Of Flemish origin (the grandfather had settled in Bonn in 1732 from Malines), his father Johann was a singer at the Court of the Archbishop of Cologne. Ludwig first studied with his father and performed in public as a pianist already in 1778, then deepened his musical knowledge with C. G. Neefe. Soon active in the court theater, in 1789, he enrolled in philosophy at the University of Bonn. In 1787, a trip to Vienna and a decisive meeting with Mozart radically influenced his training as a musician; In the meantime, a period of sad family conditions began for him. In 1787 the mother died, and he had to maintain the maintenance of the alcoholic father, using him as a violist in the court orchestra.
In the Austrian capital, he studied with Haydn, with Schenk, and finally with Albrechtsberger, but also with Salieri as regards the in-depth analysis of vocality Italian. Moreover, in the environment of Bonn, he intertwines profitable contacts with patrons and artists who keep the passion for his art alive in him; And for Haydn's intervention, he knows during a short stop in Bonn, he was allowed to go to Vienna again in 1792. He will no longer return from Vienna to his hometown (his father died in the same year as his transplant in Austria).
Meanwhile, thanks to the protection of the count of Waldstein, who had known him in Bonn, he comes into contact with the best-known names of the Viennese aristocracy, including the Lichnowski and the Lobkowitz. In 1795 he held the first public concert, immediately imposing himself on the qualities of his interpretations, and in 1796 he made a tour of concerts in Germany and Bohemia.
But with the beginning of hearing disorders, which in 1802 will come to throw it on the verge of suicide (we remember the famous testament of Heiligenstadt), he tends to isolate himself more and more, while even beyond the borders, his fame as a composer is affirmed. After 1800 his production acquired a very rapid rhythm, and in 1808 he was ensured, thanks to the interest of some noble patron, an annual pension. But the conspicuous pension soon sees itself reduced to a miserable figure following inflation. At the same time, with the death of his brother Kaspar, he has entrusted to him the protection of his nephew Karl, a reckless young man who will be a source of ongoing serious concerns for him. His fame expanded increasingly in Europe, the publishers competed for his works, and he is considered a little of national glory. But deafness worsened (in the last years of his life, it was now possible to communicate with him only in writing), Karl obtained a series of boredoms, and in 1816-17 severe bronchitis undermined his solid fiber. In 1815 he appeared for the last time in public as a pianist; Since then, he closed himself more and more, while in recent years, he was oppressed by some financial concern, even if his works continued to be sought by the publishers and if the concerts of his Music met a favor that no other composer had ever reached before since then. In 1826 Karl attempted suicide; In the same year, after living in a room in the countryside with his brother Johann, Beethoven returned to Vienna under an infuriating snowstorm and fell ill with pneumonia. Neglected, evil worsens, and in winter, the musician must undergo a series of operations: but the joint hydropysois with a severe lung inflammation struggles after three days spent in almost total unconsciousness. A few days before he died, he had received a visit from Schubert, who loved him and would follow him a year later in the grave.
In the history of Music, Beethoven is an absolutely new man and artist. In life, he always sought, and desperately, freedom and independence. Formed precisely in the years in which the French revolution dictated humanity's laws
New to brotherhood and equality, he feels the artist must work for all his fellow men. So he was the first to break any subordination relationship with the aristocracy. First, he lived in his work, which he offered to his publishers, pretending to be compensated for his worth. While all his predecessors, up to Mozart and Haydn, had lived and worked in the context of a restricted circle, subsidized by their masters and real theaters, Beethoven impetuously seeks contact with an increasingly large audience.
This attitude of unconditional release from a world that already began to decay at the beginning of the 1800s reflects in his life and his relationships with men. He was a difficult person, and only very few could enter with him into friendship relationships, even if ever of true intimacy. In need of love like few others, paradoxically, he could not find him even with women: in his life, they passed through dozens (we will only remember Giulietta Guicciardi, Therese von Brunswick, the countess Endody, Bettina Brentano, and the singer Amalie von Sebald), but In no could find the partner of life.
