CHAPTER IV.
CHARACTERISTIC MOODS OF BEETHOVEN.
LUDVIG VAN BEETHOVEN.
Born December 16, 1770, at Bonn.
Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.
Beethoven was the son of a very dissipated tenor singer of the chapel of the Elector of Cologne, and the family had been musical for several generations. The boy learned to play the viola and violin as well as the piano while he was still very young indeed, and by the age of eleven was regularly engaged as viola player in the orchestra and had gained such proficiency upon the piano that it was popularly said of him that he could have played a good part of Bach's "Well-tempered Clavier" by heart. While still but a lad he succeeded informally to the post of assistant conductor of the orchestra, and it was his duty to prepare the music for the men, making the abridgments, emendations, and rearrangements that might be advisable to adapt old music to the then modern orchestra. In this way he gained, no doubt, much of his marvelous acquaintance with orchestral effect. When he was fifteen he was regularly appointed organist to the private chapel of the Elector, and he was left in charge of the orchestra for months together in the absence of the head director, Neefe.
Ludwig van Beethoven
He began to compose by the time he was ten, but he did not manifest any especial precocity in this direction: his published compositions with opus number contain only one movement, it is believed, which he wrote before he was twenty or twenty-one years of age. After the death of his father he was left, as he had been practically for some years before, the responsible head of the family, with the care of his mother and his younger brothers. He remained in Bonn, with one visit to Vienna in 1787, until he was about twenty-two years of age, when he left Bonn definitely and took up his abode in Vienna. Here he studied with the best masters attainable—Haydn, then in his prime, Salieri, and others. His first published compositions with opus numbers—three trios—date from the Vienna time.