bonn, and since nobody wrote down my actual birthday, I usually say it was the 16th and hope no one checks. My father Johann was a tenor and a music teacher, and my grandfather, also named Ludwig van Beethoven, had been Kapellmeister in Bonn, so music was simply the family business. I studied with the court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, and by 1784 I held my first permanent court job as an organist. Home life was not easy, though, and when my mother died in July 1787 I had to grow up a good deal faster than I would have liked.

Moving to the Big City and Making a Racket

In November 1792 I moved to Vienna for good, and a month later, on 12 December, I started lessons with Joseph Haydn. I also studied counterpoint with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Italian vocal writing with Antonio Salieri, because I wanted to learn from everyone who had something to teach. My breakthrough came as a pianist and composer whose playing audiences found startlingly bold and dramatic. The piano sonata we call the "Pathétique" came out in 1799, and the title was the publisher's idea, though I liked it very much.

Dinner With Princes, Mostly Mine

Vienna in those days was a city where music was supported by wealthy nobles, and I was lucky to find several of them. Prince Karl Alois Lichnowsky, Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz and Baron Gottfried van Swieten all backed me, and so did Archduke Rudolf, who was also my pupil. With friends like these I could live as a composer without being tied to one court, which suited a man of my temper very well. I didn't always behave like the perfect guest, but they kept inviting me back, and I like to think the music was the reason.

The Greatest Hits, Politely Arranged

Let me start at the piano, where the Appassionata storms along with a fire that never quite lets you rest, and the Moonlight Sonata, which I finished in 1801, begins with a slow, hushed glow. That nickname, by the way, was added long after I died, so please don't blame me for the moonlight. Für Elise is the little piece everyone seems to know, and I never published it, because it only turned up in 1867 when the scholar Ludwig Nohl found it, and the story goes that nobody is sure who Elise was. Then there are the big orchestral works: Symphony No 5 with its famous knocking opening, Symphony No 6 with its walks through the countryside, Symphony No 9 with a choir that arrives like a crowd breaking into song, and the Violin Concerto in D Major, where the soloist sings above the orchestra for the whole piece.

The Ears Give Notice

The cruelest joke of my life was that a composer began to lose his hearing, and I said it started in 1798. I hid it as long as I could, because a musician who can't hear is not the sort of story people like to tell about someone they want to hire. In October 1802, in a village called Heiligenstadt, I wrote a long letter to my brothers about my despair, and I never sent it. Yet I decided to go on, because there was still too much music in my head to give up.

Conversation by Notebook

As my deafness grew, I needed conversation books by 1818, where visitors wrote down what they wanted to say and I answered out loud. I also spent years in a bitter legal fight over my nephew Karl, whose father, my brother Kaspar Karl, died in 1815, and I was confirmed as his guardian in 1816 and again on appeal in 1820. On 7 May 1824, at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, my Ninth Symphony was performed for the first time, with Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the finale, and I was almost completely deaf by then. I died in Vienna on 26 March 1827, aged 56, after several months of illness.

Still Getting Invited to Parties

Long after I'm gone, people still play my symphonies, sonatas and concertos, and they do it in concert halls, in living rooms and on headphones. I showed that music could carry the whole of a person's struggle, not only pleasant evenings for the nobility. Composers who came after me had to reckon with that, and many of them felt my shadow whether they liked it or not. It still astonishes me that a deaf man in Vienna ended up with listeners all over the world.

What I'd Like You to Take Home

If you take one thing from my music, I hope it is the feeling that hard times can be lived through and even turned into something beautiful. You don't need to know any theory or the right moment to clap, because all I ask is that you listen with an open mind. Let the stormy pieces make you stormy, and let the gentle ones calm you down. And if, at the end of the Ninth, you find yourself wanting to sing along, then I have done my job.