Beethoven, Ludwig van

Beethoven, Ludwig van, great German composer whose unsurpassed genius, expressed with supreme mastery in his syms., chamber music, concertos,and piano sonatas, revealing an extraordinary power of invention, marked a historic turn in the art of composition; b. Bonn, Dec. 15 or 16 (baptized, Dec. 17), 1770; d. Vienna, March 26, 1827. (Beethoven himself maintained, against all evidence, that he was born in 1772, and that the 1770 date referred to his older brother, deceased in infancy, whose forename was also Ludwig.) The family was of Dutch extraction (the surname Beethoven meant “beet garden” in Dutch). Beethoven’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Mechelen, Belgium, Jan. 5, 1712; d. Bonn, Dec. 24, 1773), served as choir director of the church of St. Pierre in Louvain in 1731; in 1732 he went to Liège, where he sang bass in the cathedral choir of St. Lambert; in 1733 he became a member of the choir in Bonn; there he married Maria Poll. Prevalent infant mortality took its statistically predictable tribute; the couple’s only surviving child was Johann van Beethoven; he married a young widow, Maria Magdalena Leym (née Keverich), daughter of the chief overseer of the kitchen at the palace in Ehrenbreitstein; they were the composer’s parents. Beethoven firmly believed that the nobiliary particle “van” in the family name betokened a nobility; in his demeaning litigation with his brother’s widow over the guardianship of Beethoven’s nephew Karl, he argued before the Vienna magistrate that as a nobleman he should be given preference over his sister-in-law, a commoner, but the court rejected his contention on the ground that “van” lacked the elevated connotation of its German counterpart, “von.” Beethoven could never provide a weightier claim of noble descent. In private, he even tolerated without forceful denial the fantastic rumor that he was a natural son of royalty, a love child of Friedrich Wilhelm II, or even of Frederick the Great.

Beethoven’s father gave him rudimentary instruction in music; he learned to play both the violin and the piano; Tobias Friedrich Pfeiffer, a local musician, gave him formal piano lessons; the court organist in Bonn, Gilles van Eeden, instructed him in keyboard playing and in music theory; Franz Rovantini gave him violin lessons; another violinist who taught Beethoven was Franz Ries. Beethoven also learned to play the horn, under the guidance of the professional musician Ni-kolaus Simrock. Beethoven’s academic training was meager; he was, however, briefly enrolled at the Univ. of Bonn in 1789. His first important teacher of composition was Christian Gottlob Neefe, a thorough musician who seemed to understand his pupil’s great potential even in his early youth. He guided Beethoven in the study of Bach and encouraged him in keyboard improvisation. At the age of 12, in 1782, Beethoven composed Nine Variations for Piano on a March of Dressier , his first work to be publ. In 1783 he played the cembalo in the Court Orch. in Bonn; in 1784 the Elector Maximilian Franz officially appointed him to the post of deputy court organist, a position he retained until 1792; from 1788 to 1792 Beethoven also served as a violist in theater orchs. In 1787 the Elector sent him to Vienna, where he stayed for a short time; the report that he played for Mozart and that Mozart pronounced him a future great composer seems to be a figment of somebody’s eager imagination. After a few weeks in Vienna Beethoven went to Bonn when he received news that his mother was gravely ill; she died on July 17, 1787. He was obliged to provide sustenance for his two younger brothers; his father, who took to drink in excess, could not meet his obligations. Beethoven earned some money by giving piano lessons to the children of Helene von Breuning, the widow of a court councillor. He also met important wealthy admirers, among them Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, who was to be immortalized by Beethoven’s dedication to him of a piano sonata bearing his name. Beethoven continued to compose; some of his works of the period were written in homage to royalty, as a cantata on the death of the Emperor Joseph II and another on the accession of Emperor Leopold II; other pieces were designed for performance at aristocratic gatherings.

