Questions to ask Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven in short, and the 2027 bicentenary

Beethoven was baptised in Bonn on 17 December 1770, the son and grandson of court musicians. His father pushed him as a child prodigy and drank heavily. In November 1792 he moved to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn and stayed for the rest of his life, first as a celebrated pianist and then as the composer of nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, the opera Fidelio and the Missa solemnis. His hearing began to fail in his late twenties. He died in Vienna on 26 March 1827, aged 56, and thousands of people followed his funeral procession.

The 200th anniversary of his death on 26 March 2027 will bring concerts and school projects; our Beethoven 200 years article covers the anniversary. This page is for students who need to interview him.

Why tie each question to a document

Beethoven attracts more myths than almost any composer, many of them invented by his secretary Anton Schindler, who after Beethoven's death destroyed many conversation books and wrote fake entries into others. Scholars exposed the forgeries in the 1970s. So each group below starts from a document you can check. If a famous story has no document behind it, the notes say so.

You can practise the questions aloud with an AI recreation of Beethoven on Yuga, built from his letters and the historical record. It is not Beethoven and it can be wrong; cite the documents, not the app. Some of what follows touches on despair and suicide. If that affects you, talk to someone you trust.

Document 1: Bonn and the move to Vienna

The record: his teacher in Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, published a notice in 1783 praising the boy as a second Mozart in the making. When Beethoven left for Vienna in 1792, his patron Count Ferdinand Waldstein wrote in his album that he would receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn's hands. Mozart had died the year before. He visited Vienna briefly in 1787, and some stories claim he met Mozart then; there is no reliable evidence that he did.

1. What was it like to have a father who wanted you to be the next Mozart?
2. Did you meet Mozart when you visited Vienna in 1787?
3. What did Neefe teach you that mattered most?
4. What did you learn from Haydn, and why did you take secret lessons from other teachers too?
5. How did you make your name in Vienna as a pianist?

Document 2: the hearing letters and the Heiligenstadt Testament

The record: in letters of 1801 to his friends Franz Wegeler and Karl Amenda he admitted, in confidence, that his hearing had been failing for about three years. In October 1802, staying in the village of Heiligenstadt outside Vienna, he wrote a long letter to his brothers, never sent and found after his death. In it he describes hiding his deafness, says despair brought him close to ending his life, and says only his art held him back. The original is in the State and University Library in Hamburg.

1. How did you first notice you were losing your hearing?
2. Why did you keep it secret from almost everyone?
3. Why did you write the Heiligenstadt Testament but never send it?
4. What made you decide to keep going?

Document 3: the Eroica title page

The record: the Third Symphony (1803 to 1804) was linked to Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries recalled in 1838 that when Beethoven heard in 1804 that Napoleon had made himself emperor, he tore the title page in anger. A surviving copy of the score has the name scratched out so hard the paper is torn. The symphony was published in 1806 as “Sinfonia eroica”, to celebrate the memory of a great man.

1. What did you admire about Bonaparte before 1804?
2. Why did his crowning himself emperor make you so angry?
3. Who is the “great man” the Eroica remembers?
4. Why is the Eroica so much longer than any symphony before it?
5. Why did your only opera, Fidelio, need three versions, in 1805, 1806 and 1814?

Document 4: the Immortal Beloved letter

The record: a passionate letter in pencil, written over 6 and 7 July 1812 from the spa town of Teplitz, was found in his desk after his death. It names no one. Maynard Solomon argued in 1977 that the woman was Antonie Brentano, a married friend in Vienna; others favour Josephine Brunsvik. No one has proved it. The same month he met the poet Goethe at Teplitz.

1. Who was the Immortal Beloved, if you are willing to say?
2. Why did you never marry?
3. What did you and Goethe think of each other when you met in 1812?

Document 5: the conversation books and the Ninth

The record: from 1818 visitors wrote their side of conversations in notebooks while he replied aloud; about 140 survive. He fought a long legal battle (1815 to 1820) for custody of his nephew Karl, whose suicide attempt in 1826 shook him. The Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale on Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy, was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. Accounts say he stood beside the conductor and that the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to see the applause he could not hear.

1. How did you compose music you could no longer hear?
2. What is it like to hold a conversation through a notebook?
3. Why did you set Schiller's Ode to Joy, a poem you had known since your youth in Bonn?
4. What happened at the first performance of the Ninth?
5. Why did you fight so hard for custody of your nephew Karl?
6. Which composers do you admire most, and why do you rank Handel so high?
7. What did you want listeners to hear in your last string quartets?

Sample answers from Beethoven's own words

Q: How did you face your deafness?

Q: What did you hope the Missa solemnis would do for listeners?

Q: Which composer do you rate highest? According to Edward Schulz, an English visitor who met him in 1823 and published the account in The Harmonicon in 1824, Beethoven called Handel the greatest composer who ever lived. That is a reported remark, so present it as such.

Q: What kept you alive in 1802? Paraphrase the Heiligenstadt Testament: he wrote that only his art held him back, because it seemed impossible to leave the world before he had brought out everything he felt was in him.

Myths and anachronisms to leave out

• “Fate knocking at the door” as the meaning of the Fifth Symphony's opening comes from Schindler, whose stories are unreliable. Ask Beethoven what the opening means instead of telling him.
• Whether he was completely deaf is debated; by 1818 he could not follow speech, but how much sound he could still sense is unclear. See was Beethoven completely deaf.
• He never knew the Ode to Joy melody would become the anthem of the Council of Europe and the European Union, or that recordings of his music would exist.
• Modern tests on locks of his hair and studies of his DNA (2023) came long after him; don't ask him to confirm a diagnosis.

Where to find Beethoven's own words

The Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, his birthplace, runs a digital archive of his manuscripts, letters and early editions. Emily Anderson's The Letters of Beethoven (3 volumes, 1961) is the standard English translation. Thayer's Life of Beethoven, revised by Elliot Forbes (1964), collects eyewitness accounts. Jan Swafford's Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (2014) is a readable modern life. For him beside his great predecessor, read Mozart vs Beethoven, and see famous classical composers.