Beethoven

Beethoven was, and remains today, an influential figure in the history of classical music. Perhaps no other composer in history wrote music of such inspiring power and expressiveness. His influence on the last 150 years of music is unequalled. a genius he was.He was the first musician to link the classical period of 18th-century and the novel birth of Romanticism. Beethoven’s absolute step forward in the world of music came in his instrumental work, not forgetting his symphonies. In contrast to his forerunner Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom composing music seemed natural, Beethoven strived to make his work flawless.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany on December 16, 1770. His mother died while he was a teenager and his father was very abusive and a crazy alcoholic. Beethoven came from a very musical family; his grandfather a conductor, and his father played and taught piano and violin. From a very young age, Beethoven was a perfectionist. He saw his world as “all or nothing,” If something he was working on wasn’t absolutely perfect, he would feel he was a total failure. There wasn’t room for any compromise.

He began to realize that he was losing his hearing when he was 28 and he couldn’t hear the church bells ringing. Some people have said that his terrible temper was really his frustration with his music as he became more and more deaf. In 1802 Beethoven had encountered a terrible tragedy, realizing that the hearing problems he had noticed over the years were incurable and were sure to get worse. By the time he was 50, he was completely deaf. As time went on, Beethoven learned how to cope with his disability, like cutting off the legs of the piano so that he could feel the sounds in the floor as he played. Once he learned how to handle this, Beethoven began to write his greatest works. He would rework his musical compositions for years until they were perfect, totaling to nine symphonies and thirty-two piano sonatas in his lifetime.