In 1790 an event of importance took place in Beethoven’s life when Haydn was honored in Bonn by the Elector on his way to London; it is likely that Beethoven was introduced to him, and that Haydn encouraged him to come to Vienna to study with him. However that might be, Beethoven went to Vienna in Nov. 1792, and began his studies with Haydn. Not very prudently, Beethoven approached the notable teacher Johann Schenk to help him write the mandatory exercises prior to delivering them to Haydn for final appraisal. In the meantime, Haydn had to go to London again, and Beethoven’s lessons with him were discontinued. Instead, Beethoven began a formal study of counterpoint with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, a learned musician and knowledgeable pedagogue; these studies continued for about a year, until 1795. Furthermore, Beethoven took lessons in vocal composition with the illustrious Italian composer Salieri, who served as Imperial Kapellmeister at the Austrian court. Beethoven was fortunate to find a generous benefactor in Prince Karl Lichnowsky, who awarded him, beginning about 1800, an annual stipend of 600 florins; he was amply repaid for this bounty by entering the pantheon of music history through Beethoven’s dedication to him of the Sonate pathétique and other works, as well as his first opus number, a set of three piano trios. Among other aristocrats of Vienna who were introduced into the gates of permanence through Beethoven’s dedications was Prince Franz Joseph Lobkowitz, whose name adorns the title pages of the six String Quartets, op. 18; the Eroica Symphony (after Beethoven unsuccessfully tried to dedicate it to Napoleon); the Triple Concerto, op.56; and (in conjunction with Prince Razumovsky) the fifth and sixth syms.—a glorious florilegium of great music. Prince Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, played an important role in Beethoven’s life. From 1808 to 1816 he maintained in his residence a string quartet in which he himself played the second violin (the leader was Beethoven’s friend Schuppanzigh). It was to Razumovsky that Beethoven dedicated his three string quartets that became known as the Razumovsky quartets, in which Beethoven made use of authentic Russian folk themes. Razumovsky also shared with Lobkowitz the dedications of Beethoven’s fifth and sixth syms. Another Russian patron was Prince Golitzyn, for whom Beethoven wrote his great string quartets opp. 127, 130, and 132.

Beethoven made his first public appearance in Vienna on March 29, 1795, as soloist in one of his piano concertos (probably the B-flat major Concerto, op.19). In 1796 he played in Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin. He also participated in “competitions,” fashionable at the time, with other pianists, which were usually held in aristocratic salons. In 1799 he competed with Joseph Wölffl and in 1800 with Daniel Steibelt. On April 2, 1800, he presented a concert of his works in the Burgtheater in Vienna, at which his First Sym., in C major, and the Septet in E-flat major were performed for the first time. Other compositions at the threshold of the century were the Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 13, the Pathétique; the C–major Piano Concerto, op. 15; “sonata quasi una fantasia” for Piano in C-sharp minor, op.27, celebrated under the nickname Moonlight Sonata (so described by a romantically inclined critic but not specifically accepted by Beethoven); the D-major Piano Sonata known as Pastoral; eight violin sonatas; three piano trios; five string trios; six string quartets; several sets of variations; and a number of songs.

Fétis was the first to suggest the division of Beethoven’s compositions into three stylistic periods. It was left to Wilhelm von Lenz to fully elucidate this view in his Beethoven et ses trois styles (two vols., St. Petersburg, 1852). Despite this arbitrary chronological division, the work became firmly established in Beethoven literature. According to Lenz, the first period embraced Beethoven’s works from his early years to the end of the 18 th century, marked by a style closely related to the formal methods of Haydn. The second period, covering the years 1801–14, was signaled by a more personal, quasi-Romantic mood, beginning with the Moonlight Sonata; the last period, extending from 1814 to Beethoven’s death in 1827, comprised the most individual, the most unconventional, the most innovative works, such as his last string quartets and the Ninth Sym., with its extraordinary choral finale.

Beethoven’s early career in Vienna was marked by fine success; he was popular not only as a virtuoso pianist and a composer, but also as a social figure who was welcome in the aristocratic circles of Vienna; Beethoven’s students included society ladies and even royal personages, such as Archduke Rudolf of Austria, to whom Beethoven dedicated the so-called Archduke Trio, op.97. But Beethoven’s progress was fatefully affected by a mysteriously growing deafness, which reached a crisis in 1802. On Oct. 8 and 10, 1802, he wrote a poignant document known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” for it was drawn in the village of Heiligenstadt, where he resided at the time. The document, not discovered until after Beethoven’s death, voiced his despair at the realization that the most important sense of his being, the sense of hearing, was inexorably failing. He implored his brothers, in case of his early death, to consult his physician, Dr. Schmidt, who knew the secret of his “lasting malady” contracted six years before he wrote the Testament, i.e., in 1796. The etiology of his illness leaves little doubt that the malady was the dreaded “lues,” with symptoms including painful intestinal disturbances, enormous enlargement of the pancreas, cirrhosis of the liver, and, most ominously, the porous degeneration of the roof of the cranium, observable in the life mask of 1812 and clearly shown in the photograph of Beethoven’s skull taken when his body was exhumed in 1863. However, the impairment of his hearing may have had an independent cause: an otosclerosis, resulting in the shriveling of the auditory nerves and concomitant dilation of the accompanying arteries. Externally, there were signs of tinnitus, a constant buzzing in the ears, about which Beethoven complained. His reverential biographer A.W. Thayer states plainly in a letter dated Oct. 29, 1880, that it was known to several friends of Beethoven that the cause of his combined ailments was syphilis.

