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Table of contents [showhide] 1.1 Bonn
3 Personal beliefs and their musical influence 4 Symphonies 5 Beethoven as fictional character 6 See also 7 External links Beethoven's musical talent manifested itself early, and his father attempted, unsuccessfully, to exploit the boy as a child prodigy. Beethoven became the young protegé of Christian Gottlob Neefe who taught him composition and found him work in the musical establishment of the Bonn court. The reigning prince, Elector Maximilian Franz (1756-1801), appreciated Beethoven's talent and subsidized his musical studies. At age 17, Beethoven traveled to Vienna hoping to study with Mozart, whom he did meet and evidently impressed. But after just two weeks in Vienna, Beethoven learned that his mother was severely ill, and he was forced to return home, where she died shortly thereafter. Beethoven thus became responsible for the care of his two younger brothers, and he spent the next five years in Bonn. [edit] In his early career as a composer, Beethoven concentrated first on works for piano solo, then string quartets, symphonies, and other genres. This was a pattern he was to repeat in the "late" period of his career (see below). Thus, 12 of Beethoven's famous series of 32 piano sonatas date from before 1802, and could be considered early-period works; of these, the most celebrated today is probably the "Pathétique", Op. 13. The first six quartets were published as a set (Op. 18) in 1800, and the First and Second Symphonies premiered in 1800 and 1802. All musical authorities agree that Beethoven's early work was closely modeled on that of Haydn and Mozart. However, Beethoven's own musical personality is still very much evident even at this stage. This is seen, for instance, in his frequent use of the musical dynamic sforzando, found even in the "Elector" sonatas for piano that Beethoven wrote as a child. Some of the longer piano sonatas of the 1790's are written in a rather discursive style quite unlike their models, making use of the so-called "three-key exposition". [edit] As a result of Beethoven's hearing loss, a unique historical record has been preserved: he kept conversation books discussing music and other issues, and giving an insight into his thought. Even today, the conversation books form the basis for investigation into how he felt his music should be performed, and his relationship to art - which he took very seriously. There are a variety of theories as to why Beethoven suffered from hearing loss, from illness to lead poisoning. The oldest explanation, from the autopsy of the time, is that he had a distended inner ear which developed lesions over time. This theory is outlined in Beethoven et les malentendus by Maurice Porot et Jacques Miermont. Russell Martin argued, from analysis done by Walsh and McCrone on a sample of Beethoven's hair, that there were alarmingly high levels of lead in Beethoven's system. And that high concentrations of lead can lead to bizarre & erratic behaviour, including rages. Another symptom of lead poisoning is deafness. In Beethoven's era, lead was used widely without true understanding of the damage it could lead to: in sweetening wine, finishes on porcelain, and even medicine. The investigation of this link was detailed in the book, "Beethoven's Hair : An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved". While the likelihood of lead poisoning is very high, the deafness associated with it seldom takes the form that Beethoven exhibited. It is more likely that his generally bad health as he grew older was related to plumbism rather than his hearing loss. [edit] The Eroica was one of the first works of Beethoven's so-called "middle period", a time when Beethoven composed highly ambitious works, often heroic in tone, that extended the scope of the classical musical language Beethoven had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. The middle period work includes Symphonies 3-8, the string quartets 7-11, the Waldstein and Appassionata piano sonatas, the opera Fidelio, and many other compositions. During this time Beethoven earned his living partly from the sale and performance of his work, and partly from subsidies granted by various wealthy nobles who recognized his talent. The work of the middle period established Beethoven's reputation as a great and daring composer. In a review from 1810, he was enshrined by E. T. A. Hoffman as one of the three great "Romantic" composers; Hoffman called Beethoven's Fifth Symphony "one of the most important works of the age". The middle period ended with a flourish around 1814, with the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and the third--and at last, successful--version of Fidelio. It was around this time that Beethoven's popularity with the contemporary public reached its apogee, and he was almost universally regarded as the greatest of living composers. [edit] Then Beethoven began a renewed study of older music, including works by J. S. Bach and Handel, then being published in the first attempts at complete editions. He composed "The Consecration of the House" overture, which was the first work to attempt to incorporate his new influences. But it is when he returned to the keyboard to compose his first new piano sonatas in almost a decade, that a new style, now called his "late period", emerged. The works of the late period are commonly held to include the last five piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations, the last two sonatas for cello and piano, the late quartets (see below), and two works for very large forces: the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony ("Choral"), perhaps Beethoven's best known work. The Ninth Symphony is the first to use a chorus, and its dimensions were, again, larger than any previous work. Beethoven then turned to writing string quartets - the war between Austria and France had devastated his finances - for 100 gold ducats each. This series of quartets - the "late quartets" - would go far beyond what either musicians or audiences were ready for at that time. One musician commented that "we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is." Composer Louis Spohr called them "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors," though that opinion has changed considerably from the time of their first bewildered reception. They would continue to inspire musicians - from Richard Wagner to Béla Bartók - for their unique forms and ideas. Beethoven's health had been bad for most of his life, worsening even as he composed these last works; in his last months he became seriously ill. He died on March 26th, 1827, after several operations to relieve abdominal swelling, and a subsequent