Beethoven and the LSO

When Ludwig van Beethoven was a young man, France overthrew its monarchy and rebellion spread through Europe. Riding the crest of a wave of social change, Beethoven changed not just the sound of music but the standing of the artist in society. He introduced the concept the ‘artist-hero’, paving the way for Romanticism and even popular culture.

Beethoven was born in a faraway corner of what is now Germany to an alcoholic and abusive father. He chanced his way to Europe’s cultural capital, Vienna, where he studied with Joseph Haydn and probably associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

From musical foundations steadied by those two figures, Beethoven led music into the first-person passions of Romanticism. He wrote in every genre, and with the possible exception of opera, transformed each of them. He reimagined the scale and scope of the symphony and invested the string quartet with a level of psychological depth that dumbfounded his peers. Beethoven used rhythm like no other composer before him and pushed harmony to the boundaries of tangibility. He exploited the piano’s technological transformation to mine entirely new expressions from the instrument.

Writing for himself and not to deadlines, Beethoven was able to be more deliberate and considered in his compositions. But the story of his career is one of the constant overcoming of colossal obstacles. From the age of 26, the composer knew he had serious problems with his hearing and for the last seven years of his life he could hear almost nothing. That made him irritable, sensitive and withdrawn. But Beethoven always remained ever sure of himself, and consistently creative.

By Andrew Mellor