Ludwig van Beethoven program notes (Feb'02) | Chamber Orchestra of the Springs

Beethoven's time was one of revolutions and wars, terror and reform, poverty and extravagance and in many ways his music reflects the turbulence of the age in which he lived. Austria was at war with Ottoman Turkey, the French were in dispute with Austria, and England with France. The fall of the Bastille in 1789 was a sign of the end of the old order, extinguished forever. The period brought wide cultural changes, changes in political philosophy and in society, in literature, in painting and in music with the towering genius of Beethoven, later referred to by Liszt as "the pillar of smoke that led to the Promised Land." Beethoven is seen as the bridge from the restraint and preoccupation with form of the Classical era, to the wildly personalized and emotional Romantic era.

Beethoven had a remarkable musical output. Just to name a few: 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, 6 piano concerti plus a fragment (of which only 5 remain in the repertoire), 10 violin sonatas, 4 cello sonatas, 172 folk song arrangements, 60 canons and "musical jokes," at least 2 ballets, an opera ("Fidelio"), and a large number of other works for chamber ensembles, choir, voice ... and 9 great symphonies that still represent the highest consistent level of symphonic output by any composer in history.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in the provincial court city of Bonn, Germany, probably on December 16, 1770. Beethoven's talent was such that, at the age of 12, he was already assistant to the organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, with whom he studied. Attempts to establish him as a prodigy in the mold of Mozart had little success, however.

In 1787 Beethoven was sent to Vienna, but his mother fell ill, and he had to return to Bonn almost immediately. She died a few months later, and in 1789 Beethoven himself requested that his alcoholic father be retired, a move that left him responsible for his two younger brothers. Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna a second time in November of 1792, in order to study with Haydn.

In 1794 French forces occupied the Rhineland; consequently, Beethoven's ties with and support from the Bonn court came to an end. His father had died a month after his departure from Bonn, and his brothers joined him in Vienna. He remained there the rest of his life, leaving only for holidays and concerts in nearby cities. His only extended journey was to Prague, Dresden, and Berlin in 1796. Beethoven never held an official position in Vienna. He supported himself by giving concerts, by teaching piano, and increasingly through the sale of his compositions. Members of the Viennese aristocracy were his steady patrons, and in 1809 three of them - Prince Kinsky, Prince Lobkowitz, and the Archduke Rudolph - even guaranteed him a yearly income with the sole condition that he remain in Vienna.

The last 30 years of Beethoven's life were shaped by a series of personal crises, the first of which was the onset of deafness. The early symptoms, noticeable to the composer already before 1800, affected him socially more than musically. His reaction was despair, resignation, and defiance. Resolving finally to "seize fate by the throat," he emerged from the crisis with a series of triumphant works that mark the beginning of a new period in his stylistic development.

A second crisis a decade later was the breaking off of a relationship with an unnamed lady (probably Antonie Brentano, the wife of a friend) known to us as the "Immortal Beloved," as Beethoven addressed her in a series of letters in July 1812. This was apparently the most serious of several such relationships with women who were in some way out of his reach, and its traumatic conclusion was followed by a lengthy period of resignation and reduced musical activity.

During this time Beethoven's deafness advanced to the stage that he could no longer perform publicly, and he required a slate or little notebooks (now known as "conversation books") to communicate with visitors. The death of his brother Caspar Carl in 1815 led to a 5-year legal struggle for custody of Caspar's son Karl, then 9 years old, in whom Beethoven saw a last chance for the domestic life that had otherwise eluded him. His possessiveness of Karl provoked a final crisis in the summer of 1826, when the young man attempted suicide. Shortly thereafter, Beethoven's health began to fail, and he died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

Beethoven's König Stephan Overture, op. 117, is one of the composer's "forgotten gems." While Beethoven spent the best part of ten years on the four Leonore/Fidelio overtures, he managed to write King Stephan and Ruins of Athens in the space of just three weeks in 1811. They were intended as a musical embellishment to a two-part festival drama that August von Kotzebue had written for the opening of the new German Theatre in Pest. The first part, which he called "Prelude," was dedicated to "King Stephan, Hungary's first benefactor." Beethoven's five piano concertos are more closely associated with his appearances as a pianist than another group of works. The immediate evidence for this is that he lost interest in piano concertos when he was compelled by advancing deafness to give up performing in public. He had to hand over his last and greatest concerto, the Fifth in E-flat, to his pupil Czerny to perform. A sixth, in D major, came to a halt as a sketch in 1815. The Fifth Piano Concerto in E-flat, op. 73, received mixed reviews in its first performances, despite later becoming a staple of the concert hall. There is a slight irony in the fact that Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto bears the title Emperor. Beethoven wrote it in Vienna in 1809, while the city was occupied by Napoleon's troops. Formerly an admirer of Napoleon, Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony to him, later to rip the dedication page out in anger. His resentment of Napoleon led to a flurry of patriotic works: Egmont, Wellington's Victory, and, to a lesser degree, the Seventh Symphony. Thus, the title Emperor is not used in Europe, and was probably started in England.