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| Ludwig van Beethoven-For the kids who might be interested
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827) was a German composer of Classical music, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest of composers, and his reputation inspired – and in some cases intimidated – composers, musicians, and audiences who were to come after him.
Life and work
Main article: Beethoven: life and work
Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, to Johann van Beethoven (1740-1792), of Flemish origins, and Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven (1744-1787). Until relatively recently 16 December was shown in many reference works as Beethoven's "date of birth", since it is known he was baptised on 17 December and children at that time were generally baptised the day after their birth. However modern scholarship declines to rely on such assumptions.
Beethoven's first music teacher was his father, who worked as a musician in the Electoral court at Bonn, but was also an alcoholic who beat him and unsuccessfully attempted to exhibit him as a child prodigy, like Mozart. However, Beethoven's talent was soon noticed by others. He was given instruction and employment by Christian Gottlob Neefe, as well as financial sponsorship by the Prince-Elector. Beethoven's mother died when he was 17, and for several years he was responsible for raising his two younger brothers.
Beethoven moved to Vienna in 1792, where he studied with Joseph Haydn and other teachers. He quickly established a reputation as a piano virtuoso, and more slowly as a composer. He settled into the career pattern he would follow for the remainder of his life: rather than working for the church or a noble court (as most composers before him had done), he was a freelancer, supporting himself with public performances, sales of his works, and stipends from noblemen who recognized his ability.
Beethoven's career as a composer is usually divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods.
In the Early period, he is seen as emulating his great predecessors Haydn and Mozart, at the same time exploring new directions and gradually expanding the scope and ambition of his work. Some important pieces from the Early period are the first and second symphonies, the first six string quartets, the first two piano concertos, and the first twenty piano sonatas, including the famous "Pathétique" and "Moonlight".
The Middle period began shortly after Beethoven's personal crisis centering around deafness, and is noted for large-scale works expressing heroism and struggle; these include many of the most famous works of classical music. The Middle period works include six symphonies (Nos. 3 – 8), the last three piano concertos and his only violin concerto, five string quartets (Nos. 7 – 11), many piano sonatas (including the "Waldstein", and "Appassionata"), and Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio.
Beethoven's Late period began around 1816 and lasted until Beethoven ceased to compose in 1826. The late works are greatly admired for their intellectual depth and their intense, highly personal expression. They include the Ninth Symphony (the "Choral"), the Missa Solemnis, the last six string quartets and the last five piano sonatas.
Beethoven's personal life was troubled. Around age 28 he started to become deaf, a calamity which led him for some time to contemplate suicide. He was attracted to unattainable (married or aristocratic) women, whom he idealized; he never married. A period of low productivity from about 1812 to 1816 is thought by some scholars to have been the result of depression, resulting from Beethoven's realization that he would never marry. Beethoven quarreled, often bitterly, with his relatives and others, and frequently behaved badly to other people. He moved often from dwelling to dwelling, and had strange personal habits such as wearing filthy clothing while washing compulsively. He often had financial troubles.
It is common for listeners to perceive an echo of Beethoven's life in his music, which often depicts struggle followed by triumph. This description is often applied to Beethoven's creation of masterpieces in the face of his severe personal difficulties.
Beethoven was often in poor health, and in 1826 his health took a drastic turn for the worse. His death in the following year is usually attributed to liver disease.
Beethoven is considered by many to be the greatest artist who has ever lived. In addition to amazing natural talent, he had the great fortune to live in the 19th century as civilization was coming to an end through the adoption of new attitudes and values. While the seeds of social dissolution that would sprout 50 or 100 years later were being firmly planted, at the same time the traditions that gave birth to civilization were still known. This perspective on tradition contrasted with decline provided the ability to summarize and capture the history of the noble creating spirit.
Just as the late Greeks produced a flurry of great works and then almost immediately perished, so too was the clustering of Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche part of the final but definitive record that there once stood a brilliant, capable, and creative civilization that became spiritually poisoned and rotten inside, assuring their ultimate regression into cultureless barbarism.
Beethoven's mature work is defined by what Spengler correctly identifies as the Faustian spirit: a complete feeling of freedom from boundaries and limits, and a belief in infinite space and possibility.
To understand Beethoven, you must first understand how music stands as an art form, rather than the entertainment product it has been reduced to today. A composer uses a particular form, such as the classical form, as his canvas, upon which notes and their relationship become the substance through which he communicates. A writer chooses words for his considered ideas, but a composer expresses his ideas abstractly through tones. It must also be said that the audiences of the classical era were educated in the art of music, knowing which key modulations to expect at different intervals of the performance - a night at the symphony was an artistic pursuit, not something bored people did for amusement.
Despite the abstract communication of music that can be thought of as its own language, the initiated understand it quite well with no textual description provided. The fate motif used in Beethoven's fifth symphony, the cycle of life (struggle, contemplation, action, despair, triumph) in the ninth, or the heroic and noble steadfastness of the seventh are unmistakable to those who know how to understand the ideas expressed within the music.
The same spirit lives on in those of us who are aware of the world and reject "progress" and "enlightenment" because both are ignorant and destructive. Instead we prefer intelligent, sane, healthy ideas, and take note when a great man has stood before us and left us with works that will speak for eternity.
"He was an artist, but also a man, a man in every sense, in the highest sense. Because he shut himself off from the world, they called him hostile; and callous, because he shunned feelings... Excess of feeling avoids feelings. He fled the world because he did not find, in the whole compass of his loving nature, a weapon with which to resist it. He withdrew from his fellow men after he had given them everything and had received nothing in return. He remained alone because he found no second self. But until his death he preserved a human heart for all men, a father's heart for his own people, the whole world."
-- Austrian dramatist Hans Grillpartzer speaking at Beethoven's funeral |
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