Articles
www.politesocietymagazine.com
BEETHOVEN - FROM THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR
By Sean Renaud
Beethoven is one of those composers we all learn about in school. Crazy hair. Deaf. Wrote a bunch of cool music (that we heard once in Bugs Bunny). What many of us miss out on is the full scope of Beethoven’s story. He was born in 1770 in Bonn, Germany and was one of seven children, and one of only three of those to survive infancy. His father was a professional musician himself, who recognized in his son from a very early age an extraordinary musical ability. Beethoven was a child prodigy who would eventually come to study with Josef Haydn, one of the great composers of the Classical Era and a contemporary of Mozart. Beethoven’s early compositions were all incredibly brilliant, but still very much in the style of his Classical forebears. In those times, music was written with very specific guidelines and rules that were rarely (if ever) broken.
Beethoven’s approach to composition would change drastically in the summer of 1802. He had been suffering from a severe case of tinnitus (a constant ringing in the ears found in many career musicians) for quite some time. Believing, correctly so, that he would eventually lose the ability to hear entirely, Beethoven spent the summer contemplating his condition and writing music in the quiet town of Heiligenstadt. Here he wrote a sort of last will and testament in the form of a letter to his brothers, describing how he had felt a strong urge to commit suicide. For the six years prior to
his 1802 stay in Heiligenstadt he had been spiraling into a maddening depression,
6