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Beethoven Was No Beauty
Beethoven's childhood nickname was The Spaniard. He was dark skinned and different. His fellow German friends and schoolmates were light skinned and fair haired.
Beethoven was no fair-haired beauty.
Ludwig was intense. The great Beethoven had a huge head, a wild mass of hair, and somewhat protruding "buck" teeth. He was also a habitual spitter, which he did wherever and whenever he pleased. He was also clumsy, and had a habit of accidentally upsetting small furnishings in the fine homes he visited.
Piano Is Easy
Ludwig Was A Very Bad Dancer
As a dancer, he was awkward and unbalanced, an interesting revelation given the amazing rhythmic vitality of his music. Beethoven's friends noted many times the cuts on his face from shaving. Ludwig may have been the greatest composer in history, but lacked this simple skill.
His moods were wildly varied, but associates recall him as generally sullen. Beethoven's apartments were an unholy mess. It was a jumble of pens and spilled pots of ink and piles of laundry and last night's dinner plate piled together in one grand mess.
One Of The First Composers Ever Published
In those days a composer was lucky to get anything from the work of composing. Beethoven mastered the new world of music publishing and died a wealthy man. But there was another side to Ludwig.
Beethoven Was A Loner
He was entirely original, a fact that everyone who knew him or his music acknowledged readily. There were very few people he could trust with his inner thoughts. Although he fell in love many times, he always seemed to pick women that were unattainable.
Most were either married or above his social station. Thus he lived alone, and then his terrible deafness became total. In deafness, Beethoven retreated into a fantasy world of musical construction. He wrote music of personal, haunting beauty, as if he now wrote for himself alone. Perhaps he believed he was the only one who could understand this late music.
REFERENCES
Music History
What Killed the Golden Age of the Piano
Carl Tausig Cooks His Cat
I Meet Aaron Copland
George Sand Killed Chopin
Why Brahms Must Have Been Fat
Artur Rubinstein Was A Vampire
Igor Stravinsky Loses His Cool
Vladimir Horowitz Goes To The Racetrack
The World’s Largest Blue Danube Waltz
Was Mozart Murdered?
Beethoven’s Rage Over A Lost Penny
Franz Schubert, The First Bohemian
Chopin’s Singing Piano Tone
Stravinsky’s Good Luck
Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Fan
Hector Berlioz and the Orchestral Train Wreck
Piano Lessons with Papa Bach
Piano Lessons with Frederic Chopin
The Great Piano Craze of 1910
The American Piano Wars
Why Hugo Wolf Went Insane
Rachmaninoff and the Evolution of Pop Songs
Musical Feuds
Piano In The Past Was Better
The Master’s Hands
Einstein’s Piano
Einstein’s Violin Improvisations In Gypsy Style
A History of Piano and Numbers
Ryan Seacrest’s Piano Concerto #2
