This period, which later became known as the Heroic Period because of the larger than life nature that his compositions took on, saw the creations of such masterpieces as the Tempest Sonata, Op.
Some say that this middle period was Beethoven's greatest. It certainly was his most productive. In about a decade Beethoven produced countless masterpieces in every genre. In , however, his musical output began to drop, possibly in connection to his declining health and mental state.
Around the famous Immortal Beloved affair occured which left Beethoven in deep depression and contemplating suicide. Beethoven's output was mostly null until At this point he was completely deaf and slightly mad. Also his brother died leaving Beethoven's only nephew, Karl, in the guardianship of his mother.
Now Beethoven felt that she was not fit to raise Karl, so he entered into a vicious lawsuit over custody of the child. For the most part he was able to use his influence with the aristocracy to win the battle.
Unfortunately Beethoven was not a fit father and his relationship with Karl was quite poor, driving him to an suicide attempt a few years later. Beethoven then studied under the highly famous composer, Joseph Haydn , under whom he polished his counterpoint skills. During these times, Beethoven was receiving stipends from Viennese Royalty, who were carefully observing his maturity.
Beethoven then gave his first public performance in Vienna in , by then; he had started garnering popularity as a new piano virtuoso.
However, around , Beethoven started to lose his hearing due to tinnitus. His difficulty in hearing certain sounds, coupled with chronic abdominal pain, made for a very difficult personal life. Beethoven also had a difficult romantic life, which was hampered by severe class differences.
His Six String Quartets, published in , demonstrate complete mastery of that most difficult and cherished of Viennese forms developed by Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven also composed The Creatures of Prometheus in , a wildly popular ballet that received 27 performances at the Imperial Court Theater. It was around the same time that Beethoven discovered he was losing his hearing.
For a variety of reasons that included his crippling shyness and unfortunate physical appearance, Beethoven never married or had children. He was, however, desperately in love with a married woman named Antonie Brentano. Over the course of two days in July of , Beethoven wrote her a long and beautiful love letter that he never sent.
Addressed "to you, my Immortal Beloved," the letter said in part, "My heart is full of so many things to say to you — ah — there are moments when I feel that speech amounts to nothing at all — Cheer up — remain my true, my only love, my all as I am yours.
The death of Beethoven's brother Caspar in sparked one of the great trials of his life, a painful legal battle with his sister-in-law, Johanna, over the custody of Karl van Beethoven, his nephew and her son. The struggle stretched on for seven years, during which both sides spewed ugly defamations at the other. In the end, Beethoven won the boy's custody, though hardly his affection.
Despite his extraordinary output of beautiful music, Beethoven was lonely and frequently miserable throughout his adult life. Short-tempered, absent-minded, greedy and suspicious to the point of paranoia, Beethoven feuded with his brothers, his publishers, his housekeepers, his pupils and his patrons.
In one illustrative incident, Beethoven attempted to break a chair over the head of Prince Lichnowsky, one of his closest friends and most loyal patrons. Another time he stood in the doorway of Prince Lobkowitz's palace shouting for all to hear, "Lobkowitz is a donkey! For years, rumors have swirled that Beethoven had some African ancestry. These unfounded tales may be based on Beethoven's dark complexion or the fact that his ancestors came from a region of Europe that had once been invaded by the Spanish, and Moors from northern Africa were part of Spanish culture.
A few scholars have noted that Beethoven seemed to have an innate understanding of the polyrhythmic structures typical to some African music. However, no one during Beethoven's lifetime referred to the composer as Moorish or African, and the rumors that he was Black are largely dismissed by historians.
At the same time as Beethoven was composing some of his most immortal works, he was struggling to come to terms with a shocking and terrible fact, one that he tried desperately to conceal: He was going deaf. By the turn of the 19th century, Beethoven struggled to make out the words spoken to him in conversation. Beethoven revealed in a heart-wrenching letter to his friend Franz Wegeler, "I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf.
