Questions to Ask Beethoven
For a student, a music class or a curious listener writing an imagined interview with Ludwig van Beethoven. The questions follow his life in order, from the boy in Bonn to the pianist making his name and his living in Vienna, through the deafness and the music to the late years and what came after, and each is tied to something he did or wrote. The notes say where an answer can be checked against the record, which famous stories are only reported, and what a lazy imagined answer sounds like.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Bonn
Your father had you at the keyboard as a small boy, sometimes late into the night. What do you remember of those lessons?
Why ask it
Neighbors in Bonn, whose memories were written down years later, described a small boy in tears at the instrument. A convincing answer holds the anger and the debt together, since the same drilling made him a paid court musician by his early teens.
The notice for your first public concert in Cologne gave your age as six when you were seven. When did you learn how old you really were?
Why ask it
The announcement of March 1778 can still be read, and well into adult life he believed he was younger than his baptism record said. Use the reply to open the subject of a father selling a prodigy on the Mozart pattern. If your Beethoven only laughs it off, press him.
What did Christian Gottlob Neefe give you that your father could not?
Why ask it
Neefe, the court organist, set him to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, helped his first pieces into print and wrote in a music magazine in 1783 that the boy could become a second Mozart. Check your answer against the letter of thanks Beethoven sent him from Vienna.
You traveled to Vienna at sixteen and were called home because your mother was dying. Did you meet Mozart while you were there?
Why ask it
No document from 1787 says they met, and the scene in which Mozart tells the room to watch this boy reached print only decades later, at second hand. So the careful reply is short, or a plain no. What can be quoted is the grief: a letter written that September calls his mother his best friend.
At eighteen you asked the court to pay half your father's salary to you. What was it like to become head of the family that way?
Why ask it
The 1789 petition is documented, and it left him answerable for two younger brothers. Carry this answer forward to the later years: the man who fought for custody of his nephew had been acting as a parent since he was a teenager.
Your grandfather, also Ludwig, led the court's music in Bonn. Why did you keep his portrait with you all your life?
Why ask it
He was three when the old man died, yet he had the painting sent on to Vienna and hung it wherever he lodged. One object and two men make a tidy paragraph for a short project: the grandfather who rose to Kapellmeister beside the father who did not.
Count Waldstein wrote in your album that you would receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands. Did that read as a blessing or a burden on the road out of Bonn?
Why ask it
The entry is dated 1792 and turns up in nearly every biography. Mozart had been dead less than a year, so a young man of twenty-one was being told whose place to fill. Decide which way he leans here before you write the Haydn answers, because it sets their tone.
Vienna
You studied with Haydn for about a year. What did he actually teach you, and why did you take your exercises to someone else behind his back?
Why ask it
By Johann Schenk's own later account he corrected the counterpoint in secret, and Beethoven went on to Albrechtsberger and Salieri. His pupil Ries reported him saying he had learned nothing from Haydn, yet the first piano sonatas are dedicated to Haydn. A believable answer is grudging, not contemptuous.
Haydn advised you not to publish the C minor trio from your Opus 1. Why do you think he said it, and why did you go ahead?
Why ask it
Ries tells the story and adds that Beethoven suspected envy. Haydn may only have doubted the public would take to it. In a music class, play the trio's opening and let the room vote on whose judgment was better.
Before Vienna knew you as a composer it knew you as a pianist who improvised. What happened at those contests in the salons?
Why ask it
The duels with Joseph Wölfl and Daniel Steibelt come down from pupils and friends, and the Steibelt one, with a cello part turned upside down on the stand, reads almost too well. Let him tell it with relish, then say in your write-up who reported it and how long afterward.
You gave lessons to Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries. What kind of teacher were you?
Why ask it
Both pupils left descriptions. Czerny, who came to him as a boy of about ten, remembered scales, hand position and legato, and Ries remembered wrong notes being let pass while a lack of expression brought a storm. Patience is the surprise, so give him some.
Prince Lichnowsky gave you rooms and later a yearly sum. What did he expect in return, and when did it become too much?
