These easy victories in Persia left the Czar free to resume his threatening attitude toward Turkey. In this he received the hearty support of Canning. A protocol at St. Petersburg, concluded between the Duke of Wellington and Nesselrode, formed the basis for Anglo-Russian intervention in the East. The royalists of France were won over by an offer from the Greek insurgents Intervention in Greece favored to place the Duke of Nimours on the throne of Greece. Without giving actual support to the proposed intervention the French ambassador in Constantinople was instructed to act with his English and Russian colleagues. Under the weight of this combination even Prince Metternich gave way.
Affairs in Germany were calculated to excite his alarm. At Dresden the accession of Anthony Clement to the crown of Saxony met with extreme disfavor on the part of the Saxon people by reason of Anthony's pronounced Catholicism. Soon his measures provoked a rising of the people. Anthony had to resign, and Frederick Augustus II. became regent.
In Wurtemberg, where public affairs had taken a more liberal turn, the death of Wilhelm Hauff, the young author, was felt as a great loss. Hauff died in his twenty-fifth year, while still in the first promise of his Death of Hauff literary activity. His stories of the Black Woods and his Oriental Tales, together with his medieval romance "Lichtenstein," modelled after the best of Walter Scott's romances, have assured him a prominent place in German letters.
On March 15, Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace, one of the greatest mathematicians and physical astronomers of all time, died at Arcueil. Laplace Laplace was born in 1749, in Normandy. Although a poor farmer's son, he soon won the position of a teacher at the Beaumont Military School of Mathematics, and later at the Ecole Militaire of Paris. One of the early notable labors of Laplace was his investigation of planetary perturbations, and his demonstration that planetary mean motions are invariable—the first important step in the establishment of the stability of the solar system and one of the most brilliant achievements in celestial mechanics. In his The nebular hypothesis "Exposition du Systeme du Monde" was formulated the theory called the "nebular hypothesis," the glory of which he must share with Kant. "He would have completed the science of the skies," says Fourier, "had the science been capable of completion." As a physicist he made discoveries that were in themselves sufficient to perpetuate his name, in specific heat, capillary action and sound. In mathematics he furnished the modern scientist with the famous Laplace co-efficients and the potential function, thereby laying the foundation of the mathematical sciences of heat and electricity. Not satisfied with scientific distinction, Laplace aspired to political honors and left a public record which is not altogether to his credit. Of his labors as Minister of the Interior, Napoleon remarked: "He brought into the administration the spirit of the infinitesimals." Although he owed his political success, small as it was, to Napoleon—the man whom he had once heralded as the "pacificator of Europe"—he voted for his dethronement.
Shortly after the death of Laplace, Ludwig van Beethoven died in Vienna on March 26. The last years of his life were so clouded by his deafness and by Death of Beethoven the distressing vagaries of his nephew that he was often on the verge of suicide. In December, 1826, he caught a violent cold, which brought on his ultimate death from pneumonia and dropsy. Beethoven, though he adhered to the sonata form of the classic school, introduced into his compositions such daringly original methods that he must be regarded as the first of the great romantic composers. Some of his latest compositions notably, were so very unconventional that they found no appreciation, even among musicians, until years after his death. Technically, his art of orchestration reached such a perfection of general unity and elaboration of detail that he must stand as the greatest instrumental composer of the nineteenth century. The profound subjective note that pervades his best compositions lifts his music above that of his greatest predecessors: Bach, Haydn and Mozart.
Beethoven came of a line of musical ancestors. His grandfather and namesake was an orchestral leader and composer of operas. His father was a Beethoven's career professional singer, who took his son's musical education in hand at the age of four. At eight the boy was a fluent performer both on the violin and on the piano. When but ten years old Beethoven produced his first pianoforte sonata, and was installed as assistant organist in the Electoral Chapel at Bonn. When the lad visited Vienna, in 1787, his extemporizations on the piano made Mozart exclaim: "He will give the world something worth listening to." It was Haydn that persuaded Beethoven's patron to send the youth to Vienna; there he became Haydn's pupil and received material support from Prince Lichnovsky, one of his warmest admirers. From his first entrance into the musical circles of Vienna, Beethoven was justly regarded as a highly eccentric man. His generosity of soul and transcendent genius made all those that learned to know him condone his freaks. It was after the opening of the Nineteenth Century that Beethoven reached his freest creative period. Between 1800 and 1815 he composed the first six of his Notable compositions great symphonies, the music to "Egmont," the best of his chamber-music pieces, fourteen pianoforte sonatas, among them the "Pastorale" and the "Appassionata," and his only opera "Fidelio." This opera, which was first named "Leonore," with an overture that was afterward abandoned, had its first public performance in Vienna just before Napoleon's entry into the capital in 1805. After three representations it was withdrawn. Nearly ten years "Fidelio" later, after complete revision by Beethoven, "Fidelio" achieved its first great success. The great "Heroica Symphony" composed at the same time was originally dedicated to Bonaparte. When Napoleon had himself proclaimed Emperor, Beethoven tore up the dedication in a rage. It was subsequently changed "to the memory of a great man." After 1815, when the composer had grown quite deaf, his compositions, like his moods, took a gloomy cast. The Beethoven's declining years extravagances of his nephew, whose guardianship he had undertaken, caused him acute material worries. In truth he need have given himself no concern, for his admirers, Archduke Rudolph and Princes Lobkovitz and Kinsky, settled on him an annuity of 4,000 florins; but to the end of his days the unhappy composer believed himself on the verge of ruin. When he died, his funeral was attended by the princes of the imperial house and all the greatest magnates of Austria and Hungaria. Twenty thousand persons followed his coffin to the grave.
BEETHOVEN AND HIS ADMIRERS
Painted by A. Grafle
By this time a number of foreign volunteers had flocked to Greece. Lord English officers in Greece Cochrane, an English naval officer of venturous disposition, was appointed High Admiral. Sir Richard Church was put in command of the Greek land forces. Early in May, Church and Cochrane sought in vain to break the line of Turks under Kiutahi Pasha pressing upon Athens. They were defeated with great loss, and on June 5 the Acropolis of Athens surrendered to the Turks. Fall of Athens In July a treaty for European intervention in Greece was signed in London. Turkey and Greece were summoned to consent to an armistice, and to accept the mediation of the powers. All Turks were to leave Greece, and the Greeks were to come into possession of all Turkish property within their limits on Turks reject armistice payment of an indemnity. Greece was to be made autonomous under the paramount sovereignty of the Sultan. The demand for an armistice was gladly accepted by Greece. But the Sultan rejected it with contempt. The conduct of the Turkish troops in Bulgaria caused the Bulgarians to rise and call for Russian help.