Life of Beethoven

by Ludwig Nohl

Johann van Beethoven took Magdalena Kewerich, of Ehrenbreitstein, to wife, in 1763. She is described as a “pretty and slender woman.” She had served as a chambermaid, for a time, in some of the families of the great, had married young, and was left a widow at the age of nineteen. Johann’s marriage to this woman was not acceptable to the court capellmeister, and so it happened that he was obliged to leave the home in which he had thus far lived with his lonely father, and move into a wing of the house, number 515, in Bonn street, where his son Ludwig, the subject of this sketch, was born.

The young wife brought no property to her husband. Several children were born to the newly married couple in quick succession. Of these, Karl, born in 1774 and Johann in 1766, play some part in Beethoven’s life. The growth of the family was so rapid that it was not long before they felt the burthen of pecuniary distress. The grandfather, who was well to do, helped them, at first. His stately figure in his red coat, with his massive head and “big eyes,” remained fixed in the boy Ludwig’s memory, although he was only three years of age when his grandfather died. The child was, indeed, tenderly attached to him. As the father’s poverty increased, he made some efforts to improve his condition. But they were of no avail; for his deportment was only “passable” and his voice “was leaving him.” He now had recourse to teaching, and obtained employment in the theater, for he played the violin also. Sickness, however, soon eat up what was left of his little fortune. Their furniture and table ware followed their silver-service and linen—“which one might have drawn through a ring,”—to the pawn-shop; and now the father’s poverty contributed only to make him, more and more, the victim of his weakness for the cup.

But there was even now one star of hope in the dreary firmament of his existence—his son Ludwig’s talent for music. This talent showed itself in very early childhood, and could not, by any possibility, escape the observation of the father, who, after all, was himself a “good musician.” And, although the father was not destined to live to see his son in the zenith of his success, it was his son’s talent alone that saved the family from ruin and their name from oblivion, for with the birth of Beethoven’s younger brother, Johann, and of a sister who died shortly after, the circumstances of the family became still more straightened. Mozart had been in Bonn a short time before, and it occurred to the father to train his son to be a second little Mozart, and, by traveling with him, earn the means of subsistence of which the family stood so sorely in need. And so the boy was rigidly kept to his lessons on the piano and violin. His daily exercises on these instruments must have been a severer task on him than would seem to be necessary in a regular course of musical training. He used to be taken from his playing with other children to practice, and friends of his youth tell us how they saw him standing on a stool before the piano and cry while he practiced his lessons. Even the rod was called into requisition in his education, and the expostulations of friends could not dissuade the father from such relentless severity. But the end was attained. Regular and persevering exercise, laid the foundation of a skill in the art of music, which led him before the public when only seven years of age. On the 26th of March (by a strange coincidence the day of the month on which Beethoven died), the father announced, in a paper published in Cologne, that “his son, aged six years, would have the honor to wait on the public with several concertos for the piano, when, he flattered himself, he would be able to afford a distinguished audience a rich treat; and this all the more since he had been favored with a hearing by the whole court, who listened to him with the greatest pleasure.” The child, to enhance the surprise, was made one year younger in this announcement than he was in reality; and this led Beethoven himself into an error as to his age, which he did not discover until he was nearly forty.

We need say but little concerning his other teachers when a youth. His great school was want, which urged him to follow and practice his art, so that he might master it, and, with its assistance, make his way through the world. When Beethoven grew to be eight years of age, he had as a teacher, in addition to his father, the vocalist Tobias Pfeiffer, for a whole year. Pfeiffer lived in the Beethoven family. He was a skillful pianist. Beethoven considered him one of the teachers to whom he was most indebted, and was subsequently instrumental in procuring assistance for him from Vienna. But we may form some idea of the nature of his instruction, and of the mode of living in the family, from the fact, attested by Beethoven’s neighbors, that it frequently happened that Pfeiffer, after coming home with the father late in the night from the tavern, took young Ludwig out of bed and kept him at the piano practicing till morning. Yet the success attendant on this instruction was such, even now, that when the boy, Beethoven and his teacher, who performed on the flute, played variations together, the people in the streets stopped and listened to their delightful music. In 1781, when Ludwig was ten years old, he traveled to Holland with his mother, played in the houses of the great, and astonished every one by his skill. The profits from this journey, however, cannot have been very large. When the boy was questioned about them, he replied: “The Dutch are a niggardly set; I shall never visit Holland again.”

