Some of these episodes read like stories in a tabloid magazine but this one is for adults.
I don't think that many days can pass without one's hearing Beethoven's music coming from someplace -- a TV commercial, as background score for movies like "Die Hard", a scratchy rendition from somewhere. If you've had piano lessons you've probably practiced "Fur Elise." Gary Oldman played him in "Immortal Beloved." The first notes of his fifth symphony form a "V" in Morse code and was used as an emblem of Allied morale in World War II. The Voyager spacecraft carries his music. His house in Bonn is now a museum. There is an asteroid belt named after him.
I don't know if the best thing the Beatles ever wrote was better or worse than the worst thing Beethoven ever wrote, but Old Ludwig left behind some of the world's noblest music. At its best it becomes a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
He was born in Bonn, an outpost of the Holy Roman Empire in 1770, now one of Germany's larger industrial centers and the seat of government. All these accomplishments came from a kid whose father was a stern and ambitious drunk who wanted his son, Ludwig, to imitate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, another kid who, a generation earlier, had been turned into a traveling show by another ambitious father. Beethoven, alas, was no Mozart and wound up beaten and locked in the basement. He was still a good enough pianist to give his first public recital at the age of seven.
He studied diligently and at the age of sixteen had demonstrated enough talent for the aristocrats of Bonn to pack him off to Vienna, the undisputed capital of the arts in Europe. It was like having your vaudeville act sent from Cheryl's Boom Boom Palace to The Sands in Las Vegas. He performed for Mozart and became friends with Haydn. It was the Enlightenment. What a heady atmosphere it must have been.
His brilliant playing and his radical music impressed everyone, but so did Beethoven himself -- short, ugly, pock-marked, and bad tempered. He fell in love with well-born women who responded for a while and then married some aristocrat. No wonder he frowns from every portrait.
By the early 1800s, when he was in his 30s, he realized he was growing deaf and furiously composed some of his best-known pieces, big, dramatic works, a grand opera, a solemn mass, his symphonies, the "Eroica," which Norman Bates listened to in the solitude of his bedroom and which gave us the expressive and tragic grandeur of the funeral march I heard coming from every television set and radio -- over and over -- in the streets, the bars, and the hotel lobbies of San Francisco after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He wrote a haunting series of string quartets that no one understood and that a modern jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, listens to now for inspiration.
Before he was forty his deafness was so advanced he had to give up performances and concentrate on composing, even though he had to press his ear against the wooden from to hear the notes. After extended, humiliating legal battles he won custody of a nephew and both of them hated each other. His nephew tried to commit suicide. Beethoven drank. His temper got worse. Landlords kicked him out. His friends abandoned him. He didn't change his clothes for weeks. He was arrested for vagrancy by police who refused to believe he was Europe's greatest living composer and spent the night in jail. And you think YOU'RE life is screwed up?
It's hard to imagine how, surrounded by such chaos, he managed to write his most famous work -- one of the most optimistic and quickening symphonies ever written: the "Choral Symphony," or as Alex calls it in "A Clockwork Orange," "the glorious ninth." It was set to a poem about the brotherhood of man and God's beneficence written by Friederich Schiller. The music was adopted as the anthem of the European Union. At its premier, Beethoven couldn't hear the rapturous applause and a musician had to turn him towards the audience.
You don't have to be a fan of classical music; the ninth symphony will still stand your hair on end. He never got through his tenth though. He died at the age of 56 in 1827, leaving everything to his nephew and a famous death mask to the historians.
The first movement of his fifth symphony, and one of his late string quartets should be past Pluto by now.,
I don't think that many days can pass without one's hearing Beethoven's music coming from someplace -- a TV commercial, as background score for movies like "Die Hard", a scratchy rendition from somewhere. If you've had piano lessons you've probably practiced "Fur Elise." Gary Oldman played him in "Immortal Beloved." The first notes of his fifth symphony form a "V" in Morse code and was used as an emblem of Allied morale in World War II. The Voyager spacecraft carries his music. His house in Bonn is now a museum. There is an asteroid belt named after him.
I don't know if the best thing the Beatles ever wrote was better or worse than the worst thing Beethoven ever wrote, but Old Ludwig left behind some of the world's noblest music. At its best it becomes a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
He was born in Bonn, an outpost of the Holy Roman Empire in 1770, now one of Germany's larger industrial centers and the seat of government. All these accomplishments came from a kid whose father was a stern and ambitious drunk who wanted his son, Ludwig, to imitate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, another kid who, a generation earlier, had been turned into a traveling show by another ambitious father. Beethoven, alas, was no Mozart and wound up beaten and locked in the basement. He was still a good enough pianist to give his first public recital at the age of seven.
He studied diligently and at the age of sixteen had demonstrated enough talent for the aristocrats of Bonn to pack him off to Vienna, the undisputed capital of the arts in Europe. It was like having your vaudeville act sent from Cheryl's Boom Boom Palace to The Sands in Las Vegas. He performed for Mozart and became friends with Haydn. It was the Enlightenment. What a heady atmosphere it must have been.
His brilliant playing and his radical music impressed everyone, but so did Beethoven himself -- short, ugly, pock-marked, and bad tempered. He fell in love with well-born women who responded for a while and then married some aristocrat. No wonder he frowns from every portrait.
By the early 1800s, when he was in his 30s, he realized he was growing deaf and furiously composed some of his best-known pieces, big, dramatic works, a grand opera, a solemn mass, his symphonies, the "Eroica," which Norman Bates listened to in the solitude of his bedroom and which gave us the expressive and tragic grandeur of the funeral march I heard coming from every television set and radio -- over and over -- in the streets, the bars, and the hotel lobbies of San Francisco after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He wrote a haunting series of string quartets that no one understood and that a modern jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, listens to now for inspiration.
Before he was forty his deafness was so advanced he had to give up performances and concentrate on composing, even though he had to press his ear against the wooden from to hear the notes. After extended, humiliating legal battles he won custody of a nephew and both of them hated each other. His nephew tried to commit suicide. Beethoven drank. His temper got worse. Landlords kicked him out. His friends abandoned him. He didn't change his clothes for weeks. He was arrested for vagrancy by police who refused to believe he was Europe's greatest living composer and spent the night in jail. And you think YOU'RE life is screwed up?
It's hard to imagine how, surrounded by such chaos, he managed to write his most famous work -- one of the most optimistic and quickening symphonies ever written: the "Choral Symphony," or as Alex calls it in "A Clockwork Orange," "the glorious ninth." It was set to a poem about the brotherhood of man and God's beneficence written by Friederich Schiller. The music was adopted as the anthem of the European Union. At its premier, Beethoven couldn't hear the rapturous applause and a musician had to turn him towards the audience.
You don't have to be a fan of classical music; the ninth symphony will still stand your hair on end. He never got through his tenth though. He died at the age of 56 in 1827, leaving everything to his nephew and a famous death mask to the historians.
The first movement of his fifth symphony, and one of his late string quartets should be past Pluto by now.,
