beethoven

As someone who suffers from extreme hearing loss, I am amazed at the great

Talent of Ludwig vans Beethoven, who as one of the greatest composers of all time wrote most of his music while he was deaf! It seems impossible, but what a genius he was.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany on December 16, 1770. His mother died while he was a teenager and his father was very abusive and a crazy alcoholic. Beethoven came from a very musical family. His grandfather became a conductor and his father played and taught piano and violin.

From a very young age, Beethoven was a perfectionist and became emotional and moody when things didn’t go well with his music. Beethoven saw his world as “all or nothing,” If something he was working on wasn’t absolutely perfect, he would feel he was a total failure. In Beethoven’s life, there wasn’t room for any compromise. He began to realize that he was losing his hearing when he was 28 and he couldn’t hear the church bells ringing. Some people have said that his terrible temper was really his frustration with his music as he became more and more deaf. Beethoven became so sad about his deafness that he considered suicide. He even wrote a suicide letter to his brother to tell him that he planned to kill himself. When he was 50, he was completely deaf. As time went on, Beethoven learned how to cope with his disability. One way Beethoven coped was in order to hear the sounds; he would cut off the legs of the piano and put it on the floor, so that he could feel the sounds in the floor as he played. Once he learned how to handle this, Beethoven began to write his greatest works. Beethoven was such a perfectionist that he would rework his musical compositions for years until they were perfect. It is incredible that during his life, Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and thirty-two piano sonatas.

Because of these problems, Beethoven never had many close friends or happy relationships. The music he created showed this and was almost sad and heavy, it wasn’t full of life and fun. Beethoven loved to take walks in the country and enjoy the beauty of nature. It was nature that gave him the inspiration to write “Symphony No. 6.” One of Beethoven’s earliest and most successful works was a religious composition, named “Opus 85”, in 1803, known as the “Hallelujah” choir that we all sing on Easter Sunday.