To the end of his life Beethoven hoped to find a remedy for his deafness among the latest “scientific” medications. His Konversationshefte bear a pathetic testimony to these hopes; in one, dated 1819, he notes down the address of a Dr. Mayer, who treated deafness by “sulphur vapor” and a vibration machine. By tragic irony, Beethoven’s deafness greatly contributed to the study of his personality, thanks to the existence of the “conversation books” in which his interlocutors wrote down their questions and Beethoven replied, a method of communication which became a rule in his life after 1818. Unfortunately, Beethoven’s friend and amanuensis, Anton Schindler, altered or deleted many of these; it seems also likely that he destroyed Beethoven’s correspondence with his doctors, as well as the recipes which apparently contained indications of treatment by mercury, the universal medication against venereal and other diseases at the time.

It is remarkable that under these conditions Beethoven was able to continue his creative work with his usual energy; there were few periods of interruption in the chronology of his list of works, and similarly there is no apparent influence of his moods of depression on the content of his music; tragic and joyful musical passages had equal shares in his inexhaustible flow of varied works. On April 5, 1803, Beethoven presented a concert of his compositions in Vienna at which he was soloist in his Third Piano Concerto; the program also contained performances of his Second Sym. and of the oratorio Christus am Oelberge . On May 24, 1803, he played in Vienna the piano part of his Violin Sonata, op.47, known as the Kreutzer Sonata , although Kreutzer himself did not introduce it; in his place the violin part was taken over by the mulatto artist George Bridgetower. During the years 1803 and 1804 Beethoven composed his great Sym. No. 3, in E-flat major, op.55, the Eroica . It has an interesting history. Beethoven’s disciple Ferdinand Ries relates that Beethoven tore off the title page of the MS of the score orig. dedicated to Napoleon, after learning of his proclamation as Emperor of France in 1804, and supposedly exclaimed, “So he is a tyrant like all the others after all!” Ries reported this story shortly before his death, some 34 years after the composition of the Eroica, which throws great doubt on its credibility. Indeed, in a letter to the publishing firm of Breitkopf & Härtel, dated Aug. 26, 1804, long after Napoleon’sproclamation of Empire, Beethoven still refers to the title of the work as “really Bonaparte.” His own copy of the score shows that he crossed out the designation “Inttitulata Bonaparte,” but allowed the words written in pencil, in German, “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte” to stand. In Oct. 1806, when the first ed. of the orch. parts was publ. in Vienna, the sym. received the title “Sinfonia eroica composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d’un grand’ uomo” (“heroic sym., composed to celebrate the memory of a great man”). But who was the great man whose memory was being celebrated in Beethoven’s masterpiece? Napoleon was very much alive and was still leading his Grande Armee to new conquests, so the title would not apply. Yet, the famous funeral march in the score expressed a sense of loss and mourning. The mystery remains. There is evidence that Beethoven continued to have admiration for Napoleon. He once remarked that had he been a military man he could have matched Napoleon’s greatness on the battlefield. Beethoven and Napoleon were close contemporaries; Napoleon was a little more than a year older than Beethoven.

In 1803 Emanuel Schikaneder, manager of the Theater an der Wien, asked Beethoven to compose an opera to a libretto he had prepared under the title Vestas Feuer , but he soon lost interest in the project and instead began work on another opera, based on J.N. Bouilly’s Leonore, ou L’Amour conjugal . The completed opera was named Fidelio , which was the heroine’s assumed name in her successful efforts to save her imprisoned husband. The opera was given at the Theater an der Wien on Nov. 20, 1805, under difficult circumstances, a few days after the French army entered Vienna. There were only three performances before the opera was rescheduled for March 29 and April 10, 1806; after another long hiatus a greatly revised version of Fidelio was produced on May 23, 1814. Beethoven wrote three versions of the Overture for Leonore) for another performance, on May 26, 1814, he revised the Overture once more, and this time it was performed under the title Fidelio Overture .

