Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)was born in Bonn,on the 17 of December 1770. He studied first with his father, Johann, a singer and instrumentalist in the service of the Elector of Cologne at Bonn.It was said that he was a violent and intemperate man who returned home late at night and and dragged young Ludwig from his bed in order to"beat" music lessons into the boy's sleepy head. Despite these and other abuses …showed first 75 words of 604 total…

…showed last 75 words of 604 total…bourgeois taste. Yet the Viennese were conscious of Beethoven's greatness When, early in 1827, he died, 10,000 are said to have attended the funeral. He had become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike composers of the preceding generation, he had never been a purveyor of music to the nobility he had lived into the age - indeed helped create it - of the artist as hero and the property of mankind at large.