Beethoven's Major Accomplishments

When we talk about Beethoven people often recall him as one that was great. When you think of Beethoven you can consider him a transitional composer and that is mainly because he is the crucial transitional figure linking the Classical and Romantic eras of musical history. Beethoven's innovation was the ability to briskly establish imperishability in bringing together different keys and unexpected notes to join them. Beethoven's music was correspondent to the agreement of the music in literature. Most of his music focused on life drama of one or more individuals through hard life circumstances. Beethoven’s role as a transitional composer between the classical and romantic periods took

Beethoven is perhaps the most famous musician of all time. His influence on later composers was extremely huge, to the extent where many composers were intimidated by his music. Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770 into a family of musicians. His father and grandfather were both musicians at the court of Elector in the German town of Bonn. His grandfather was very respected, but his dad not so much given that he was an alcoholic. At a young age, Beethoven was put in charge of his family’s finances and started a job at the court. He composed music and helped look after the instrumentation. Around the same time, he began to write music. In 1790, an important visitor passed through Bonn: this was Franz Joseph Haydn. He was on his way to London for a visit when he stopped to meet Beethoven and agreed to take him on as a student when he came back from London to Vienna. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna to study with Hayden. Apparently, it did not go as planned. Hayden was old fashion and a little overbearing, while Beethoven was rebellious and headstrong. Beethoven found support among the rich arts who lived in Vienna. Prince Lichnowsky gave him board and lodging at his place for in return, Beethoven would compose music and preform at evening parties.

had to raise his two brothers because their father wasn’t able to care for them after he became an alcoholic because of the passing of his wife.

Ever since his father began teaching him as a child to play the violin and clavier, any keyboard instrument such as the harpsichord, Ludwig van Beethoven has been amongst the most renowned and influential composers of music. Despite the harsh punishments and mistreatment Beethoven suffered through while practicing with his father, he still managed to become a “prodigy” at a rather young age, having his first public recital at around seven years old. After his first recital role music played in his continued to grow, and soon after dropping out of school to pursue music “full time” he published his first composition.

Only a few composers in the history of time have ever successfully left their mark throughout our musical world we live in today. It’s been over two hundred years since the birth of Beethoven and his music still speaks to us today as he originally expressed and composed it. Ludwig Van Beethoven was born in the city of Bonn Germany on December 16th 1770 and has since been one of the most influential composers known to man. A common theme of early age learning and mastering seems to emerge in Beethoven’s life because while living in a musical family as a child, his father taught him how to play the piano, violin and in addition how to compose musical pieces since he was four years of age. A few short years later, he gave his first public piano performance at the age of seven. While Beethoven certainly gained a lot of knowledge from his peers, he also supported his family by giving music lessons and also by playing in the court orchestra. In the year 1792, Beethoven worked under an Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn and by the year 1800, his compositions established him as a strong Mozart successor.

Although Beethoven wrote only nine symphonies, his symphonies were highly abstract and much heavier symphonies than any of Mozart’s and Hayden’s. Beethoven was far from lazy he was great, and he was a perfectionist, his process of creation was just like chiseling the work from a stone into a beautiful piece of art, while Mozart and Hayden could make a symphony quick and be satisfied easily with their work, Beethoven would work constantly to perfect his work. If you look at Beethoven’s fifth symphonies sketches from the earliest beginning point, and compare them to the final product he came up with, you can see how much work he must have put in to the fifth symphony to get it to be the groundbreaking powerful piece of musical art we know today.

Making a living as a composer could be broken down into two groups; there are those who work very hard and learn everything from the basics, and there are those who are natural prodigies. Compared to music nowadays, composers in the early ages seemed that they needed to be remarkable in order to be noticed by many people. Nowadays, people can simply make any kind of music they please and somehow people can make a trend out of it. Earlier composers had originality, which was everywhere, even if it meant going against the mainstream of the music components. Whether it is having dissonance in their music or creating a whole new style, each composer created their own signature style that the audience could point out and had differentiated composers

Still considered “one of the greatest composers of the West European music traditions” (Columbia), Beethoven has influenced the classical world in great manners. The life of Beethoven was a sorrowful one with him becoming “deaf at age 32” (Eckley), being depressed, ill, and constantly falling in love despite never marrying. Bowden adds Beethoven writing a letter to the ’Immortal Beloved’, “a woman whose identity Beethoven careful to conceal” (Bowden). Such problems never stopped his passion for composing. Beethoven broke the classical music traditions of Haydn and Mozart. For example, he composed the wonderful piece “Third Symphony, the Eorcia.” Columbia believes Erocia showed freedom and nobility through its harmonies and orchestration. Other famous pieces include Moonlight Sonata, Kreutzer Sonata for Violin, and 5th Symphony. The pieces showed pain, sorrow, or pure angst which influenced romantic composers and many afterward.

