Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in December 1770 and trained in his father’s household before moving to Vienna in his early twenties, where he studied briefly with Joseph Haydn and built a reputation first as a pianist of unusual rhetorical force, then as a composer. By his late twenties he was Vienna’s most-watched young musical figure, with a circle of aristocratic patrons whose support allowed him to write without dependence on a single court or church post.

The onset of deafness in his late twenties and its progression through his thirties shifted his working method but not his output. The middle period produced the third through eighth symphonies, the Razumovsky quartets, the violin concerto, and *Fidelio*, his only opera, written and revised across a decade. The late period — the final piano sonatas, the *Missa solemnis*, the Ninth Symphony with its choral finale, and the late string quartets — moved beyond the conventions of his own earlier work and remained the touchstone for generations of composers after his death.

Beethoven died in Vienna in March 1827 after a long final illness. He was buried with civic ceremony, and his funeral was attended by an estimated 10,000 people. Music Preserved’s archive holds recordings spanning the symphonic, concert and chamber works in performances that reflect the long history of Beethoven on the British stage.