Hello again! This week we will be taking a look at Beethoven, one of the “three B’s” of classical music along with Bach and Brahms. This blog will be slightly less lighthearted than my others because I wanted to tackle the issue of Beethoven’s mental health. Mental health affects so many students nowadays, but back in the 18th century, there was virtually no definition of mental illness. This lapse may be why society has painted Beethoven as that crazy deaf guy who wrote some pretty genius music. But he is so much more than that.
Let’s start out with Beethoven’s childhood. His father, who noticed Beethoven’s musical skill early, sought to make his son the next Mozart-like child prodigy. He physically abused the young child into practicing and performing music. He was also sickened by many illnesses from childhood to adulthood – colitis, rheumatism, typhus, smallpox, abscesses, infections, and hepatitis.
Beethoven was famous for his improvisation while building his reputation as a young piano virtuoso before the loss of his hearing. He even performed for Mozart when he was 17 years old, who, legend has it, told the world to keep an eye on Beethoven because he would give them something to talk about.
Beethoven moved to Vienna to continue his musical career, where he received lessons from the great Joseph Haydn! Apparently, they didn’t get along very well; yet lessons from the father of the symphony proved instrumental, I’m sure (pun intended hehe).
When Beethoven was at the height of his career in his mid-20’s, performing for the nobility of Vienna, he began to hear a constant buzzing in his ears. He had to use conversation books to communicate with his friends through writing. By age 44, he was completely deaf.
For a musician, going deaf is extremely catastrophic. According to the Western Journal of Medicine, Beethoven suffered from Paget’s disease of bone, which affected his facial and body structures and, most prominently, his hearing. This loss of hearing was so detrimental that Beethoven became depressed and retreated to Heiligenstadt, a town outside of Vienna.
Feeling isolated and hopeless, Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers that detailed his despair, now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. He detailed how he was forced to face his deafness without hope of a cure and how he was considering suicide. Yet, the call within him to produce music was so powerful that he resisted taking his own life; Beethoven stated, “it seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.”
This letter marked the end of what is known as Beethoven’s early period, where he wrote pieces like Rondo a Capriccio (“Rage Over a Lost Penny” – one of my favorites) and the Pathétique sonata. His middle period was decidedly more emotional, as he eventually lost all hearing and composed what he could never hear played. According to legend, Beethoven sawed the legs off his piano so that he could feel the vibrations of the instrument through the floorboards.
Because he could not hear his compositions nor the music of the day, Beethoven “conjured a world of sound different from anything previously conceived… [and] reflected struggle and the attempt to achieve transcendence over that struggle,” according to Bryan Maxwell in his essay “The Music and Mind of Beethoven: Chords of Disquiet.”
During this middle period, Beethoven wrote the famous Moonlight Sonata (aka the bane of my existence in grade school to learn), although that nickname was given to the piece after his death. He also wrote his “Eroica” symphony; it was originally dedicated to Napoleon until he declared himself emperor, ruining his image in Beethoven’s mind so much that he furiously scratched out Napoleon’s name on the manuscript. This period also contained the tempestuous Fifth Symphony and his only opera, Fidelio, on which he worked long and hard to get it just right.
Beethoven’s final period resulted from the victory of a custody battle for his 9-year-old nephew; thereafter his musical rages declined, and he wrote more spiritual and joyful pieces like his Ninth Symphony (which contains Ode to Joy), which was revolutionary in that it featured a chorus.
Yet even with his composing, Beethoven could not suppress his depression. He turned to drinking to try to cure his ailments. At the age of 56, Beethoven died during a raging thunderstorm (quite a fitting way to go, huh?) due to cirrhosis of the liver from chronic alcoholism.
Beethoven is truly one of the greatest composers of all time, known by pretty much everyone even two hundred years later. His musical legacy lives on – you can hear his music in so many commercials and movies if you listen – as so many musicians, young and old, strive to master his compositions. We must remember him not as just a tortured artist but as a person too – one who inspiringly overcame so many obstacles to make a name for himself.
Several scholars ask whether we would have received the same musical genius if Beethoven had not lost his hearing or suffered from depression. However, we must ask ourselves, especially today with mental illness becoming more prevalent, if artistic genius is really worth the cost of one’s sanity and peace of mind.
Here are more pieces of Beethoven’s to check out:
Für Elise (Bagatelle in A Minor)
String Quartets – any of them really, he redefined the string quartet. But here’s number 11, “Serioso”
And yes, our meme of the week is still here!
Here are my references:
Budden, Julian Medforth, and Raymond L. Knapp. “Ludwig Van Beethoven: Approaching Deafness.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 5 Sept. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-van-Beethoven/Approaching-deafness#ref383691.
Malinsky, Gili. “19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Beethoven.” Mental Floss, 12 Aug. 2014, www.mentalfloss.com/article/58297/19-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-beethoven.
Maxwell, Bryan. “The Music and Mind of Beethoven.” CSAHQ, 2011, www.csahq.org/docs/default-source/news-and-events-docs/csa-bulletin-docs/volume-60-number-3/maxwell_60_3.pdf?sfvrsn=48f5c646_2.
Spencer, Mel. “Beethoven: Compositions, Biography, Siblings and More Facts.” Classic FM, Global, 25 Sept. 2018, www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/guides/beethoven-20-facts-about-great-composer/.
Wolf, Paul. “Creativity and Chronic Disease: Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827).” The Western Journal of Medicine, BMJ Publishing Group, Nov. 2001, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071597/.