An extraordinary profusion of creative masterpieces marked the years 1802–08 in Beethoven’s life. During these years he brought out the three String Quartets, op.59, dedicated to Count Razumovsky; the fourth, fifth, and sixth syms.; the Violin Concerto; theFourth Piano Concerto; the Triple Concerto; the Coriolan Overture; and a number of piano sonatas, including the D minor, op.31; No. 2, the Tempest; the C major, op.53, the Waldstein; and the F minor, op.57, the Appassionata . On Dec. 22, 1808, his fifth and sixth syms. were heard for the first time at a concert in Vienna; the concert lasted some four hours. Still, financial difficulties beset Beethoven. The various annuities from patrons were uncertain, and the devaluation of the Austrian currency played havoc with his calculations. In Oct. 1808, King Jerome Bonaparte of Westphalia offered the composer the post of Kapellmeister of Kassel at a substantial salary, but Beethoven decided to remain in Vienna. Between 1809 and 1812, Beethoven wrote his Fifth Piano Concerto; the String Quartet in E-flat major, op.74; the incidental music to Goethe’s drama Egmont; the seventh and eighth syms.; and his Piano Sonata in E- flat major, op.8la, whimsically subtitled “Das Lebewohl, Abwe-senheit und Wiedersehn,” also known by its French subtitle, “Les Adieux, l’absence, et le retour.” He also added a specific description to the work, “Sonate caractéristique.” This explicit characterization was rare with Beethoven; he usually avoided programmatic descriptions, preferring to have his music stand by itself. Even in his Sixth Sym., the Pastoral , which bore specific subtitles for each movement and had the famous imitations of birds singing and the realistic portrayal of a storm, Beethoven decided to append a cautionary phrase:”More as an expression of one’s feelings than a picture.” He specifically denied that the famous introductory call in the Fifth Sym. represented the knock of Fate at his door, but the symbolic association was too powerful to be removed from the legend; yet the characteristic iambic tetrameter was anticipated in several of Beethoven’s works, among them the Appassionata and the Fourth Piano Concerto. Czerny, who was close to Beethoven in Vienna, claimed that the theme was derived by Beethoven from the cry of the songbird Emberiza, or Emmerling, a species to which the common European goldfinch belongs, which Beethoven may have heard during his walks in the Vienna woods, a cry that is piercing enough to compensate for Beethoven’s loss of aural acuity. However that may be, the four-note motif became inexorably connected with the voice of doom for enemies and the exultation of the victor in battle. It was used as a victory call by the Allies in World War II; the circumstance that three short beats followed by one long beat spelled V for Victory in Morse code reinforced its effectiveness. The Germans could not very well jail people for whistling a Beethoven tune, so they took it over themselves as the first letter of the archaic German word “Viktoria,” and trumpeted it blithely over their radios. Another famous nicknamed work by Beethoven was the Emperor Concerto , a label attached to the Fifth Piano Concerto, op.73. He wrote it in 1809, when Napoleon’s star was still high in the European firmament, and some publicist decided that the martial strains of the music, with its sonorous fanfares, must have been a tribute to the Emperor of the French. Patriotic reasons seemed to underlie Beethoven’s designation of his Piano Sonata, op. 106, as the Hammerklavier Sonata , that is, a work written for a hammer keyboard, or fortepiano, as distinct from harpsichord. But all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas were for fortepiano; moreover, he assigned the title Hammerklavier to each of the 4 sonatas, namely opp. 101, 106, 109, and 110, using the old German word for fortepiano; by so doing, he desired to express his patriotic consciousness of being a German.

Like many professional musicians, Beethoven was occasionally called upon to write a work glorifying an important event or a famous personage. Pieces of this kind seldom achieve validity, and usually produce bombast. Such a work was Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria , celebrating the British victory over Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother who temporarily sat on the Spanish throne. In 1814 Beethoven wrote a cantata entitled Der glorreiche Augen-blick , intended to mark the “glorious moment” of the fall of his erstwhile idol, Napoleon.

Personal misfortunes, chronic ailments, and intermittent quarrels with friends and relatives preoccupied Beethoven’s entire life. He ardently called for peace among men, but he never achieved peace with himself. Yet he could afford to disdain the attacks in the press; on the margin of a critical but justified review of his Wellington’s Victory , he wrote, addressing the writer: “You wretched scoundrel! What I excrete [he used the vulgar German word scheisse] is better than anything you could ever think up!”

