Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/521

Rh the name of his paternal grandfather Louis, or, in its Ger manized form, Ludwig. Beethoven himself seems to have considered the 16th December of the said year his birthday, but documentary evidence is wanting. At one period of his life he believed himself to have been born in 1772, being most likely deceived on the point by his father, who tried to endow his son and pupil with the prestige of mira culous precocity. Xo less uncertain than the date is the exact place of the great composer s birth ; two houses in Bonn claim the honour of having been the scene of the important event. The youth of Beethoven was passed under by no means happy circumstances. His father was of a rough and violent temper, not improved by his passion for intoxicating drink, nor by the dire poverty under which the family laboured. His chief desire was to reap the earliest possible advantage from the musical abilities of his son, who, in consequence, had at the age of five to submit to a severe training on the violin under the father s super vision. Little benefit was derived from this unsystematic raode of instruction, which, fortunately, was soon abandoned for a more methodical course of pianoforte lessons under a musician of the name of Pfeiffer. Under him and two other masters, Van der Eden and Neefe, Beethoven made rapid progress as a player of the organ and pianoforte ; his proficiency in the theoretical knowledge of his art the aspiring composer soon displayed in a set of Varia tions on a March published in 1783, with the inscrip tion on the title-page, &quot;par un jeune amateur, Louis van Beethoven, dge dix ans,&quot; a statement the inaccuracy of which the reader will be able to trace to its proper source. In 1785 Beethoven was appointed assistant of the court- organist Neefe ; and in a catalogue raisonne of the musicians attached to the court of the archbishop, he is described as &quot;of good capacity, young, of good, quiet behaviour, and poor.&quot; The elector of Cologne at the time was Max Franz, a brother of the Emperor Joseph, who seems to have recognized the first sparks of genius in the quiet and little communicative youth. By him Beethoven was, in 1787, sent for a short time to Vienna, to receive a few lessons from Mozart, who is said to have predicted a great future for his youthful pupil. Beethoven soon returned to Bonn, where he remained for the next five years in the position already described. Little remains to be said of this period of apprenticeship. Beethoven conscientiously studied his art, and reluctantly saw himself compelled to alleviate the difficulties of his family by giving lessons. This aversion to making his art useful to himself by imparting it to others remained a characteristic feature of our master dur ing all his life. Of the compositions belonging to this time nothing now remains ; and it must be confessed that, compared with those of other masters, of Mozart or Handel, for instance, Beethoven s early years were little fertile with regard either to the quantity or the quality of the works produced. Amongst the names connected with his stay at Bonn we mention only that of his first friend, and protector, Count Waldstein, to whom it is said Beethoven owed his appointment at the electoral court, and his first journey to Vienna. To the latter city the young musician repaired a second time in 1792, in order to complete his studies under Haydn, the greatest master then living, who had become acquainted with Beethoven s talent as a pianist and composer on a previous occasion. The relation of these two great men was not to be fruitful or pleasant to either of them. The mild, easy-going nature of the senescent Viennese master was little adapted to inspire with awe, or even with sympathy, the fiery Ehenish youth. Beethoven in after life asserted that he had never learned anything from Haydn, and seems even to have doubted the latter s intention of teaching him in a proper manner. He seems to have had more confidence in the instruction of Albrechts- berger, a dry but thorough scholar. He, however, and all the other masters of Beethoven agree in the statement, that being taught was not much to the liking of their self- willed pupil. He preferred acquiring by his own toilsome experience what it would have been easier to accept on the authority of others. This autodidactic vein, inherent, it seems, in all artistic genius, was of immense importance in the development of Beethoven s ideas and mode of ex pression. In the meantime his worldly prospects seemed to be of the brightest kind. The introductions from the archbishop and Count Waldstein gave him admittance to the drawing- rooms of the Austrian aristocracy, an aristocracy unrivalled by that of any other country in its appreciation of artistic and especially musical talent. Vienna, moreover, had been recently the scene of Mozart s truimphs ; and that prophet s cloak now seemod to rest on the shoulders of the young Rhenish musician. It was chiefly his original style as a pianist, combined with an astonishing gift of improvisation, that at first impressed the amateurs of the capital ; and it seems, indeed, that even Haydn expected greater things from the executive than from the creative talent of his pupil. It may be added here, that, according to the unanimous verdict of competent witnesses, Beethoven s greatness as a pianoforte player consisted more in the bold, impulsive rendering of his poetical intentions than in the absolute finish of his technique, which, particularly in his later years, when his growing deafness debarred him from self-criticism, was somewhat deficient. As a composer Beethoven appeared before the public of the Austrian capital in 1795. In that year his Three Trios for Pianoforte and Strings were published. Beetho ven called this work his Opus 1, and thus seems to disown his former compositions as juvenile attempts unworthy of remembrance. He was tit that time twenty-five, an age at which Mozart had reaped some of the ripest fruits of his genius. But Beethoven s works are not like those of the earlier master, the result of juvenile and all but unconscious spontaneity ; they are the bitter fruits of thought and sor row, the results of a passionate but conscious strife for ideal aims. Before considering these works in their chief features, we will add a few more remarks as to the life and character of their author. The events of his outward career are so few and of so simple a kind that a continuous narrative seems hardly required. The numerous admirers whom Beethoven s art had found amongst the highest circles of Vienna, Archduke Rudolf, his devoted pupil and friend, amongst the number, determined him to take up his permanent residence in that city, which henceforth he left only for occasional excursions to Baden, Modling, and other places in the beautiful surroundings of the Austrian capital. It was here, in his lonely walks, that the master received new impulse from his admiring intercourse with nature, and that most of his grandest works were conceived and partly sketched. Except for a single artistic tour to Northern Germany in 1796, Beethoven never left Vienna for any length of time. A long-projected journey to England, in answer to an invitation of the London Philharmonic Society, was ultimately made impossible by ill-health. Beethoven s reputation as a composer soon became established beyond the limits of his own country, notwithstanding the charges of abstruseness, unpopularity, and the like, which he, like most men of original power, had to submit to from the obtuse arrogance of contem porary criticism. The summit of his fame, so far as it manifested itself in personal honours conferred upon him, was reached in 1815, when Beethoven celebrated by a Symphony the victories of the Allies over the French oppressor, and was rewarded by the applause of the sovereigns of Europe, assembled at the Congress of Vienna. 