Why ask it
The break came in 1806 at the prince's country estate, when Beethoven refused to play for visiting French officers and left at night in the rain. The line about thousands of princes and only one Beethoven is tied to that quarrel, but the note it supposedly came from does not survive, so label it as reported.
In 1809 three noblemen signed a contract to pay you 4,000 florins a year if you stayed in Vienna. Did you ever see all of it?
Why ask it
The contract answered a job offer from the court of Napoleon's brother at Kassel. Then the currency was devalued, Prince Kinsky died after a fall from his horse and Prince Lobkowitz ran into money trouble, and Beethoven went to law to collect. Skip converting the sum into modern money: no conversion is reliable.
You never held a court post after Bonn. How did a composer earn a living in Vienna without one?
Why ask it
Have him list the sources: publishers' fees, dedications, lessons, concerts put on at his own risk and the annuity. Follow up with which of them he resented most. His letters grumble about the hours that lessons took from composing, so that reply has something to stand on.
In July 1812, at Teplitz, you wrote a letter to someone you called your Immortal Beloved. Why was it still in your desk when you died?
Why ask it
Either it was never sent or it came back to him. Several women have been proposed as the one addressed, and no name has been settled on. For a school project, turn the reply toward why he never married. His letters show he hoped to more than once, and that rank or money stood in the way.
You met Goethe at Teplitz in the summer of 1812. What did you make of each other?
Why ask it
Each wrote about the other afterward. Goethe admired the talent and called the personality utterly untamed, and Beethoven grumbled that the poet liked the air of courts too much. The tale of him marching through the imperial party while Goethe bowed comes from Bettina von Arnim and is widely doubted.
Deafness
When did you first notice your hearing was going, and what did it sound like?
Why ask it
Two letters of 1801 give his own description: a humming and buzzing day and night, high notes of voices and instruments lost at a distance, and shouting that hurt. Build the answer from those lines. The cause has never been settled, so he should not offer a diagnosis.
For about two years you kept away from company so nobody would find out. Who did you tell first, and why them?
Why ask it
He chose two friends who lived far from Vienna, Franz Wegeler and Karl Amenda, and asked both to keep it secret. The reason he gives is professional. A musician going deaf had rivals, and a good answer names that fear plainly.
In October 1802, at Heiligenstadt, you wrote a long letter to your brothers and never sent it. Who was it really for?
Why ask it
The Heiligenstadt Testament turned up among his papers after he died. Part of it is a will and part is addressed to everyone who thought him stubborn or unfriendly. It is only a few pages long, so read a translation before writing a word of his reply.
In that document you wrote that your art alone held you back from giving up. What was waiting that you could not leave unwritten?
Why ask it
His words are that it seemed impossible to leave the world before he had brought out all that he felt was in him. With a young class, stay close to that sentence and do not dramatize it. The years that followed give the answer in works: the Eroica, Fidelio, the Fifth.
Why is your brother Johann's name left blank in the Heiligenstadt Testament?
Why ask it
The gaps are there in the manuscript and nobody knows why. This is the one place where the right imagined answer is a guess that says it is a guess. Two students writing different replies and comparing them makes a good ten minutes.
How did you go on composing music you could not hear properly?
Why ask it
Everyone asks it, and the weak reply is 'I heard it in my head' and nothing more. Push for the mechanism: a childhood spent reading and imagining scores, the sketchbooks, and a loss that crept on over roughly two decades, so that much of the music was written with some hearing left.
You tried ear trumpets and treatments from one doctor after another. Did any of it help?
Why ask it
The brass trumpets made for him by Johann Mälzel still exist, and his letters mention almond oil drops, lukewarm baths and a wish to try galvanism. Keep the answer to what he tried and what he said about it. He should not be made to recommend or condemn a remedy.
When did you stop playing the piano in public, and how did you know it was time?
Why ask it
The violinist Louis Spohr described a rehearsal of the Archduke Trio in 1814 where the loud passages jangled and the soft ones vanished. Playing was how he had first made his name in Vienna, so treat this as the loss of a trade, which is a separate grief from the loss of hearing.
What did deafness change in the music itself?
