Beethoven's 250th birthday today!

[bart]

https://www.classicfm.com/composers/...ven-haus-bonn/

[PHC1]

250th Birthday of the German composer who would go on to compose 722 works written over forty-five years, from his earliest work in 1782 (variations for piano on a march by Ernst Christoph Dressler) when he was only twelve years old and still in Bonn, till his last work just before his death in Vienna in 1827 at the age of 56.

By the age of 44, he was almost totally deaf and unable to hear voices or so many of the sounds of his beloved countryside.




Beethoven was the grandson of Ludwig van Beethoven (1712–1773), a musician from the town of Mechelen in the Austrian Duchy of Brabant (in what is now the Flemish region of Belgium) who had moved to Bonn at the age of 21. Ludwig was employed as a bass singer at the court of Clemens August, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, eventually rising to become, in 1761, Kapellmeister (music director) and hence a pre-eminent musician in Bonn. The portrait he commissioned of himself towards the end of his life remained displayed in his grandson's rooms as a talisman of his musical heritage. Ludwig had one son, Johann (1740–1792), who worked as a tenor in the same musical establishment and gave keyboard and violin lessons to supplement his income.

Johann married Maria Magdalena Keverich in 1767; she was the daughter of Heinrich Keverich (1701–1751), who had been the head chef at the court of the Archbishopric of Trier. Beethoven was born of this marriage in Bonn at what is now the Beethoven House Museum, Bonnstrasse 20. There is no authentic record of the date of his birth; but the registry of his baptism, in the Catholic Parish of St. Remigius on 17 December 1770, survives, and the custom in the region at the time was to carry out baptism within 24 hours of birth. There is a consensus (with which Beethoven himself agreed) that his birth date was 16 December, but no documentary proof of this.

Of the seven children born to Johann van Beethoven, only Ludwig, the second-born, and two younger brothers survived infancy. Kaspar Anton Karl was born on 8 April 1774, and Nikolaus Johann, (generally known as Johann) the youngest, was born on 2 October 1776.




The house Ludwig Von Beethoven was born in, is still there.



The house at Bonngasse 20, where composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born in December 1770, is one of the few remaining houses in Bonn built in the 18th century. Its baroque stone facade was erected over cellars dating back to the 12th or 13th century. The ground floor accommodated a kitchen and a utility room, underneath which was a cellar. On the first floor, there were two smaller rooms and a somewhat larger room. The bedrooms were in the attic.

Beethoven's parents, electoral court singer Johann van Beethoven and his wife Maria Magdalena, née Keverich, moved into the garden wing in November 1767. Other electoral court musicians lived nearby, among them Johann Peter Salomon in the front building, electoral court musical director Ludwig van Beethoven (grandfather) opposite of the street and hornist Nikolaus Simrock.

In 1774 the Beethoven family left their first house and moved to a place at the Auf dem Dreieck square. From 1776 on they lived for ten years with interruptions at Rheingasse in a house known as "Zum Walfisch", the so-called Fischer house, and from 1787 onwards at Wenzelgasse. None of the later Beethoven houses has survived.