5 facts about Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the most famous famous composers and pianists. His compositions are one of the most performed ones in the world and build a bridge between the classical and the romantic period. Because of this I am quite sure that you know him or have at least heard one of his compositions. As he is also topic in school mainly in the music lessons I am sure that you already learned a lot about him. But you can never know everything so here I gathered 5 facts about Ludwig van Beethoven so you can learn something new.

The first fact that will surely make some of you very happy, at least the ones that were never really good in mathematics, is that Beethoven was quite bad at mathematics especially in multiplication and division. Because he left school at the young age of 11 years he also did not get a real chance to actually learn it.

The second fact which in my opinion probably is a result of him being bad at mathematics and leaving school very young. Is that he was very bad in handling money and sometimes spend more than he even had. This is also why he spoke about himself saying that he is a incompetent businessman and bad at calculating.

As you might already know at the time of his death Beethoven was completely deaf. The whole process of him becoming deaf started when he was around 26 years old. But what actually caused him becoming deaf was never found out. There are a lot of theories that have different reasons for him becoming deaf but there newer was found the one right answer. But the most plausible one is that it is a result of one of Beethoven’s sicknesses in his early childhood like typhus or the small pox. But I believe that the answer for this will forever be concealed.

Beethoven was born in Germany in a time without modern medicine which is why it is not uncommon to read that people of his time suffered from various illnesses as doctors were first of not as informed and did not have the resources to get to information as quickly as nowadays and secondly the general medical resources were not as available as today many medicines were not as effective or even invented and also medical imaging procedures such as magnetic resonance tomography were not invented. But in Beethoven’s case the list of his illnesses is exceptionally long even for his time he suffered from: deafness, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, a variety of infections, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice, chronic hepatitis, and cirrhosis of the liver.

The last fact has something to do with one of his most famous compositions ‘for Elise’ because many historians do believe that this composition was not meant for an Elise, Beethoven at that time apparently did not have any female friends called Elise. Historians say that it was supposed to say ‘For Therese’, because he was supposed to marry Therese Malfatti in 1810 which would fit to the time of origin.

That was it about Beethoven, did you know all the facts or did you learn something new today?