Music is a very long-lasting and powerful thing in our world. It has a long history with many genius artist and innovators. One of these people is Beethoven. Beethoven is universally known as one of the greatest musicians of all time. Even during his life music changed a lot and has continued to change even after his life. Around his time in the 18th century you could only see music in a live performance. This made music a strictly social arena. Nowadays we can listen on our iPods or computers by ourselves with headphones. As music evolved from just being able to be seen live it became less and less social. That may be seen as a negative of the evolution of music by many but I while able to understand that point of view see it as a positive. The reason why I see it as mostly positive is

Beethoven, is a well known name that one definitely knows for his famous works. Born on December 16, 1770 , Germany, he was the oldest son of Johann and Maria Magdalena van Beethoven. His father was a singer however, was more well known for his alcohol addiction.. Between the birth of his second brother, Beethoven’s father taught him how to play music in an abusive way, hitting Beethoven when he didn’t play the music piece properly. Thus, Beethoven became a brilliant composer and piano player at a young age. For example, Beethoven at the age of 19 composed a musical piece for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who had died and it was a success. Other examples of his most famous works are, Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata and the 5th symphony. In the

Difficult as it may be to define the true relationship of an artist to his successors, this difficulty is enormously increased when the subject is as complex a man and musician as Beethoven. His role as both a “preserver of the eighteenth-century tradition1 and a pioneer of romantic self-expression, has secured his status as one of the most revered composers in the history of Western music. Throughout his symphonic cycle, Beethoven’s own journey of self-discovery can be very clearly heard. The Third, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth symphonies were particularly pioneering; they used new ideas such as programme music, orchestral and symphonic expansion and the prolongation of dissonance, inspiring a new generation of romantic symphonists. However, there is an equally strong argument, suggesting that musical fashion and history had turned away from Beethoven towards the end of his life. In the music of his immediate contemporaries, with the exception of Schubert perhaps, his work hardly played a vital force and it was not until the latter half of the 19th century that his influence began to dominate the musical scene. Composers such as Brahms and Bruckner developed the motivic and intrinsically musical ideas in Beethoven’s music whilst others such as Berlioz, Liszt, Mahler and Wagner embraced the extra-musical programmatic ideas. Through an extension of Beethoven’s work in both of these strands, his legacy

Through exploring Beethoven’s compositions throughout his career, readers are able to recognize various factors that influenced the style of his music in each period of his life. In his early period, his

Beethoven continued to compose after Eroica. Which of the excerpts of Beethoven’s later works do you like the best? Why?

The early piano sonatas of Beethoven deserve special mention. Although his first published examples of concertos and trios and the first two symphonies are beneath the masterpieces of Mozart and Haydn, the piano sonatas bear an unmistakably Beethovian stamp: grandiose in scope and length, and innovative in their range of expression. The sonatas were able to move expression from terrible rage to peals of laughter to deep depression so suddenly. Capturing this unpredictable style in his music, a new freedom of expression which broke the bounds of Classical ideals, was to position Beethoven as a disturbed man in the minds of some of his contemporaries. Furthermore, he was to be seen as the father of Romanticism and the single most important innovator of music in the minds of those after him. (Bookspan 27).

Beethoven writes on in this letter his thoughts of suicide, but that he refrained from doing so because he felt called to compose more than his current repertoire at the time had. Even while going deaf, Beethoven continued to create magnificent pieces of music that forcefully carried emotion into its listener’s ears with pieces like the famous Moonlight Sonata and Piano Sonata in E Minor. This music that Beethoven was composing had true passion behind it, which is something that contributed in the shift from the Classical Era to the Romantic Period in music. The word “simplicity” can be used to describe Beethoven’s numerous compositions because they were not the intricate fast-moving pieces that Mozart was known for, but rather simple and elegant musical pieces.