Why ask it
Listeners have argued both ways for two centuries, some hearing a late style set free from what a concert room expected and some hearing no connection at all. Let him push back on the tidy version in which the affliction made him great. Then play something from 1800 and something from 1825 and ask the class what they hear.
The music
They say you got up at dawn, counted out sixty coffee beans for your cup and worked until the afternoon, then walked for hours. How much of that is true?
Why ask it
The beans and the timetable come from Anton Schindler, his secretary and first biographer, so they belong in the reported column. The long walks in any weather are described by many others who knew him. Daily habits are an easy way into the interview, provided the reply says who is doing the remembering.
You carried a sketchbook on your walks. What went into it, and how long did a theme take to come right?
Why ask it
A great many sketchbooks survive, and they show plain first ideas crossed out and reworked again and again. Libraries that hold them have put pages online, so a project can show one. It is the best cure for the belief that the music arrived whole.
The Third Symphony was going to be called Bonaparte. What happened to the title page?
Why ask it
Ries said he tore it up on hearing that Napoleon had made himself emperor, and a surviving copy has the name scratched out hard enough to hole the paper. Yet a letter to his publisher months later still says the symphony is really called Bonaparte. The honest answer is a mixed one.
People say the opening of the Fifth is fate knocking at the door. Did you ever say that?
Why ask it
The remark comes from Anton Schindler, his secretary in the last years, who is known to have made things up. An impatient reply suits him here. The exchange teaches the difference between what a composer said and what was said on his behalf.
The Fifth and Sixth were first heard on one night in December 1808, in a concert that ran about four hours in an unheated theater. What went wrong?
Why ask it
The program also held the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy, which fell apart and had to be started again. A listener who sat through it left a letter about the cold and the length. Good for a class that assumes masterpieces were greeted as masterpieces.
Fidelio went through three versions and four overtures. Why was your only opera so hard to get right?
Why ask it
It opened in 1805 with French troops occupying Vienna and many of his supporters gone from the city, was cut the next year and succeeded only when rewritten in 1814. Ask what drew him to the plot, a wife who disguises herself to free a political prisoner. His answer says a good deal about what he thought music was for.
You called it a sonata in the manner of a fantasy. How do you feel about the whole world calling it the Moonlight?
Why ask it
The nickname came from the critic Ludwig Rellstab after Beethoven's death. Czerny reported him complaining that people talked of that sonata endlessly when he had written better ones. A light question that works with younger classes, and the same point holds for the Emperor concerto.
Who was Elise?
Why ask it
The manuscript is lost, the piece was printed forty years after he died, and the name may have been misread by the man who found it. Do not settle it. A Beethoven who smiles and declines to say is truer to the evidence than one who names her.
You added metronome marks to your symphonies, and players have argued about them ever since. Did you mean those speeds?
Why ask it
He welcomed Mälzel's metronome and published the figures in 1817, and many are faster than orchestras traditionally play. Explanations run from a faulty device to the idea that he meant every one. Two recordings of one movement and a stopwatch will tell a class more than his reply does.
Late years
After your brother Kaspar died in 1815 you spent years in court against his widow over their son Karl. Why did you want the boy so badly?
Why ask it
Court papers and his own letters show him at his worst: he abused Johanna in writing and tried to keep her from seeing her child. An honest interview lets her side be heard through the question. A reply in which he is simply a devoted uncle should worry you.
During that case a court asked whether the 'van' in your name made you a nobleman. What did you have to admit?
Why ask it
The case had been heard in the court reserved for the nobility, and when he could not show a title it was sent down to the ordinary one. He took it as a humiliation. Set that beside the man reported as telling a prince that rank came by birth and that he owed his own place to himself.
What kind of guardian were you to Karl?
Why ask it
The conversation books preserve Karl's half of their arguments: an uncle generous with school fees and suspicious of every friend. By 1826 the young man wanted to get away, and he soon joined the army. A younger class can stop there, and older students can read a full biography on that last summer.
From 1818 your visitors wrote their side of the conversation in notebooks while you answered aloud. What would we learn if your half had been written down too?
Why ask it
Around 140 of the conversation books survive, full of shopping lists, gossip, politics and other people's questions. His spoken replies are gone. That gives the whole project its frame: an imagined interview with Beethoven is an attempt to supply the missing half.
