I never understood one thing and I thought maybe you could enlighten me? I don't get the wordplay from Beethoven into Baethoven... I know I've been playing and loving the piano for ages but I don't get it... Thanks in advance!
no problemo!! so as you know ludwig van beethoven is one of the most influential composers of all time but hey there are a lot of composers out there so why beethoven?
first off he was born right on the heels of the success of our favorite little shit wolfgang amadeus mozart, and ludwig’s dad was real savvy and tried to market his kid like mozart had been marketed as a child prodigy, and he lied on advertisements for ludwig’s performances about his age. some hold that his dad was a brutal teacher who left ludwig in tears at the piano and when ludwig got to finally go to vienna to study with mozart, did he even get to meet him? nope.
his dad and mom soon died of alcoholism and severe illness respectively and while he’s dealing with supporting his family, guess who else dies?? the little shit who took vienna by storm, mozart, whom ludwig always aspired to study with. so ludwig goes to study with joseph haydn and is effectively tasked with “receiv[ing] Mozart’s spirit through Haydn’s hands.” the whole music community is watching to see how u fill the Mozart Vacuum, ludwig. no pressure.
so beethoven wrote with a mozarty flair for a while and cranked out a couple symphonies and piano sonatas but by age 26 the man started to lose his hearing. as a musician this was his bread and butter and he suffered immensely. some anecdotes about that:
it physically hurt his ears in the beginning to even have a conversation
his doctor told him to go live in the small village of Heiliganstadt in Austria to get away from everything and just come to terms with it
suicide letters. beethoven wrote to his brothers lamenting his condition and how he’d considered killing himself but had since resolved to stay strong for the sake of his art, and saw the whole damn thing as a challenge (“I will seize Fate by the throat. It will not wholly conquer me!”)
he tried to hear with this thing?? can you even imagine having to hold this to your ear all the time?
he lost the ability to hear the higher frequencies first, so when his friends would come around he would always be thundering extra-loudly on the low keys of the piano, and he’d remark, “isn’t it beautiful?”
he had to carry little notebooks with him all the time so people could write what they wanted to say to him. they estimate that he went through 400 of them
at the end of the premiere of his ninth symphony the crowd gave him overwhelming, thunderous applause, but someone had to go up to him and spin him around to face the audience because he couldn’t hear it.
and while he did all this, beethoven completely revolutionized the way music was going. his works turned from mozarty and light to absolutely brutal, stormy, violent and often very tortured (but not always) as his deafness grew and he dealt with love life trouble, the death of his brothers, and his own other illnesses. his ventures into the extremely emotional marked the beginning of a whole new era in classical music— the Romantic period.
beethoven pushed right through some of the biggest most insurmountable difficulties that human beings can face. he was a hell of a man and we love him today for it
and that my friend (besides “bee-” being a homophone) is why he is TOP BAE