Beethoven was overly suspicious; he even accused the faithful Schindler of dishonestly mishandling the receipts from the sale of tickets at the first performance of the Ninth Sym. He exaggerated his poverty; he possessed some shares and bonds which he kept in a secret drawer. He was untidy in personal habits: he often used preliminary drafts of his compositions to cover the soup and even the chamber pot, leaving telltale circles on the MS. He was strangely naive; he studiously examined the winning numbers of the Austrian government lottery, hoping to find a numerological clue to a fortune for himself. His handwriting was all but indecipherable. An earnest Beethoveniac spent time with a microscope trying to figure out what kind of soap Beethoven wanted his housekeeper to purchase for him; the scholar’s efforts were crowned with triumphant success: the indecipherable word was gelbe —Beethoven wanted a piece of yellow soap. Q.E.D. The copying of his MSS presented difficulties; not only were the notes smudged, but sometimes Beethoven even failed to mark a crucial accidental. A copyist said that he would rather copy 20 pages of Rossini than a single page of Beethoven. On the other hand, Beethoven’s sketchbooks, containing many alternative drafts, are extremely valuable, for they introduce a scholar into the inner sanctum of Beethoven’s creative process.

Beethoven had many devoted friends and admirers in Vienna, but he spent most of his life in solitude. Carl Czerny reports in his diary that Beethoven once asked him to let him lodge in his house, but Czerny declined, explaining that his aged parents lived with him and he had no room for Beethoven. Deprived of the pleasures and comforts of family life, Beethoven sought to find a surrogate in his nephew Karl, son of Caspar Carl Beethoven, who died in 1815. Beethoven regarded his sister-in-law as an unfit mother; he went to court to gain sole guardianship over the boy; in his private letters, and even in his legal depositions, he poured torrents of vilification upon the woman, implying even that she was engaged in prostitution. In his letters to Karl he often signed himself as the true father of the boy. In 1826 Karl attempted suicide; it would be unfair to ascribe this act to Beethoven’s stifling avuncular affection; Karl later went into the army and enjoyed a normal life.

Gallons of ink have been unnecessarily expended on the crucial question of Beethoven’s relationships with women. That Beethoven dreamed of an ideal life companion is clear from his numerous utterances and candid letters to friends, in some of which he asked them to find a suitable bride for him. But there is no inkling that he kept company with any particular woman in Vienna. Beethoven lacked social graces; he could not dance; he was unable to carry on a light conversation about trivia; and behind it all there was the dreadful reality of his deafness. He could speak, but could not always understand when he was spoken to. With close friends he used an unwieldy ear trumpet; but such contrivances were obviously unsuitable in a social gathering. There were several objects of his secret passions, among his pupils or the society ladies to whom he dedicated his works. But somehow he never actually proposed marriage, and they usually married less hesitant suitors. There remains the famous letter Beethoven addressed to an “unsterbliche Geliebte,” the “Immortal Beloved,” but her identity remains a matter of much controversy among Beethoven scholars. See G. Altman, Beethoven: Man of His World: Undisclosed Evidence for His Immortal Beloved (Tallahassee, 1996).

The so-called third style of Beethoven was assigned by biographers to the last 10 or 15 years of his life. It included the composition of his monumental Ninth Sym., completed in 1824 and first performed in Vienna on May 7, 1824; the program also included excerpts from the Missa Solemnis and Die Weihe des Hauses . It was reported that Caroline Unger, the contralto soloist in the Missa Solemnis , had to pull Beethoven by the sleeve at the end of the performance so that he would acknowledge the applause he could not hear. With the Ninth Sym., Beethoven completed the evolution of the symphonic form as he envisioned it. Its choral finale was his manifesto addressed to the world at large, to the text from Schiller’s ode An die Freude . In it, Beethoven, through Schiller, appealed to all humanity to unite in universal love. Here a musical work, for the first time, served a political ideal. Beethoven’s last string quartets, opp. 127, 130, 131, and 132, served as counterparts of his last sym. in their striking innovations, dramatic pauses, and novel instrumental tone colors.

In Dec. 1826, on his way back to Vienna from a visit in Gneixendorf, Beethoven was stricken with a fever that developed into a mortal pleurisy; dropsy and jaundice supervened to this condition; surgery to relieve the accumulated fluid in his organism was unsuccessful, and he died on the afternoon of March 26, 1827. It was widely reported that an electric storm struck Vienna as Beethoven lay dying; its occurrence was indeed confirmed by the contemporary records in the Vienna weather bureau, but the story that he raised his clenched fist aloft as a gesture of defiance to an overbearing Heaven must be relegated to fantasy; he was far too feeble either to clench his fist or to raise his arm. The funeral of Beethoven was held in all solemnity.