And it was undoubtedly a boundless need for freedom that prompted him to isolate himself more and more from the world to entrust his message to humanity, which led him to move into an unreal dimension that made his life an adventure of the most unusual and, in some ways, incredible that history has been handed down to us. In Music, however, the disorder of life and the grip of character are resolved in simple and direct communication dictated by a very high brilliant force. In the first works, he absorbs and debates the stylistic problem imposed by his great predecessors, Haydn and Mozart. When he is twenty -two, Mozart is already dead, and Haydn has come to the most sumptuous period of his maturity: the young Beethoven now sees the world with a new eye, vivified and stimulated by the significant historical events that accompany its training (the French revolution first of all ), and at the same time immerses himself in the achievements that Mozart and Haydn had done to then personally live them with a different expressive charge. The first piano sonatas, the first quartets, and the first two symphonies (but whale-swing exceptions as of now, for example, in the Sonata in do minor pathetic piano op. 13, which is from 1798) thus reflect a sensitivity still linked to the Music of the 18th century. However, these works, such as Rococo, can never be assigned to a specific stylistic category. But in these works, there is tireless research, the development of a very personal style that gradually will be brightly enunciated in the most fabulous creations of virility.
Beethoven's name is inextricably linked to that of the form-Son. It is in this form, handed down to him by the School of Mannheim, by C. Ph. E. Bach, and other musicians from the 18th century, which finds the expressive and constructive stimulus more congenial to him.
He coined the two main themes of the Sonata with grandiose plastic capacity, and he adds peaks before him inaccessible in the art of development. In the effects of him, conflicts dominated by a higher balance are unleashed; in his themes of him, there is a lyricism that predicts that of subsequent romanticism. Above all, this formal element predominates in the works of the middle period, in most symphonies and pianistic sonatas, and in the quartets that precede the last ones, where a new world of dizzying formal and expressive research is inaugurated.
Beethoven's work is a cosmos in which man finds himself immediately reflected in his more impetuous passions and his more noble feelings. In Beethoven, he finally speaks all humanity: the elementary conciseness of his themes and developments brings him close to the man of the street, to the mass that had been practically excluded - if the phenomenon of the theatrical work is except - from Music. And in the middle works, this impetus of brotherhood, of communication with all their fellow men, to raise them and give them a precise awareness of men, comes to the surface. Finally, the form also breaks, leaving the green light, on the edge of a technique now transcendental, to the imagination in its autonomous shape, to the pure invention that goes beyond every bond and every formal scheme. This is the case of the last quartets, the ninth symphony, the latest piano ratings, and shocking works in their expressive radicality, disconcerting for the height to which the artistic expression comes in them. Here Beethoven hooks up in unexplored spheres; it opens to music possibilities that only after many decades will posterity fully understand their genius.
The orchestral compositions still have a non -negligible importance of the 11 overtures that Beethoven wrote for comedies and ballets and his only theatrical work, Fidelio. Keep in mind that even the Beethoven obiture adopted the form-Son, validating with the authority of its genius a structure that was being affirmed at the end of the 19th century and that sostered substantially from the Italian-type obiture (A. Scarlatti) or French (Lulli).
The creatures of Prometeo op. 43 (Die Geschopfe Des Prometheus):
The "Ouverture" at the ballet denotes Beethoven's youth style characteristics. It is a brilliant piece, admirable for the incessant rhythmic life, almost an elegant and smooth game of fresh and youthful musical ideas.
King Stefano op. 117 (1811):
The Ouverture, which is the most energetic page, is introduced by four dry, solemn, archaizing rings and is then conceived on two musical ideas that alternate with each other and repeat with instrumental changes and, therefore, of complexion, The first mainly lyrical and exotic ("Alla Forgarese" writes Beethoven when he resumes this theme in the song n. 4, the elegant chorus of women who accompany the bride) and the second impetuous and war. The style and character of the other songs are adequate with skill but also in shape, mostly impersonally solemn, to stage needs.
