🇩🇪Ludwig van
Beethoven

He was twenty-six years old when he noticed that his ears were beginning to fail him — a death sentence, he believed, for a musician. By thirty he was struggling to hear conversations. By forty-four he was completely deaf. And yet between the onset of his deafness and his death at fifty-six, Ludwig van Beethoven composed the Seventh Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, the late string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony — the most celebrated orchestral work in the history of Western music, a composition that concludes with a choral setting of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" that has since been adopted as the anthem of the European Union, performed at the opening of every Olympic Games, and played in moments of collective human celebration across every continent on earth. He never heard any of it. Not one note, in performance, with his ears. He heard it in his mind, and that turned out to be enough.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, on or around December 17, 1770 — he was baptized on the 17th; the date of birth itself was never recorded. His father Johann was a court musician and an alcoholic who recognized his son's talent early and, having heard of the legend of Mozart, attempted to manufacture a similar prodigy. He forced young Ludwig to practice piano for hours, sometimes waking him at midnight to perform. It was a brutal education, but it worked: Beethoven performed publicly for the first time at age seven, studied under the court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe from age ten, and at thirteen was appointed as Neefe's assistant. At seventeen he traveled to Vienna, where he reportedly played for Mozart, who was said to have told bystanders: "Watch that young man. The world will hear from him one day." Beethoven returned to Bonn when his mother fell ill and died, and did not make Vienna his permanent home until 1792, the year after Mozart's own death.

In Vienna, Beethoven studied under Joseph Haydn and quickly established himself as the most exciting pianist in the city — his improvisations were described by contemporaries as overwhelming, almost violent in their emotional intensity. His early works, including the first two symphonies and the first twelve piano sonatas, follow the classical models of Haydn and Mozart while already pushing at their edges. Then came the crisis. In 1802, isolated at the village of Heiligenstadt while attempting to slow his hearing loss, Beethoven wrote what is now called the Heiligenstadt Testament — a letter to his brothers never sent, which reads as a suicide note reconsidered: "It was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was dawning within me." He did not leave. He went home and began composing the Eroica Symphony — the third — which is sixty-three minutes long, nearly twice the length of any symphony written before it, and which opens a new era in Western music essentially by itself.

The decade that followed — roughly 1803 to 1812 — produced the works that define Beethoven's "heroic" period: the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies; the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos; the Violin Concerto; the opera Fidelio; and the piano sonatas known as the Waldstein, Appassionata, and Les Adieux. The Fifth Symphony, with its famous four-note opening motif, has been analyzed more than any other piece of music in history. The Sixth, the Pastoral, was the first major program symphony — music that tells a story — and directly inspired Berlioz and Mahler. The Seventh was described by Wagner as "the apotheosis of the dance." Beethoven was producing, in a compressed burst of creative intensity, music that would take generations to fully absorb.

His personal life was a catalogue of disappointment. He fell in love repeatedly, proposed marriage to women who declined, and remained a bachelor his entire life. The identity of his "Immortal Beloved" — the unnamed recipient of a passionate unsent letter discovered after his death — has been debated by scholars for two centuries. He was famously difficult: impulsive, suspicious, prone to quarrels, careless about money and lodgings. He changed apartments eighty times in thirty-five years in Vienna. He fought bitterly with publishers, patrons, and his own nephew Karl, whose custody he pursued through years of litigation after his brother's death. And through all of it, the deafness deepened. By 1818 he was communicating entirely through written "conversation books," of which 400 survive.

The Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824, was premiered on May 7 of that year. Beethoven stood on stage to indicate the tempos, though he could hear nothing. When the performance ended, he continued conducting — he did not know it was over. The contralto Caroline Unger touched his arm and turned him to face the audience. They were standing, applauding, waving handkerchiefs. He had to be turned to see it. He wept. The Ninth was unlike anything that had been composed before: a symphony that incorporates human voices in its final movement, that sets poetry to orchestral music, that ends with a statement of universal brotherhood explicitly addressed to all of humanity. Its "Ode to Joy" theme has since been identified by researchers as the single most widely recognized melody in the world. Beethoven died three years later, in March 1827, from liver disease complicated by years of heavy drinking. An estimated ten thousand people attended his funeral procession through the streets of Vienna. Franz Schubert, who would die the following year, was among the pallbearers.

His legacy is not a matter of influence — influence implies a distance between the source and its effects. With Beethoven, the effect is direct and total: every composer who came after him had to decide what to do about Beethoven. Brahms took forty years to write his first symphony because he was too intimidated by Beethoven's nine. Berlioz, Mahler, Wagner, Bruckner, Shostakovich — the entire tradition of large-scale orchestral composition is a series of answers to questions Beethoven posed. In the twentieth century, his music became the template for film scores, pop anthems, rock power chords. The opening of the Fifth Symphony is a ringtone. The "Ode to Joy" is a school exercise. And yet neither has been diminished by the familiarity. The music contains something that exposure does not exhaust.