Beethoven was memorialized in festive observations of the centennial and bicentennial of his birth, and of the centennial and sesquicentennial of his death. The house where he was born in Bonn was declared a museum. Monuments were erected to him in many cities. Commemorative postage stamps bearing his image were issued not only in Germany and Austria, but in Russia and other countries. Streets were named after him in many cities of the civilized world, including even Los Angeles.

Beethoven’s music marks a division between the Classical period of the 18 th century, exemplified by the great names of Mozart and Haydn, and the new spirit of Romantic music that characterized the entire course of the 19 th century. There are certain purely external factors that distinguish these two periods of musical evolution; one of them pertains to sartorial matters. Music before Beethoven was Zopfmusik , pigtail music. Haydn and Mozart are familiar to us by portraits in which their heads are crowned by elaborate wigs; Beethoven’s hair was by contrast luxuriant in its unkempt splendor. The music of the 18 th century possessed the magnitude of mass production. The accepted number of Haydn’s syms., according to his own count, is 104, but even in his own catalogue Haydn allowed a duplication of one of his symphonic works. Mozart wrote about 40 syms. during his short lifetime. Haydn’s syms. were constructed according to an easily defined formal structure; while Mozart’s last syms. show greater depth of penetration, they do not depart from the Classical convention. Besides, both Haydn and Mozart wrote instrumental works variously entitled cassations, serenades, divertimentos, and suites, which were basically synonymous with syms. Beethoven’s syms. were few in number and mutually different. The first and second syms. may still be classified as Zopfmusik , but with the Third Sym. he entered a new world of music. No sym. written before had contained a clearly defined funeral march. Although the Fifth Sym. had no designated program, it lent itself easily to programmatic interpretation. Wagner attached a bombastic label, “Apotheosis of the Dance,” to Beethoven’s Seventh Sym. The Eighth Sym. Beethoven called his “little sym.,” and the Ninth is usually known as the Choral sym. With the advent of Beethoven, the manufacture of syms. en masse had ceased; Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and their contemporaries wrote but a few syms. each, and each had a distinctive physiognomy. Beethoven had forever destroyed Zopfmusik , and opened the floodgates of the Romantic era. His music was individual; it was emotionally charged; his Kreutzer Sonata served as a symbol for Tolstoy’s celebrated moralistic tale of that name, in which the last movement of the sonata leads the woman pianist into the receptive arms of the concupiscent violinist. But technically the sonata is very difficult for amateurs to master, and Tolstoy’s sinners were an ordinary couple in old Russia.

Similarly novel were Beethoven’s string quartets; a musical abyss separated his last string quartets from his early essays in the same form. Trios, violin sonatas, cello sonatas, and the 32 great piano sonatas also represent evolutionary concepts. Yet Beethoven’s melody and harmony did not diverge from the sacrosanct laws of euphony and tonality. The famous dissonant chord introducing the last movement of the Ninth Sym. resolves naturally into the tonic, giving only a moment’s pause to the ear. Beethoven’s favorite device of pairing the melody in the high treble with triadic chords in close harmony in the deep bass was a peculiarity of his style but not necessarily an infringement of the Classical rules. Yet contemporary critics found some of these practices repugnant and described Beethoven as an eccentric bent on creating unconventional sonorities. Equally strange to the untutored ear were pregnant pauses and sudden modulations in his instrumental works. Beethoven was not a contrapuntist by taste or skill. With the exception of his monumental Grosse Fuge , composed as the finale of the String Quartet, op. 133, his fugai movements were usually free canonic imitations. There is only a single instance in Beethoven’s music of the crab movement, a variation achieved by running the theme in reverse. But he was a master of instrumental variation, deriving extraordinary transformations through melodic and rhythmic alterations of a given theme. His op.120, 33 variations for piano on a waltz theme by the Viennese publisher Diabelli, represents one of the greatest achievements in the art.

When Hans von Bülow was asked which was his favorite key signature, he replied that it was E-flat major, the tonality of the Eroica , for it had three flats: one for Bach, one for Beethoven, and one for Brahms. Beethoven became forever the second B in popular music books.

The literature on Beethoven is immense. The basic catalogues are those by G. Kinsky and H. Halm, Das

Werk Beethovens: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner sämtlichen vollendeten Kompositionen , publ. in Munich and Duisburg in 1955, and by W Hess, Verzeichnis der Gesamtausgabe veröffentlichten Werke Ludwig van Beethovens , publ. in Wiesbaden in 1957. Beethoven attached opus numbers to most of his works, and they are essential in a catalogue of his works.