Google celebrates composer Beethoven's life with interactive Doodle

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Google Doodle

Google remembers composer Ludwig Van Beethoven's life and times with a special interactive Google Doodle with comical but visually stunning animation combined with music.

A screen grab of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Google Doodle

Although it's unclear when Beethoven was born December 17th marks the 245th year of his baptism.

Video courtesy/Google's official YouTube account

The humourous doodle starts with Ludwig van Beethoven composing a piano symphony, when the clock strikes 8. The parchments comprising of symphony compositions behind him make up the letters of the Google logo.

Beethoven (utilising a ear trumpet to hear this) rushes out to the symphony hall, when his foot suddenly gets stuck on something sticky. A horse ends up eating the parchment containing the composition of his symphony at the same time. Beethoven's 5th symphony plays in the background during the entire duration of the doodle. The screen then fades to pieces of his fifth symphony broken into 4 individual musical puzzle pieces that can be played using a single mouse-click.

Created by designer Leon Hong in collaboration with artist Nate Swinehart and engineers Jonathan Shneier and Jordan Thompson, the Google Doodle makes a humourous reference of Ludwig Van Beethoven's ill luck that the composer faced throughout his life.

The doodle is more of a puzzle than it is a picture.

Players are tasked with arranging Beethoven's sheet music in the correct order after he mixes up the pieces on his way to conduct a concert.

The game focuses on the composer's most widely-received works, such as "Moonlight Sonata" and "Ode to Joy". Each song becomes harder to piece back together as the game progresses.

The Doodle went live on Google's main search page starting on the evening of December 16 and will stay up through December 17.
- With inputs from agencies