3 fun facts about Beethoven

For my birthday this year, my parents got me a Beethoven biography written by renowned Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon.  What was great about this book was it combined stories from him life with an analysis of his music at the time, a very interesting read!  Much of it was academic to the non-musician, but here are three interesting facts I learned that you may not know!

1) Beethoven's deafness was not a sudden event, as widely believed, but was rather an extremely gradual process.  In his twenties, he developed tinnitus, which is a constant ringing or buzzing of the ears, but apart from this his hearing was still fine.  Through his thirties and forties, this gradually worsened, to the point where he had trouble hearing most notes on the piano and stopped performing in public.  However, he kept this a secret from all but his closest friends, terrified of what would become of his career if people found out he was going deaf!  It was not until his the last decade of his life, however, where he finally became completely deaf.  During this final period of his life, he could only communicate with his peers through writing in journals with them, which became an invaluable resource to historians.  The exact cause of Beethoven's progressive deafness remains unknown.

2) Beethoven never married, but he had a habit of falling desperately in love with unavailable women.  Typically, he fell in love with one of his students or a daughter of one of his benefactors, all of which were aristocrats and outside of his social standing.  However, Beethoven's perennial bachelorhood cannot be completely blamed on the social hierarchy of the times, as a part of him was always afraid to get married.  He was so enraptured by his art that he knew he would not be willing to compromise his time, which could explain why he was never able to make a relationship work.  In fact, the love letters he wrote to his "Immortal Beloved" (now believed to be Antonie Brentano, a married woman) were actually reciprocated by her, but in the end he decided to reject her rather than risk all for love.  From that moment on, he abandoned all hope of marriage and was even involved with prostitutes at the local brothel, whom he mysteriously referred to as "fortresses" in his letters.  It was likely that Beethoven felt great shame over his debauchery, as he championed virtue more than any other quality.

3) Beethoven had an older brother who died in infancy.  Interestingly, Beethoven refused to accept his own certificate of baptism (which in those days also served as a birth certificate) as legitimate, and instead assumed the birth date and identity of his deceased brother, claiming that he was the firstborn son.  Indeed, for his entire life, Beethoven steadfastly insisted that his birthday was a couple of years older than it really was, and even claimed to have noble ancestry when that was not the case.  Many historians think that this conspiratorial thinking arose in Beethoven due to his hatred for his father, who was a drunk and an incompetent parasite to their family.  Beethoven's mother was reputed to have gotten her first pregnancy through adultery with another man, so perhaps Beethoven fancied his older brother's identity to avoid being related to his father!