as Capellmeister to the court. Musicians were not held of
much account in those days, and the marriage of a singer with the
daughter of a cook was not at all considered a mesalliance. Johann was
a sad drunken scapegrace, and his poor wife, in bringing up her family
upon the small portion of his earnings which she could save from being
squandered at the tavern, had a pitiably hard and long struggling life
of it.

Johann soon discovered the extraordinary musical endowments of his
child and at once set to work to make a "prodigy" of him, as Handel,
Bach, and Mozart had been before; for in this way the father hoped to
secure a mine of wealth and lazy competence for himself. So the boy,
when only a few years old, was kept for long weary hours practising
the piano, and one of the earliest stories of his life is of the
five-year-old little child made to stand on a bench before the piano
laboring over the notes, while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks
at the cold and aching pain, from which his hard taskmaster would not
release him. Besides his father, a clever musician who lodged in the
house, Pfeiffer, an oboist at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven
used afterward to say that he had learnt more from this Pfeiffer than
from any one else; but he was too ready to abet the father in his
tyranny, and many a time, when the two came reeling home late at night
from drinking bouts at the tavern, they would arouse the little fellow
from his sleep and set him to work at the piano till daybreak.

His next instructor was Neefe, the organist of the Archbishop's
private chapel, a really skilful and learned musician, who predicted
that the boy would become a second Mozart. Under him Beethoven studied
for several years, and in 1782, when he was hardly twelve years old,
we find him acting as organist in Neefe's place during the absence of
the latter on a journey. The next year three sonatas composed by young
Beethoven, and dedicated to the Elector in fulsome language, which was
probably his father's production, were printed. Soon afterward the boy
obtained the appointment of assistant-organist to the Elector, with a
salary of a hundred thalers, no inconsiderable addition to the
resources of his poor mother, who, with her family of three children,
Ludwig, Carl, and Johann, and the more and more frequent visits of her
ne'er-do-well of a husband to the tavern, was often grievously hard
put to it for money. Young Ludwig had little play