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Beethoven: where to start with his music
Jul 1, 2020
I t’s not only because this year is the 250th anniversary of his birth that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is the obvious composer with whom to begin a series like this, just as it’s no accident of history that almost two centuries after his death, Beethoven is still seen as the archetype of the great composer – the gruff, uncompromising genius increasingly cut off from the world by deafness, who forged his own artistic path, increasingly regardless of what others thought of him and his work.
The music you might recognise
The music by which he’s known to the wider world – whether it’s his Fifth Symphony , with its V for Victory motto that became such a symbol of hope for the allies during the second world war, the setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy that ends his Ninth , or piano works such as the Moonlight Sonata and the bagatelle Für Elise , known to generations of aspiring pianists – tells only a small part of the Beethoven story. Such familiar works hardly hint at his significance or the magnitude and breadth of his achievement, let alone explain why he is such a pivotal figure in the history of what we generally regard as “classical” music, and how it developed from the baroque of the 17th century to the modernism of the 20th.
His life …
Before Beethoven, composers mostly wrote music to order, whether for the church or rich patrons (as JS Bach did) or as employees of European noble courts (as Haydn and Mozart were for much of their creative lives). If the great composers of those eras were often able to transcend such constraints to create music that was elegant and profoundly personal, Beethoven was determined to take that idea of creative independence much farther.
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