10 Things You Never Knew About Beethoven By Susan Lund

His first Mass, in 1807, inspired a jeering put-down from his patron. ‘O, Beethoven, what is this that you have done again!’ An orchestral player laughed. When Beethoven returned to Vienna to his then beloved, Josephine Deym, her servants shut the door in his face.

A hundred and fifty leading conductors recently voted Beethoven’s Eroica ‘The world’s greatest symphony’.

Beethoven was praised as an innovative composer from the age of 12. His father encouraged him to practise but threatened to ‘box his ears’ if he composed.  

While still a boy he rose at dawn to play the organ at his local church, giving the money to his mother. She died when he was 16. He looked after his two younger brothers, Caspar Carl and Johann, officially receiving half his father’s salary and a grain-allowance. The three brothers rescued their father from being arrested when he reeled home, drunk, after the death of his wife.

Beethoven was a father. He called himself a dad but everybody thought this meant his nephew, Karl, adopted as his son in 1816 after the death of Caspar Carl. No. He really did have a son, with his Immortal Beloved, to whom he wrote his passionate letter from the Bohemian spa of Teplitz in 1812.

In 1818 the English piano-maker, Broadwood, sent him a powerful new piano. For this he wrote one of his longest, greatest piano sonatas, Opus 106, the Hammerklavier. Anyone faced in their own life with total trauma – bereavement, cancer in the family, the death of a child – can find empathy with this, with its heart-rending slow movement.

The only child to whom he dedicated a piece of music was Antonie’s then 10year old daughter in 1812, at the time of his affair with Antonie. He later dedicated several major piano works to Antonie’s family. After he became ill, Karl Josef could only be soothed by being played to on the piano.

‘To the devil with your Gracious Sir!’ he exclaimed to the copyist of his Choral. ‘Only God can be called Gracious!’ But he was not a practising Catholic. Haydn called him ‘an atheist.’ He laid himself open to blackmail by declaring in front of his nephew’s headmaster, ‘Christ was nothing but a crucified Jew.’ He fell to his knees before Abbé Stadler, eliciting laughter from onlookers at his publisher’s music-shop, ‘Reverend Sir, give me your blessing!’ ‘If does no good, ’twill do no harm!’

Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved was a Catholic. Her religion was central to her. When their child became ill, her greatest wish was that Karl Josef be opened up sufficiently to choose God, to save his immortal soul. Beethoven, with a father’s wish to do his best for his sick son, wrote his second Mass, the Missa Solemnis, for him. He called this Mass ‘My greatest work.’