infection. Unlike in the case of Mozart, who was buried in a pauper's grave, 20,000 Viennese citizens lined the streets at Beethoven's funeral. [edit] Beethoven continued to expand the "development" section of works, extending a trend in the works of Haydn and Mozart, who had dramatically expanded both the length and substance of instrumental music. As Beethoven's major immediate predecessors and influences, he looked to their harmonic and formal models for his own works. However, both Mozart and Haydn placed the great weight of a musical movement in the statement of ideas called the exposition, for Beethoven the development section of a sonata form became the heart of the work. Beethoven was able to do this by making the development section not merely longer, but also more structured. The very long development section of the Eroica Symphony, for example, is divided into four roughly equal sections, making it, in effect, a sonata form within a sonata form. The first movement alone of this symphony is as long as an entire typical Italian-style Mozart symphony from the 1770s. His focus on the development would, like others of his innovations, set a trend that later composers would follow. Although Beethoven wrote many beautiful and lyrical melodies, another radical innovation of his music, compared especially to that of Mozart and Haydn, is his extensive use of forceful, marked, and even stark rhythmic patterns throughout his compositions and, in particular, in his themes and motifs, some of which are primarily rhythmic rather than melodic. Some of his most famous themes, such as those of the first movements of the Third, Fifth, and Ninth symphonies, are primarily non-melodic rhythmic figures consisting of notes of a single chord, and the themes of the last movements of the Third and Seventh symphonies could more accurately be described as rhythms rather than as melodies. This use of rhythm was particularly well suited to the primacy of development in Beethoven's music, since a single rhythmic pattern can more easily than a melody be taken through a succession of different, even remote, keys and harmonic regions while retaining and conveying an underlying unity. This allowed him to combine different features of his themes in a wide variety of ways, extending the techniques of Haydn in development (see Sonata Form). He also continued another trend - towards larger orchestras - that went on until the first decade of the 20th century, and moved the center of the sound downwards in the orchestra, to the violas and the lower register of the violins and cellos, giving his music a heavier and darker feel than Haydn or Mozart. Gustav Mahler modified the orchestration of some of Beethoven's music -- most notably the 3d and 9th symphonies -- with the idea of more accurately expressing Beethoven's intent in an orchestra that had grown so much larger than the one Beethoven used: for example, doubling woodwind parts to compensate for the fact that a modern orchestra has so many more strings than Beethoven's orchestra did. Needless to say, these efforts remain controversial. In his Fifth Symphony Beethoven introduced a striking motif, drawn from a late Haydn symphony, in the very opening bar, which he echoed in various forms in all four movements of the symphony. This is the first important occurrence of cyclic form. He was also fond of making usual what had previously been unusual: in the Fifth Symphony, instead of using a stately minuet, as had been the norm for the "dance" movement of a four-movement work, he created a dark march, which he used as the third movement and ran into the fourth without interruption. While one can point to previous works which had one or more of these individual features, his music, combined with the use of operatic scoring that he learned from Mehul and Cherubini, created a work which was altogether novel in effect - too novel, in fact, for some critics of the time. On the other hand, his contemporary Spohr found the finale "too baroque", though he praised the second movement as being in "good Romantic style". His Ninth Symphony included a chorus and solo voices in the 4th movement for the first time, and made extensive use of fugues, which were generally considered to be a different form of music, and again unusual in symphonies. He wrote one opera, Fidelio. It has been said that he wrote beautiful vocal music without regard for the limitations of human singers, treating the voice as if it were a symphonic instrument - even though his conversation books note his desire to make his music singable and include references that indicate that he had remembered his father's singing lessons. Beethoven's development and works are typically divided into three periods: an early period in which his works show especially the influence of Mozart and Haydn; a middle, mature period in which he developed his distinctive individual style, sometimes characterized as "heroic"; and a late period, in which he wrote works of a highly evolved, individuated, sometimes fragmented and unorthodox style sometimes characterized as "transcendent" and "sublime", where he tried to combine the baroque ideas of Handel and Bach with his icons Mozart and Haydn. In his late years he called Handel "my grand master". In contrast to Mozart, he labored heavily over his work, leaving intermediate drafts that provide considerable insight into his creative process. Early drafts of his Ninth Symphony used rough vertical marks on the score in place of actual notes, to indicate the structure he had in mind for the melody. Studies of his sketch books show the working out of dozens of variations on a particular theme, changing themes to fit with an overall structure that evolved over time, and extensive sketching of counter-melodies. [edit] Beethoven's intense faith in God as experienced through art is an important theme in his conversation books, his belief that art is a force unto itself, and that "God is closer to me than others of my art", infuse his search for redemption through and in music. [edit] Symphony No. 1 in C major, Opus 21 (1800)
The opus numbers of Beethoven's Symphonies form the Trice Sequence, Sloane's A001491 (http://www.research.att.com/cgi-bin/access.cgi/as/njas/sequences/eisA.cgi?Anum=A001491), which for a long time puzzled mathematician Clifford Pickover, who believed the sequence had a mathematical formula to it. [edit] Beethoven was the title character in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's concept album, Beethoven's Last Night. In it, he makes a deal with the Devil to ease the suffering of a child sitting outside his door. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Beethoven".
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