In the meantime, he turned his attention also to the study of the organ. Under the guidance of a certain Brother Willibald, of a neighboring Franciscan monastery, he soon became so proficient on that instrument, that he was able to act as assistant organist at divine service. But his principal teachers here were the old electoral court organist, van den Eeden, and afterwards, his successor, Christian Gottlob Neefe. In what regards composition the latter was the first to exercise any real influence on Beethoven, and Beethoven, in after years, thanked him for the good advice he had given him—advice which had contributed so much to his success in the “divine art.” He concludes a letter to Neefe as follows: “If I should turn out some day to be a great man, you will have contributed to making me such.” Neefe came originally from Saxony. As an organist, he had all the characteristics of the North German artists; but, on the other hand, he had, as a composer, a leaning towards the sonata-style introduced by Ph. E. Bach. He was a man of broad general education, and the form of his artistic productions was almost faultless. Such was young Beethoven’s proficiency at the age of eleven, in 1782, that Neefe was able to appoint him his “substitute,” and thus to pave the way for his appointment as court organist. We owe to him the first published account of Beethoven, and from that account we learn that the great foundation of his instruction was Bach’s “well-tempered clavichord,” that ne plus ultra of counterpoint and technic. He first made a reputation in Vienna by his masterly playing of Bach’s fugues. But the instruction he had received in composition, bore fruit also, and some variations to a march and three sonatas, by him, appeared at this time in print.

In the account of Beethoven referred to above, and which was written in 1783, Neefe said that that young “genius” was deserving of support that he might be able to travel, and that he would certainly be another Mozart. But the development of his genius soon took a wider scope. He even, on one occasion, when Neefe was prevented doing so, presided at a rehearsal in the Bonn theater, in which the best pieces of the age were produced. This was at the age of twelve. And so it happened that his artistic views and technic skill grew steadily greater. We are told that when he became court organist, at the age of thirteen, he made the very accurate vocalist Heller lose the key entirely during the performance of divine service, by his own bold modulations. True, the Elector forbade such “strokes of genius” in the future, but he, no less than his capellmeister Luchesi, was greatly astonished at the extraordinary capacity of the young man.

Incidents of this kind may have suggested the propriety of giving him the instruction appropriate for a really great master of art; and, indeed, we find the court organist of Bonn with Mozart in Vienna, in the spring of 1787.

Beethoven’s appearance was not what would be called imposing. He was small of stature, muscular and awkward, with a short snub nose. When he was introduced to Mozart, the latter was rather cool in his praise of his musical performances, considering them pieces learned by heart simply for purposes of parade. Beethoven, thereupon requested Mozart to give him a subject, that he might try his powers of musical improvisation. Charmed with the ability displayed in the execution of the task thus imposed on his young visitor, Mozart exclaimed: “Mark that young man! the world will hear of him some day.” Beethoven, however, received very little instruction from Mozart, who was so deeply engaged, just at this time, with the composition of his Don Giovanni, and so sorely tried by adverse circumstances, that he played very little for him, and could give him only a few lessons. Besides, Beethoven’s mother was now taken seriously ill, and after a few weeks he had to return home, where other blows of a hard fate awaited him. His kind, good mother, was snatched from him by death, and his father’s unfortunate weakness for strong drink obtained such a mastery over him that he was deprived of his position shortly after. The duty of supporting his two younger brothers was thus imposed on Ludwig, the eldest.

Young Beethoven was thus taught many a severe lesson early in life, in the hard school of adversity. But his trials were not without advantage to him. They gave to his character that iron texture which upheld him under the heaviest burthens, nor was his recall to Bonn a misfortune. He there found the very advantages which he had gone to seek in the musical metropolis, Vienna; for Maximilian Francis, Elector of Cologne, the friend and patron of Mozart, was one of the noble princes of the preceding century, who made their courts the sanctuary of culture and of art.

Maximilian was the youngest son of Maria Theresa. He had received the careful training, for which that imperial house was noted, and he found in Joseph II an example in every way worthy of imitation. He was as faithful to his calling as an ecclesiastic as to his duties as a ruler, and as adverse to what he looked upon as superstition in the garb of Christianity, as to the extravagance of his predecessors, who had left the country in a state of corruption and destitution. He everywhere endeavored to bring order out of chaos and to spread prosperity among his people. A pure, fresh atmosphere filled the little court as long as he presided in it. He was still young, not much over thirty, and a man of the truest principles. Speaking of him as “that most humane and best of princes,” a contemporary writer says: “People had grown accustomed to think of Cologne as a land of darkness, but when they came to the Elector’s court, they quickly changed their mind.” The members of the orchestra of the court especially, among whom our young court organist is to be reckoned, were, we are told, very intelligent, right thinking men, of elegant manners and unexceptionable conduct.