What was Beethoven like?
By: Noah Bradley
Tags: Beethoven, Biography, Classical Music, History, Music

Ludwig van Beethoven (Detail) by Joseph Willibrord Mähler, 1804–5.

Short Biography

Beethoven was born on or around the 16th of December 1778 in Bonn, to a failed alcoholic father and a dry cook’s daughter. His father Johann, would beat him heavily for mistakes on the piano, but also sometimes out of animosity.

After gaining a notable reputation in his native Germany, in 1792, he went to Vienna to study composition with Haydn, Salieri, and Albrechtsberger.

Beethoven experienced success in Vienna, supplicating some of his income as a teacher of aristocratic piano students.

Upon his growing deafness through tinnitus, he hoped of recovery by moving to the countryside away from all the pulse of the city. Realising he wasn’t going to get better, he wrote a suicide note but evidently did not go through with it.

Upon the death of his brother, Kaspar, he started and eventually won a legal battle for the custody of his nephew, Carl, against his “evil” sister in law.

By now, his deafness had caught up with him completely.

In 1826 Beethoven had a series of arguments with Carl about his barring him from military service, Carl went to shoot himself at the ruins of Baden, but botched it, leaving a scar to his temple. Beethoven relented, allowing him to go to war.

Not long after Beethoven developed pains in the liver, likely as a result of cirrhosis. On the 26th of March, 1827, bedridden, he received news of a gift of 12 bottles of wine from his publisher, he responded: “Pity, pity- too late”.

His Character

When staying in Baden in 1820, Beethoven got lost on one of his typical long walks. Whilst peering through restaurant and apartment windows to ascertain his location, he was arrested by the local police. This was as they suspected him of being a tramp, on account of his clothing; which was dirty, tattered and smelly. Presumably, the incident happened away from Vienna, and in the absence of his friends, as they would “not uncommonly” exchange his old clothes for new ones overnight, leading to a somewhat cleaner appearance. Such was reflected in the manner of his lodgings: when Rossini met him in 1822, he described them as “a disordered and dirty attic” with a ceiling that “showed crevices through which the rain poured down in streams”. This is not to mention the contents; called “furniture topped with plates carrying last night’s dinner”, and of course the infamous “unemptied chamber pot”. He would also change his apartments regularly; never quite settling in one place.

Beethoven, despite the care to which they afforded him, did not get on with his friends. He was notoriously difficult for his strong paranoia of betrayal. He was also known for his temper: the incident of his rejecting of bad eggs (to the housekeeper to which he had hitherto said “Only the pure of heart can make good soup”) by throwing the uncooked rest of the batch at her individually, comes to mind, or perhaps when he upturned a bowl of knödel broth over a lippy waiter.

Beethoven, though not unkind, failed to empathise or connect with others: he simply lacked sensitivity to their wishes as he could not understand them. At the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, Fifth Symphony, Choral Fantasy, and the replaying of the Mass in C major and a few other shorter pieces, his patron and friend, the Prince von Lobkowitz wrote: “There we sat, in the most bitter cold, from half-past six until half-past ten, and were reminded of the maxim that one may well have too much of a good thing.” Beethoven did not understand what issue his audience could have with an evening full of such delight, failing to discern the concentration barrier. His friendships, already not ideal, did not benefit from this quality.

Given his lack of direct empathy, you might assume that he was romantically lacking. To the contrary: on his death, the famous “Immortal Beloved” letter was found in his estate. The identity of the woman in question is subject to debate, so I shall not burden you with void hypothesis. It reads as follows: “Even in bed my thought yearn to you, my Immortal Beloved, here and there joyfully, then again sadly, awaiting from fate, whether it will listen to us. I can only live, either altogether with you or not at all. Yes, I have determined to wander about for so long far away, until I can fly into your arms and call myself quite at home.” That excerpt was from the 7th of July, 1812. He never married. Such ordeals were of no help to his problem with cheap wine.

To a degree, the extremity of Beethoven’s idiosyncrasies can be attributed to his emotional afflictions: his traumatic childhood, innumerable relationship troubles, and more than anything else; his deafness. He saw it very much as an insult to his will: that the one sense he had devoted his life creating around be robbed from him.

Beethoven’s music is filled with tenderness and vulnerability, sometimes this vulnerability manifesting itself as anger. It is then evident that the deaf soup-tipping Beethoven is an embittered one, seen at a later, tried point in his life. He was described as well dressed in his earlier years, yet that degraded along with his hearing, in Heiligenstadt. From birth, he was by nature a cynical non-conformist, “frank to the point of rudeness”, but as time went on, his quirks were inevitably magnified by hard experience.

His life and music were one great striving for joy, yet he died without the wife or child that he longed for and only the faintest true recollection of his art. This striving is what makes his music so powerful.