The ruins of Athens op. 113 (1811):
The allegorical drama The ruins of Athens presents symphonic writing. The decadence of Greece, which languishes under Turkish domination, and of Athens, in which she returns after an absence of two thousand years of age. Today in concert halls, the Ouverture is often performed in which all the main themes of the work are organized in the form-Son. Minerva, who received forgiveness from Jupiter, is represented, in the introduction, Andante with motorcycles, by an ascending theme detached that it reaches the violins and from the following reason entrusted to the arches, which anticipate the second song, the duet between the Greek and the Greek, while the following two martial themes, exposed in the calendar shade of Sol major allude to the agreement between the Hungarian people and its rulers. The next, cheerful but not too much, in form-Sonata, does not present any thematic reference to the other stage music.
Egmont Ouverture op. 84 (1809):
Goethe's "Ouverture" has the character of a simple introduction to the drama, of which he seems to reflect fans of freedom, resolving himself in a jubilation song.
Coriolano "Ouverture" op. 62 (1807):
Composed, in parallel with the fifth symphony, in 1807, the Ouverture in Coriolano (a tragedy of Heinrich Collin now forgotten) is one of the darkest and most tragic compositions that the musician has conceived. It indelibly enrolls in the listener's memory for the drama of the initial engraved, for the restlessness of the first yearning theme, for the noble lyricism of the second theme in Mi Bemolle (the Ouverture is in do minor, the same shade as the fifth ). After a series of contrasts and conflicts that are pressing without requiency throughout the piece, it ends on the tragic engraved of the beginning, which is extinct with a left effect in the serious register of the arches.
The onomastic festival op. 115 (1815):
The Zur Namensfeier Ouverture (so called by the note in charge of Beethoven to the autographed score, from which it appears that the composition was completed "in the month of the harvest of 1814, on the evening of the honor of our emperor", that is, on 4 October, feast of San Francesco) is one of the first examples of a concert by concerts, a "genre" flowery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of the evolution of the "Academy," as an aristocratic musical treatment of an eminent chamber legal regime (even if in It was performed the concerts for Piano di Mozart and the Haydn symphonies) with a public demonstration of spectacular nature and massive and composite constitution.
The evening, lasting several hours, could include a pair of symphonies, a concerto for solo instrument and orchestra, an oratory, or a cantata, all preceded by an ad hoc symphonic introduction and concluded by the improvisation of the author on the piano: Pantagruelica Sbandigione musical, today difficult to dispose of.
The consecration of the house op. 124 (Die Weihe des Houses), "Ouverture" (1822):
It was composed for the inauguration of the new Josephstadter Theater. It is a piece conceived in an almost Handelian spirit, an actual "occasion" composition in the noblest and majestic sense of the term. Needless to seek dramatic conflicts: this Music takes place like a sound tapestry, going from a "majestic and supported" solemn imprint to a more lively fanfare that flows into a bright and charming escape. The musician's hand is also happy and, above all, in the counterpoint parts. To them is added a sumptuous treatment of the orchestra which concludes the piece in a truly monumental way, in a blazing do major.
Leonora n. 1, n. 2 and n. 3:
The three "ouvertures" Leonora was composed for the first and second version
of Fidelio. The first does not satisfy the author, who, in the same year of the representation of Fidelio (1805), prepared a second, While the best-known version is the third, composed for the resumption of the work in 1806. It is one of the most varied and compelling works created by Beethoven in the symphonic field. The formal complexity, which escapes any attempt to classify, is equal only to the wealth of ideas that anticipate and symbolize the fundamental elements of the drama with great expression. Thus we find it condensed within a few minutes, the characteristic themes of some important characters of Fidelio: in the transition from slow times to cheerful or rapid ones, in the mysterious fanfares who suddenly interrupt the flow of Music, in the exultation of the central theme of the Allegro (which starts after an adage of vast proportions), Leonora n. 3 is a wide-ranging page, vivid, penetrating, and spontaneous like few others of this kind.
Fidelio op. 72c:
In 1814, recurring a new version of Fidelio to the Viennese public, Beethoven wrote a fourth ouverture, which is also normally performed today to introduce the work. With the three Leonore, this ouverture has nothing to do. Here, the composer does not use themes taken from the work, and his incisive traits of drama are resolved on a substantially rapid and brilliant conception of conception.
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