Early to the Middle "Heroic" Period of Beethoven
December 20, 2024
By: Noel Morris
Early Beethoven
December 16, 1770 - Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn. His grandfather Ludwig was the much-loved Kapellmeister at court (master of music). Beethoven's brute father, Johann, was a tenor and a lesser talent, although he was popular at the local pub. He beat music into young Ludwig, starting with piano and adding violin and viola. Grandfather Ludwig died when the boy was only three, but his memory stuck with the composer as a father figure.
Young Ludwig started earning his keep at fourteen, playing for the court. He helped care for his brothers and ran interference for the family, scooping up his drunken dad before the authorities could arrest him.
At sixteen, Ludwig received a grant from the Elector of Bonn to study music in Vienna. He arrived eighteen days later and presented himself to Mozart. Little is known about that meeting, but an urgent message quashed Beethoven's hopes: his mother lay on her deathbed, and he had to hurry home.
"You shall receive Mozart's spirit through Haydn's hands."
—Count Waldstein
Mozart died before Beethoven could make it back to Vienna. The younger composer bided his time in Bonn, growing into a monster pianist and improviser. After five years, Count Waldstein bankrolled a return trip, sending Beethoven to study with Franz Joseph Haydn. Sadly, the two composers didn't mesh; their personalities clashed. Beethoven snuck lessons from other teachers and jumped into the fast lane, cranking out piano music to match his dazzling virtuosity. Hopping from palace to palace, he wowed the Viennese elite and became a local celebrity.
In truth, Beethoven owed a great debt to Haydn (and Mozart). He absorbed their legacy and took up the mantle, writing chamber works, concertos, solo piano pieces, and his first two symphonies. Emphasizing clarity and restraint, he demonstrated full command of the Classical style.
The Middle "Heroic" Period
"Without suffering, there is no struggle; without struggle, no victory; without victory, no crown."
Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford attributed those words to Maria Magdalena van Beethoven, the composer's mother. For her, it was a motto, but it reads like prophecy to us. Where Classicists treated struggle with a delicate hand, middle-period Beethoven seized it by the throat and turned it into art.
In his mid-twenties, Beethoven began to experience tinnitus in his left ear—a disastrous condition for a busy pianist. In 1802, a doctor recommended he take the waters in Heiligenstadt, a spa town nestled among vineyards and the Vienna Woods. Beethoven spent six months there, taking day hikes and writing music. Needless to say, the mineral baths did nothing for his hearing, but he did begin to come to terms with it. He described his condition in a letter to his brothers—a portrait of desperation, despair, and grit.
"I would have ended my life—it was only my art that held me back," he wrote. Through that letter, we learn about the maelstrom in Beethoven's head and his struggle to see a way forward. "Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me." He never sent the letter but always kept it with him.
From that moment, Beethoven threw his energy into composition. Ideas poured from his brain, and he scribbled them out, amassing a muss of sketches that would later become symphonies, concertos, and chamber works. While his first decade in Vienna centered around the private homes of the elite, his second put him before the public. Haydn and Mozart's lean, gentile aesthetic no longer aligned with his spirit. During his "Heroic" decade, he ripped the polite veneer off music to express tragedy, adversity, heroism, and victory. First up, he wrote his Bonaparte Symphony, the piece we'd come to know as Eroica. He followed with the Symphonies Nos. 4-8, three piano concertos, his Violin Concerto, and his opera Fidelio. His music shocked the Viennese with its tempestuousness and scale and lit the way for the Romantics.