Beethoven’s best: Tribute to the musical legacy of the German maestro

Updated On: 26 March, 2024 09:19 AM IST | Mumbai | Nandini Varma

On the German maestro’s death anniversary, here’s our curated tribute to celebrate his rich musical legacy

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Paul Whitaker (centre) from the documentary, Beethoven’s Ninth: Sympony for the World. Pic Courtesy/YouTube

Today marks the 197th death anniversary of one of the greatest, and perhaps most influential, composers of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven. He was playing and writing music at the time of European romanticism when emotions, feelings, and intuition were at the centre of all art, replacing rationalism and reason of the early 18th century. It’s a well-known fact that Beethoven had begun losing his hearing in his late twenties. He wrote, in a melancholic letter to his brothers, about the difficulty of admitting to an infirmity in “the one sense… which I once possessed in the highest perfection”. He added, “Therefore forgive me when you see me draw back.” However, he continued to make music that would change the way musicians, composers and listeners would think about the art form for years.

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Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge: Among the books written on the composer, Tunbridge’s work is one that immediately engages both a musician and a non-musician alike. It’s neither dreary nor excessively academic. Tunbridge balances the details of the movements within Beethoven’s music and the biographical aspects of his life — his relationship with his family, his travel to Vienna, the business of making money in music, the spirit of Europe in the late 19th century, his friendships with poets and musicians — that shaped his work.
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Ludwig van Beethoven. Pic Courtesy/Wikimedia Commons