Your secretary Anton Schindler added entries to those notebooks after you died. What would you say to him?
Why ask it
Scholars showed in the 1970s that many entries in Schindler's hand were written in later, which weakened every story that rests on him alone. Use the anger of the reply as a lesson in method. For each quotation in your project, find out who first reported it.
You offered the Missa Solemnis to several publishers at the same time, assuring each of them it was theirs. How do you defend that?
Why ask it
The letters survive, and admirers tend to leave them out. A fair answer points to the cost of raising his nephew and to how little protection a composer's work had once it was printed. A Beethoven who denies it happened has been written by someone who did not look.
You first thought of setting Schiller's Ode to Joy in your early twenties. Why did it take thirty years?
Why ask it
A letter written from Bonn in 1793 mentions the plan, and the symphony was finished in 1824. A full answer covers what changed in between, for him and for Europe: the wars with France, Napoleon's rise and fall, and then a Vienna of censors and police. He wrote the line the baritone sings before the poem begins, so ask about that too.
At the first performance of the Ninth in May 1824 you stood on stage beating time, and someone had to turn you around to face the audience. What did you see?
Why ask it
Michael Umlauf was the real conductor and had told the players to watch him. The contralto Caroline Unger is the one named as turning Beethoven, though accounts differ on whether it was after the scherzo or at the end. Write the answer in sight only, hats and handkerchiefs waving, because that is how the applause reached him.
The slow movement of your A minor quartet is headed as a song of thanksgiving from a convalescent. What had you come through?
Why ask it
He was seriously ill in the spring of 1825 and wrote the heading in his own hand, naming the old church mode he used. Play the movement before anyone answers. Leave the illness undiagnosed: what counts is that he thought recovery worth a quarter of an hour of music.
Your publisher asked you to replace the Great Fugue as the finale of the B flat quartet, and you agreed. Why give way that once?
Why ask it
It was unlike him, and the substitute finale turned out to be the last complete movement he wrote. He may have been glad of the extra fee, or sure the fugue could stand alone, and a good reply picks one and argues it. Quartets today play it either way, so ask the class which ending they would choose.
Over the last movement of your final quartet you wrote 'Must it be? It must be.' What was the question?
Why ask it
He headed the movement 'The difficult decision'. One story traces the words to a joke about a man who did not want to pay for a set of parts, and many listeners hear something far larger. He liked puns and musical jokes, so an answer that keeps both readings is in character.
Legacy
In your last weeks you asked the Philharmonic Society in London for help while holding on to bank shares you refused to sell. What were the shares for?
Why ask it
The society sent a hundred pounds, and the shares were found after his death, set aside for Karl. It need not be read as deceit. The answer shows what he would and would not spend, and it closes the story of the nephew with the will.
You left sketches for a Tenth Symphony. What was it going to be?
Why ask it
The sketches exist, and one of his last letters to London speaks of a new symphony lying in his desk. Any finished Tenth you can listen to is someone else's reconstruction. Have him refuse to describe it in full, since nobody can check a word of what he might say.
A great crowd followed your coffin through Vienna in March 1827. Did you know while you lived how famous you were?
Why ask it
Estimates of the crowd vary widely, so name your source if you give a figure. Schubert walked as a torchbearer and the playwright Grillparzer wrote the oration. Set that against his complaint in the 1820s that Vienna cared only for Rossini, and against the open letter in which admirers begged him to premiere the Ninth there.
Which of your works do you think is your best?
Why ask it
He called the Missa Solemnis his greatest work in letters written to sell it, and a friend reported that he favored the C sharp minor quartet among the late ones. Both statements have a context, so let him answer with a touch of the salesman. Then ask which piece he would rather be forgotten.
A girl who was learning the piano once wrote to you, and you wrote back. What would you tell a young musician now?
Why ask it
His reply of July 1812 to a young pianist named Emilie is in the published letters. It tells her not only to practice her art but to work her way into its secrets, and says a true artist has no pride because art has no limits. Build his advice from that letter and the poster slogans stay out.
