Ludwig van Beethoven

Overview

Biography

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer and pianist who remains one of the most influential figures in the history of Western music. Born in Bonn, he moved to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn, and spent the rest of his life there transforming the musical language he inherited from Mozart and Haydn into something altogether more dramatic, personal, and far-reaching.

Beethoven's progressive hearing loss — which became severe by his mid-thirties and total by his late forties — is among the most poignant stories in musical biography. Yet it was in this period of encroaching silence that he wrote some of his greatest works: the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the late string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony, premiered in 1824 when he was completely deaf. The Ninth — with its final choral movement setting Schiller's "Ode to Joy" — was the first symphony to incorporate the human voice, and its opening theme has become perhaps the most recognised melody in the Western canon.

His 32 piano sonatas chart the evolution of the instrument and its possibilities; works like the "Moonlight" Sonata (Op. 27 No. 2) and the "Hammerklavier" (Op. 106) remain touchstones for pianists today. Beethoven expanded every form he touched — the symphony, the string quartet, the piano concerto — establishing a model of the composer as heroic individual, expressing subjective experience through music, that shaped the entire Romantic era.