His general education was not continued beyond the elementary school, but this was in accordance with the usual custom in Bonn at that time, only a few children going on to a Gymnasium (high school). A relative, Franz Rovantini, gave the boy lessons on the violin and viola. He appears also to have had piano lessons from Tobias Friedrich Pfeiffer, who lodged for a while with the family, and informal tuition from several local organists. A little later, when he was eight, his father is said to have sent him to the old court organist van den Eeden, from whom he may have received some grounding in music theory as well as keyboard instruction. Beethoven’s first appearance in public was at a concert given with another of his father’s pupils (a contralto) on 26 March 1778, at which (according to the advertisement) he played ‘various clavier concertos and trios’. Tradition adds that the child, made to stand at the keyboard, was often in tears.
It is clear that at a very early age he received instruction from his father on the piano and the violin. Inevitably the early years of the son of an obscure musician in a small provincial town are themselves sunk in obscurity, and though speculation and myth-making have both been productive, facts are rather scarce. Both brothers were to play important parts in Beethoven’s life. Of five children subsequently born to the couple only two survived infancy: Caspar Anton Carl (bap. 2 April 1769) lived only six days their second, also called Ludwig and the subject of this narrative, was baptized on 17 December 1770. The couple took lodgings in Bonn at 515 Bonngasse. In November 1767 he married Maria Magdalena ( 1746–87), daughter of Heinrich Keverich, ‘overseer of cooking’ at the electoral summer palace of Ehrenbreitstein, and already the widow of Johann Leym, valet to the Elector of Trier she was not yet 21. He was also proficient enough on the piano and the violin to be able to supplement his income by giving lessons on those instruments as well as in singing. He, too, entered the elector’s service, first as a boy soprano in 1752, and continuing after adolescence as a tenor. Johann van Beethoven ( c 1740–1792) was a lesser man than his father. With his wife Maria Josepha Poll, whom he had married in 1733, and who later took to drink, he had only one child that survived. In 1761 he was appointed Kapellmeister, a position which – although he seems not to have been a composer, unlike other occupants of such a post – carried with it the responsibility of supervising the musical establishment of the court. The composer’s grandfather, Ludwig (Louis) van Beethoven ( 1712–73), the son of an enterprising burgher of Mechelen (Belgium), was a trained musician with a fine bass voice, and after positions at Mechelen, Leuven and Liège accepted in 1733 an appointment as bass in the electoral chapel at Bonn. Three generations of the Beethoven family found employment as musicians at the court of the Electorate of Cologne, which had its seat at Bonn.
Membranophones (Stretched Membrane Percussion) Music Business, Institutions and Organizations
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