The tune of the Ode to Joy is now the anthem of the European Union and is sung at celebrations all over the world. Is that what you meant by it?
Why ask it
The line about all people becoming brothers is Schiller's, and governments of very different kinds have claimed the melody since. Older students can turn this into an essay: who owns the meaning of a piece once it leaves the composer?
Any of your music can now be played back at the touch of a button. What would you want to hear first?
Why ask it
A lighter one to end on with a younger class. The strongest replies follow the record: the Ninth and the late quartets, which he never heard except inwardly, or Handel, whom he is reported to have called the greatest composer of all.
What should a student listen to before writing a single word about you?
Why ask it
Ask it last and then do what he says. Three pieces are enough for a project, one early, one from the middle years and one late, such as the Pathétique sonata, the Fifth Symphony and the slow movement of the A minor quartet.
Writing an imagined interview with Beethoven that holds up
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you write the interview
Choose the year you are visiting him
The Beethoven of 1795 is a fashionable pianist with good hearing and princes for friends. The Beethoven of 1825 is deaf, famous, short of patience and living in untidy rooms with a notebook on the table. Pick one moment and ask only what he could know by then, or stage it after his death and let him look back over all of it. Mixing the two without saying so is the commonest flaw in these projects.
Read three short documents first
The Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, one of the 1801 letters about his hearing, and a page or two of a conversation book in translation. Together they take under half an hour and give you his own vocabulary for the three subjects every interview reaches: the deafness, his pride and his daily life.
Listen before you ask
Tie each group of questions to a piece and hear it first: an early piano sonata for Bonn and Vienna, the Fifth for the middle years, a late quartet movement for the end. A question about the Ninth written by someone who has heard the finale is a different question.
Pick ten, not the whole list
A school interview rarely needs more than eight to twelve questions. Take one or two from each group so the conversation moves through his life in order, and keep the ones whose answers you can find in a biography or a letter. Leave the unanswerable ones, such as Elise or the blank name, for the end, where a guess does no harm.
Writing his answers
Give him the voice of his letters
He wrote bluntly, joked with puns on people's names, underlined heavily and swung from warmth to fury inside a page. He complained about servants, money and his stomach. A Beethoven who speaks only in noble sentences about art and destiny does not sound like the man in the letters.
Mark every answer three ways
Beside each reply note whether it is documented (a letter, a contract, a manuscript), reported (a pupil or friend said so later) or your own guess. A teacher grading the project is looking for exactly that distinction, and it lets you include the good stories without claiming more for them than they can bear.
Stage it the way it would have happened
For an interview set in his last decade, the visitor writes each question in a notebook, hands it across, and he answers aloud. Two students can perform it that way in class, one silent and writing, one speaking. It makes the deafness part of the scene without anyone having to act it.
Let him refuse
He was known to walk out of rooms. If a question would have offended him, such as the one about the publishers or about Johanna, he can bristle, change the subject or answer a different question. Write that down as the answer and say in a footnote what the record shows.
Stories to handle with care
Anything that rests on Schindler
Anton Schindler wrote an early biography and altered the conversation books to support it. Fate knocking at the door, the sixty coffee beans and a number of remarks about tempo and meaning trace back to him alone. Use such a story only with his name attached.
Titles he did not choose
Moonlight, Emperor and Appassionata were all given by other people, most of them after his death. Have him use his own descriptions, a key and a kind of piece, and let the interviewer be the one who says the nickname.
The composer who was always deaf
He heard normally into his late twenties and lost his hearing by degrees over many years. Much of the famous music, the Fifth included, was written by a man who was hard of hearing, and the near-total deafness belongs to the last decade. Getting the timeline right changes several answers.
Modern slogans in an old mouth
Advice to follow your dreams or never give up could be put in anyone's mouth. If he gives advice, anchor it to something he did: the years of counterpoint exercises after he was already famous as a pianist, or a theme rewritten dozens of times in a sketchbook.
The parts admirers skip
The custody fight, the way he wrote about his sister-in-law and the dealings with publishers are part of the record. A project for younger children can leave them out. One for older students is stronger for including at least one, asked plainly and answered without excuses made on his behalf.