If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap. At times driven to extremes of melancholy by his affliction, Beethoven described his despair in a long and poignant note that he concealed his entire life.
Dated October 6, , and referred to as "The Heiligenstadt Testament," it reads in part: "O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you and I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.
Almost miraculously, despite his rapidly progressing deafness, Beethoven continued to compose at a furious pace. Her relationship with Beethoven intensified after Deym died suddenly in Beethoven had few other students. From to , he tutored Ferdinand Ries, who went on to become a composer and later wrote Beethoven remembered , a book about their encounters. The young Carl Czerny studied with Beethoven from to The work received numerous performances in and , and Beethoven rushed to publish a piano arrangement to capitalize on its early popularity.
In the spring of he completed the Second Symphony, intended for performance at a concert that was canceled. The symphony received its premiere instead at a subscription concert in April at the Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven had been appointed composer in residence.
Reviews were mixed, but the concert was a financial success; Beethoven was able to charge three times the cost of a typical concert ticket. Beethoven acceded to these requests, as he could not prevent publishers from hiring others to do similar arrangements of his works. Around , by the age of twenty-six, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. As early as , Beethoven wrote to friends describing his symptoms and the difficulties they caused in both professional and social settings although it is likely some of his close friends were already aware of the problems.
Beethoven, on the advice of his doctor, lived in the small Austrian town of Heiligenstadt, just outside Vienna, from April to October in an attempt to come to terms with his condition. There he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers which records his thoughts of suicide due to his growing deafness and records his resolution to continue living for and through his art.
Over time, his hearing loss became profound: at the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in , he had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience because he could hear neither it nor the orchestra. After a failed attempt in to perform his own Piano Concerto No. Despite his obvious distress, Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until Used primarily in the last ten or so years of his life, his friends wrote in these books so that he could know what they were saying, and he then responded either orally or in the book.
While Beethoven earned income from publication of his works and from public performances, he also depended on the generosity of patrons for income, for whom he gave private performances and copies of works they commissioned for an exclusive period prior to their publication.
Some of his early patrons, including Prince Lobkowitz and Prince Lichnowsky, gave him annual stipends in addition to commissioning works and purchasing published works. The cleric Cardinal-Priest and the composer became friends, and their meetings continued until Beethoven dedicated fourteen compositions to Rudolph, including the Archduke Trio and his great Missa Solemnis Rudolph, in turn, dedicated one of his own compositions to Beethoven.
The letters Beethoven wrote to Rudolph are today kept at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Only Archduke Rudolph paid his share of the pension on the agreed date. Kinsky, immediately called to military duty, did not contribute and soon died after falling from his horse. Lobkowitz stopped paying in September No successors came forward to continue the patronage, and Beethoven relied mostly on selling composition rights and a small pension after The effects of these financial arrangements were undermined to some extent by war with France, which caused significant inflation when the government printed money to fund its war efforts.
From now on I intend to take a new way. The first major work employing this new style was the Third Symphony in E flat, known as the Eroica. This work was longer and larger in scope than any previous symphony. When it premiered in early it received a mixed reception.
Some listeners objected to its length or misunderstood its structure, while others viewed it as a masterpiece. The term is more frequently used as an alternative name for the middle period. Some of the middle period works extend the musical language Beethoven had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. His position at the Theater an der Wien was terminated when the theater changed management in early , and he was forced to move temporarily to the suburbs of Vienna with his friend Stephan von Breuning.
This slowed work on Fidelio , his largest work to date, for a time. It was delayed again by the Austrian censor, and finally premiered in November to houses that were nearly empty because of the French occupation of the city.
In addition to being a financial failure, this version of Fidelio was also a critical failure, and Beethoven began revising it. The work of the middle period established Beethoven as a master. In a review from , he was enshrined by E. Beethoven mentions his love for Julie in a November letter to his boyhood friend, Franz Wegeler, but he could not consider marrying her, due to the class difference.
Beethoven later dedicated to her his Sonata No.
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